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OS/2 Going, Going... Gone
An anonymous submitter writes "IBM has posted a Software Withdrawal notice on their web site announcing that the OS/2 operating system, in all its forms, will cease to be available for purchase from IBM as of March 12, 2003. For users who have purchased the two year OS/2 Software Choice subscriptions, service will continue until December 31, 2004." We posted a pretty good story about the history of OS/2 earlier this year.
Or rather, OS/2 is dead.
Rest in peace.
When I'm all alone, at night, I think about OS/2 and it makes me feel all good inside. But the next morning the guilt and shame follows. OS/2 I shall miss you!
OS/2 was an excellent system, technically. Certainly far better than Windows. Trouble was, DOS+Windows was Good Enough and cost about 1/5th as much. IBM, at that time, couldn't market space heaters in Nome Alaska in January.
Best Slashdot Co
It seems that IBM will support the mentioned part numbers until December31,2004. Over 2 years of support on a discontinued product? If only other companies would have the same ideas. ;-)
Not dead, OS/2 lives on in Windows NT/2K/XP/.NET
Check out eComStation (www.ecomstation.com), which is a beefed up OS/2 distribution. You get lots of neat goodies like SMP support, new filesystems, better driver support, X-Windows, and all sorts of other stuff.
oh, wait, you said "OS/2" not "PS2"... for a second there I thought I cared...
This is my sig. Its pathetic.
What am I going to do with all my OS/2 specific programs I have.....wait, that's right. I don't have any.
Nevermind
WTF? Over?
os2 - does anyone actually use it?
Before you all go posting requests to IBM to open source OS/2, just remember whose code is in there: Microsoft. Remember, it was a joint venture between the two companies. Do you think that Microsoft would allow it to be open sourced? Anyway, it's technologically behind all the free Unixes, so what possibly could one learn from it, other than what was actually possible 10 years (or more) ago on realtively low-specced machines.
Stick Men
Fare the well, OS/2. We hardly knew ye.
_______
2B1ASK1
I thought about trying OS/2 out recently, trying to get away from Windoze, but with this news... i doubt it. sorry IBM. sorry.
OS/2 is heavily used in ATM (bancomates) machines.
What happens with support for that stuff?
Switching to Linux?
It really was great for multitasking. And, you could format a floppy disk while you were doing other things! But, seriously, for those of us who could only afford one computer, it let us use it while also allowing the users access. It sure as hell beat DESQView or Windows 3.1.
The first server I ever set up was OS/2 1.0, on a co-worker's discarded '286. You could - ohmygosh - task switch betweeen fullscreen cmd shells. Blew my mind.
A moment of silence for the Little Operating System That Could Have Been.
Now it's just another corpse on the bloody trail of the rampaging Alternative PC OS Killer that is Micro$oft.
Rest in peace, OS/2
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." -- Linus Torvalds
After it's all said and done in 2004, if they would release it open source, or, better yet, just make it public domain.
As I gather it you will still be able to get it as EcomStation or something like that.
...
See here
A rose by any other name
Why not?
IBM: Here's a chance to show your commitment to OSS.
Eveyone always says OS/2 was great technically, and that it was far better than Windows. Can someone give those who aren't in the know more details about how OS/2 was better than windows?
The Workplace Shell was probably mostly developed by IBM since it came along post 2.x, and would still make a nice GUI for a free OS.
It was quite nifty. It was running a 486DX25 with 16 MB of RAM and a 1M video card. For its OS it was running OS/2, as opposed to MS/DOS, which made me feel much safer. One wonders what they will run ATMs on in the future. And NO, I don't really think Linux is ready for that sort of thing. Hrrmmm... mabye QNX?
Quando Omni Flunkus Moritati
Platform best for running OS/2 is 35mm slide projector.
It was still available? I thought it died years ago...shows how much I pay attention.
This does make sense, IBM hasn't really marketed OS/2 for quite some time, so it's conceivable that they would discontinue selling and supporting it...
Sound familiar?
Microsoft has done this too with their previous versions of Windows (Read: Not their money makers)
Still, it's a shame to see it go...
Join the TWIT army now!
I wonder if they will switch to Linux from OS/2 in thier Meridian phone systems?
I cannot imagine Windows being stable enough...
One only need apply this senario to XP to behold the future...
My company still uses OS/2 for some functions and they rarely fall down in the way that say NT 4.0 would however NT 2000 seems just as stable it took Windows awhile to reach that point.
I always thought the interface felt very CDE-like and had some interesting features. It is a shame but pricing+bad marketting did them in. I remember when Warp reached the market place before Win95. People at that time were still more worried about Big-bad Blue than Microsoft.
I know there was a theater company that used OS/2 for their platform in some ticketing devices. I remember going by the box and thnking how weird that is.
Where have you seen OS/2 still lingering in IT?
_______________________________
ACK
...It's half an Operating System!
Microsoft's actions to kill OS/2 are well documented and need not be repeated here, except to say that they did a good job making it look like IBM's fault - MS basically told IBM if they distributed it with their own machines or continued to market it (and Lotus Smartsuite which died under similar circumstances) MS would do everything to prevent IBM from having access to Windows 95 in any sane way short of refusing to sell it to them. IBM capitulated, and the rest is history. For more details, the entire story is documented in the Findings of Fact in the Microsoft trial.
OS/2 follows BeOS, not to mention half a dozen other upstarts, in disappearing. I could say it's another nail in the coffin for choice, but I guess that nail was driven into OS/2's coffin in 1995. Right now the free software community seems to be the only place where choice may stay alive - by keeping platforms open, and by making source available allowing for the possibility of porting almost any open application to any open platform, choice has a chance, and probably the first chance it's had in several years. Vendors like Sun and RedHat have become a part of this (despite the constant protests about Sun, I think they're one of the good guys, NIS, NFS, OpenLook, OpenOffice, and many other innovations and applications have been given to the community over the years, and while Java isn't open source or free, it is source available, and the restrictions - given the 500lb gorilla that stands against Sun - are rational if disappointing.)
Linux, the BSDs, Atheos, and the upcoming BeOS clones, are only viable though because of this base of software that can either run on them now, or can be made to run on them. That means constant work keeping the base of free and open software relevent.
Making the alternatives stay sensible and rational will not happen by itself. Resources need to be devoted, and unless people are prepared to actually act, not just talk about it on Slashdot, nothing will ever get done. Apathy is not an option.
You can help by getting off your rear and writing to your congressman [house.gov] or senator [senate.gov]. Tell them that choice is important to you, and that it's important that the base of open, free, software available with source is constantly kept up to date, viable, and relevent to today's needs. Tell them that you appreciate the efforts of free and open software producers, but if one day those applications ceased to be updated in line with modern needs, you would be forced to find less secure and intelligent alternatives. Let them know that SMP may make or break whether you can efficiently deploy OpenBSD on your workstations and servers. Explain the concerns you have about freedom, openness, and choice, and how monopolies and a failure to keep the alternatives relevent destroys all three. Let them know that this is an issue that effects YOU directly, that YOU vote, and that your vote will be influenced, indeed dependent, on his or her policy on choices, on relevence, and keeping the free and open software base relevent.
You CAN make a difference. Don't treat voting as a right, treat it as a duty. Keep informed, keep your political representatives informed on how you feel. And, most importantly of all, vote.
KMSMA (WWBD?)
Maybe IBM could be nice and open some of the OS/2 source code up to the community? At least the parts where they hold IP rights?
Maybe enough source could be opened as to create a server product to run under Linux or other Operating Systems? So current OS/2 shops could have an easy migration from OS/2 to another OS?
Personally, I would love to the WPS running along with my favorite window manager.
Cool, now the way is paved for OS/3! I'm holding my breath!
I pulled up to an atm that seemed to be frozen. After a few seconds it rebooted into os/2. Too bad I didn't have a keyboard...
I'll fondly miss my eary OS/2 days. OS/2 was my first venture away from windows many years ago. I guess I was searching out a way to get away from the windows that was so horridly unstable. Little did I know Linux was just beginning in Linus's appartment, and it's impact on me shortly down the road. Back then, OS/2 was the only thing around that did what it did, it seamlessly ran DOS, Win and OS/2 apps side by side. Mind blowing at the time, especially for a windows user to see happen, with stability, at that time. Oh yeah, Galactic Civilizations by itsself was quite amazing. For it's day, a very complex game, of which the writers said only OS/2 could handle. http://www.os2ezine.com/v1n2/galciv.html
I used to have a good sig...
That once it's passed out of usefull life IBM will release parts if not all under the GPL for the geeks of the world to oggle at, And the sysadmins to install on users machines when they moan to much.
with your copy of BeOS, AUX, and your Amiga *pours out a forty on the curb*
If you get an error, type "OVERRIDE" or "SECURITY OVERRIDE" and then try the optimize command again.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Windows NT print subsystem came from OS/2.
Fight Spammers!
Farewell to the OS that I embraced dearly but had to part with oh so long ago...
I worked for a while, in '97-'98, as a systems engineer at the University of Virginia as a technician and systems engineer. I would get "Rock" duty (round the clock) every month or so and one of the systems I had to support was a patient tracking system for the UVA Hospital. It had a graphical user interface showing the floors of the hospital and what patient was where. It was an OS/2 Warp 3 system. Quite nice. It was the HARDWARE that kept glitching, making me aware of this system at 3am in the morning, sadly...
I tried to run Warp 3 a few years before but it did not work out. I really found the interface unattractive and the lack of apps difficult. I kept running Windows 3.1 sessions under it to the point that I just started using Windows 3.1. Sad.
A nice os. I also tried to run NeXTSTEP but had to take that offline for lack of app reasons (the interface was wonderful). Happily I run NeXTSTEP today and there is no lack of apps...well, it's actually OS X I am running -- but same difference.
blakespot
-- Heisenberg may have slept here.
iPod Hacks.com
OS/2 Going, Going... Gone
Shouldn't that be, "OS/2 Going, Going... Going"?
It will be availibe for purchase for a few months, and for support a couple of years.
Have you read my journal today?
Re: your sig "2B1ASK1"
Is that a Masonic reference?
...for a good couple of years, before I ever fired up anything higher than Win3x. The biggest problem I had was finding drivers. Other than that, it ran very smoothly.
I think I'll install it on a spare drive tonight, just for old times sake.
Does this mean that I can download OS/2 for free as Abandonware for free now, and I wasn't supposed before?
I am still running OS/2 on my main system. I have been running Post Road Mailer 3.0. I still have not been infected by any virus. When people say, I might have sent out email because I have contracted another outlook virus, I laugh.
You are still running OS/2. Many ATMs and cash registers still run OS/2.
Fight Spammers!
Just raise the taxes on crack.
Check out www.ecomstation.com :)
This is essentially OS/2. I checked up on some usenet groups discussing IBM's announcement, and it seems clear that the eCS folks knew about this when they started eCS, so OS/2 (in the form of eCS) should be around much much longer than 2004!
-Dave
moo
We stopped using OS/2 long ago...
Who hell still uses this dinosaur anyhow?
?-|||-----x<*))))><
goodbye is just to good a word so i say fare thee well
Either give it away or get top dollar, but never sell yourself cheap.
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered OS/2 community when CmdrTaco confirmed that OS/2 market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming close on the heels of a recent Slashdot survey which plainly states that OS/2 has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. OS/2 is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict OS/2's future. The hand writing is on the wall: OS/2 faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for OS/2 because OS/2 is dead. Things are looking very bad for OS/2. As many of us are already aware, OS/2 continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
etc.etc.etc. You get the idea :o)
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
I thought a lot of ATM's used OS/2. I wonder what OS they'll eventually migrate those to -- QNX perhaps?
:(
It's interesting to just sit back and wonder what the computing world would be like now (and what type of operating system we'd be running today) if IBM would have actually marketed OS/2 effectively.
It's sad to see OS/2 die - I had hopes that BeOS was going to be "everything OS/2 could have been, but wasn't." Too bad it died too
I was told that I could listen to the radio at a reasonable volume from nine to eleven...
At the time, OS/2 had extremely heavy system requirements compared to Win 3.x. In particular, I recall that it required an enormous amount of memory to run comfortably by comparison to Windows. This was at a time where memory was running at probably $100 or more per 4 MB (my own memory is failing), and at the time, it was just really difficult to justify for many people. Towards the latter part of the '90s, its requirements didn't seem so onerous, but by then Windows had become too entrenched and Win95 was on its way.
I also strongly believe Win/OS2 killed any incentive to write native OS/2 apps.
maybe.
I've personally never really used OS/2 warp, but I think back when I was in highschool there was a kid whose dad worked at IBM and had it on his computer - either way most people I know used some flavor of DOS and then Windows or migrated to Mac....
Anyway my 2.5cents is that OS/2 (for better or worse) is an older OS (which is fine for ATM's...etc...) but with it gone - maybe IBM can focus more on there Linux support - hell maybe even they'll make there own distro (Big Blue Linux anyone?)
Either way I'm all for getting rid of legacy software - one step at a time. I know most won't agree with me on this and I also know that it wouldn't be the best thing from a financial point of view either, but I would rather strip all the support for things like serial ports, parrell ports, ps/2 ports, etc... no longer include them on the new hardware and no longer include any type of built in drivers/api's...etc... for any type of legacy item (that goes for floppy drives too) in the OS - which would probably allow for a much faster OS with a smaller install size - IMO
Ave Molech Setting
OS/2 also was able to alienate many power users because of the install process. It was FAR worse than Debian, and we all know how many people complain about that. I was a very competant OS/2 user (and DOS/ Win3.11 for that matter). When I went to install my CD-ROM drive on a stable OS/2 Warp (that's 3.0 unless otherwise specificed, for you younguns), the OS ended up formatting my hard drive and doing a fresh install -- WITHOUT MY CONSENT! My backups were as good as my temper was short. I took my backups, good all the data I needed, and went to DOS/Win3.11 until I could get NT 3.51.
This is complete utter nonsense. By late 1994 early 1995, almost all cdroms were IDE. IDE cdroms did not require special installation, and were recognized by the base IDE device driver that runs your hard drive. Not only that, formatting the boot partition, like in any other operating system, cannot occur. Not only that, but OS/2 never had a bootable cdrom, so you would have had to boot from disk in order to format your boot partition.
The installation program was very weak when supporting proprietary hardware, but the base install was cake. Remember, because OS/2 supported FAT AND HPFS, the installer would ask you if you want to format it FAT, HPFS, or not at all. To suggest it just formatted your drive is insane.
I ran OS/2 from 1991 until 1998, even had a 3 note BBS running on an OS/2 box for four years. The installer was cumbersome, but it was ahead of what was in Windows 3.1. Should it have come with more drivers? Yes. Was it bad because it didn't? Of course not. You simply had to use a 80 line config.sys file.
I don't read or respond to AC posts
The problem was that IBM kept shooting themselves in the foot.
First, IBM had extremely hard times convincing other computer manufacturers to install OS/2. I recall an interview with a Compaq exec in early 1996. When asked about pre-installing OS/2, he laughed and replied with a query as to why Compaq should fund their competitor IBM.
Second, IBM had horrible marketing. The marketing for OS/2 v3.0 included such travesties as billboards proclaiming "OS/2 obliterates my software." Most people don't take that to be good. At the very least, IBM should have come up with a decent name for the OS. 'OS/2' is not a good name to market.
Third, IBM gambled away a huge amount of the budget for OS/2 V4 on OS/2 for the PowerPC. The CHRP and PREP platforms centered around the PowerPC turned out to be duds. By the time that IBM realized that this was going nowhere, they was little money in the budget to make OS/2 v4 competitive with NT v4 on x86.
The above point is driven home by what didn't make it into OS/2 v4: an asynchronous input queue, anti-aliased fonts, etc.
In conclusion, IBM bears the blame for the "failure" of OS/2. (Though, to say that a product that brought in billions of dollars to IBM over its life-cycle has "failed" is stretching the word beyond its normal meaning.) Admittedly, while Microsoft almost certainly did everything in their power to give IBM enough rope to hang themselves with. IBM certainly had the resources at the time to go toe to toe with Microsoft.
Taco Bell in Vincennes, Indiana uses Microsoft Windows 98 for an outside order displayer. For at least 3 years now, it has constantly went through a reboot cycle thanks to Windows crashing almost immediately after the logo is displayed. I find this hilarious.
So now that the copyrighted software is being taken off the market, it should become public domain immediately.
If you read Neal Stephenson's In the Beginning Was the Command Line, he blame's the trials of OS/2 on IBM's unwillingness to embrace the development community.
--- My dad's political betting
Release it's source code under GPL?
This would be a great opportunity for IBM to show it's Cluefull....
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
It was a much superior OS.. may still be really.
But it *was* overpriced and wasn't marketed well enough when it did have a chance to dominate..
As time went on, it was a loosing battle, better technology doesn't win over better marketing.. Of all people you would think IBM would realize this..
I would take a PS/2 with OS/2 over NT any day as a server, as i like my servers to RUN..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Does this mean the OS/2 port to DEC Alpha is also halted? I was looking forward to SMP support.
Well, the NatWest ATM on Piccadilly that ate my card a few weeks back was running Win2K, as I found out when it crashed and rebooted...
OS/2 is/was a kickass OS that 1000 books about bad marketing could be written about. It was at least as stable as DOS, if not more so. Seiko paging used OS/2 as the operating system for all their watch paging terminals They ran on IBM 486DX2/66 computers. The paging system used the SCA subcarrier of FM stations. Satellites were used to receiev the signal and then it went through this paging terminal and out the FM transmiter from there. I was Chief Engineer for two of these FM stations for two years until Seiko went out of business and during that time the number of reboots to those computers numbered ZERO! Show me an OS other then pure UNIX today that can make that boast! I also remember that these computers were being used under fairly heavy load 24/7, because each one had to process the data from the entire transponder (Which included every Seiko page made in the U.S.), and send out only the ones desired for the area it transmitted to.
There was this program which created a cute little cat who would chase your mouse around on your screen's background. That alone put it light years beyond any modern OS.
"Make it opensource"!
Why can't they just sell it without support? If I were an IBM shareholder, I'd want to know why they are just throwing away money, even if it's not very much. If reproducing the CD-ROMs isn't economical, they could estimate their annual sales and auction off the rights to distribute that number of CD-ROMs to somebody like Cheapbytes. I don't see why *any* software package has to "just disappear".
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Excellent as it was, OS/2 was also hopelessly tied to the i386 architecture
:)
:)
AMEN! I wrote device drivers (in what seems like a previous life) for OS/2, Windows, etc. and if you let your assembly-level debugger* wander through the OS/2 kernel there was absolutely no doubt that this was hand-coded assembly. It was beautiful assembly code, but I remember one day, in the midst of debugging, realizing "They'll never port this to another chip...ever!" The entire kernel was designed around how the 386 was designed....to the point where we kept Intel chip specs in our library. SWe had a good laugh when they announced they were going to port OS/2 to PPC.
* Yes, in those days we didn't have fancy, schmancy source-level debuggers, at least not for kernel/driver work. WinICE was like crack when it came out - everyone doing DD work HAD to have it.....and now I write Java and I don't even produce real assembly anymore. Oh, the good old days.
The PMShell (graphical OS/2 environment) was really great and very mature in its day.
I wish that IBM would release this as open-source, as it would make a stable, fast, well-documented, featureful, beautiful alternative to X-Windows under Linux.
Plus, it's got an API that is actually good. It would bring Linux one step closer to the desktop.
-kris
The end of OS/2 was spelled out clearly on August 17, 1995, when OS/2's original chief architect, Gordon Letwin, described its insurmountable barriers in this posting to comp.os.os2.advocacy.
Nooface
In Search of the Post-PC Interface
"Either way I'm all for getting rid of legacy software - one step at a time."
Umm... wouldn't this include Unix? Unix predates virtually every other operating system currently in wide use? It certainly is more "legacy" than OS2.
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
I had a 'clone' system that was nonstandard to say the least, and it never worked on my machine. Well, at least Warp One never did. I really wanted to run it too. OH well. Looks like it didn't matter much anyway.
I thought OS/2 had been off the market for some years now....
Just a ghost of OS's past.....
Wise men speak because they have something to say, Fools because they have to say something!!!!
and will continue to be supported on enterprise contracts by IBM. It is used in financial applications extensively and is STILL more solid than any windows app. They use it because of legacy applications that connect to mainframe computers via SNA with M$ won't or can't support but OS2 does nicely. It will be a LOOOONNNNG time before they find anything else. The large financial institution I work for has gone so far as to purchase and store source code with IBM's blessing for use in the future, under license of course....
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
I'm not sure if it's still this way today; but it may well be, since it would take a huge change to redo the system, but...
Back in '97 or so, Sears used a nice OS/2 setup. The main store computer was actually an OS/2 2.x box that ran a huge DB/2 database with all of the store's inventory, pricing, etc. It may have been an SMP version of OS/2, but I'm not sure on that.
The cash registers all ran a weird version of OS/2, I guess you'd call it an embedded OS/2. Standard 486 processor and whatnot, but they all (obviously) communicated with the main OS/2 system to do purchases, reservations, credit payments, etc.
Around the store, and you can still see them if you go looking, you can find these very plain looking terminals, with green CRTs. They're basically dumb terminals that managers can use to order products, check inventory, etc. And they all seemed to work by letting you run sessions on the main OS/2 box.
It was really more like OS/2 on a mainframe than your standard OS/2 desktop. But what's amazing was that it was basically the OS/2 system you could run on the desktop.
Time to Open-source it!!!
Time to Open-source it!!!
Time to Open-source it!!!
Time to Open-source it!!!
Would it be worthwhile to get the source code for OS/2? Could there be anything in there that could be cannibalized for other alternative operating systems?
"I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar."
-Hoban Washburn
IBM: It's a good machine. What model would you like?
IBM: We don't sell ThinkPads with OS/2.
IBM: Yes, but we don't sell ThinkPads with OS/2.
IBM: Yes; we wish they hadn't done that.
IBM: The Software Division. They have no say on hardware.
IBM: I'm sorry, sir. What model of ThinkPad would you like?
IBM: There isn't one.
IBM: It's not possible.
IMO, that attitude (IBM not supporting IBM) is what killed OS/2. The corporate decision not to market OS/2 to consumers, made the week before release of Win95, didn't help either.
-- Rich
- - -
"The sixth sick shiek's sixth sheep's sick."
This is the second post where someone watched an ATM reboot OS/2. This seems inconsistent with other posts claiming superior OS/2 reliability. Just how challenging can it be to keep a simple ATM running?
to err is human, to forgive is divine, to forget is... umm...
So what you are saying is that Compaq/HP/Dell never use IBM disk drives?
Which is why BeOS had a 10+ year life span that brought in billions of dollars for Be...
As a fresh faced developer out of college, I was given an opportunity to build a real-time data acquisition system using OS/2 for a long since gone company, http://www.teknivent.com.
OS/2 had great features for developers, a rich presentation API (2D of course), preemptive multitasking, GPIB drivers, detailed API documentation, etc, etc. On the negative side, our app + OS/2 needed 4MB of RAM and RAM was $1000 per MB at the time.
I still remember demoing our software for the first time at a trade show. IBM came by with an army of suits to see the demo, first time seeing a commercial OS/2 application I suppose. I still remember one of the guys asking me how many lines of code it was. My answer?
10 -- really really long lines.
Jim
P.S. For OS afficionados, I would recommend The Design of OS/2 by Deitel. This ten year old book still rocks!
ZZ
Had no idea that such a dinosaur was still around.
Microsoft bundled its own browser in a way that made it nearly impossible for a third party to remove it.
There was also this little thing about a desktop OS monopoly that figured into the equation...
IBM simply bundles a browser as an application, and one can choose to not install it or even uninstall it later if one chooses.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
I remember having to install fixpacks from floppies. I actually found some unofficial utility/hack to install them while the system was running and then reboot immediately, but the official way was kinda lame, especially since fixpacks were some 20-30MB. That's just too many floppies. This was on Warp 3.0.
I know as a fact that CDROMs were proprietary back then too. IDE and SCSI were out, but Mitsumi was a very popular proprietary bus drive back then, and other (SCSI or proprietary) drives that attached to SoundBlaster and ProAudioSpecrum cards were still very common. It was not out of place to have to make a copy of the install disk, copy a driver, and edit the config.sys. This also usually involved removing uneeded drivers as well. Not for the faint of heart.
I tried every decent and legal way I could think of to resolve the issue w/the business before I rented the chicken suit
OS/2 ran the Doom betas (with sound) just fine, but id Software contracted out the sound code at the last minute, and the sound code in the final version wouldn't work in a VDM.
It had nothing to do with the DOS extender being used -- other games like Descent used the same one and worked just fine in an OS/2 VDM...
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
In OS/2 version 3 or later, the WPS had a tight integration between the GUI and the file system. If you've fiddled around with /proc under Linux you have some idea about how the WPS treated the system. For example, under the WPS all file information was a part of the file -- not a Windows-style link or KDE/Gnome .desktop file.
Now, desktop environments like KDE and Gnome have handy features like drag-and-drop audio file creation, extensive networking features, and multimedia plugins...yet I am just now getting the same responsiveness between the GUI the file system. One annoying failure is the Gnome file load file box -- the file list isn't updated as files are renamed/added/removed.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
Actaully IBM has been wanting to do this for a long-long time. But since a couple key customer was refusing to wean themselves off IBM hung in there.
I've had to develop for and support OS/2 and even work with IBM on projects. I can't stand OS/2 it had a poor architecture, inaccuracies in the API documentation, and I couldn't never see what people liked about the interface. The only thing it had going for it is it wasn't MS. It was the OS the "anything but MS" crowd until Linux caught on. Thank god its finally dead.
It isn't 'gone' until March 12th, next year. ;)
Quite frankly, I believe that what microsoft did to IBM would be enough to warrant a breakup.
.dlls, filesystem layout, etc). OSX has a great backend and GUI, although it's a bit oversimplistic, and geared twoard home users. Unix has a great backend, but a horrific GUI (X, Gnome, and KDE are nice, but they do very little to tie into the backend of the OS, which is quite fragmented)
Unfortunately, the attempt to break up microsoft was carried out on the basis of IE being bundled with Win98 (big deal! OS2 bundled a browser, as did almost all Unixes (the browser being either Mosaic or lynx)). Netscape got pissed, and sued.
Now, let's think about this. Netscape was based around free software. Navigator never really made any signifigant amount of money for netscape. It wasn't agressively developed, etc.
On the other hand, IBM poured billions upon billions of dollars into OS2 to make sure it was an GOOD OPERATING SYSTEM. All of the sudden, Microsoft refuses to license code to IBM, and the operating system dies.
This seems like one hulluva antitrust violation. It's possible that Microsoft intended all along to ditch IBM.
I dobut that there was ever an operating system which was as agressively developed as OS2 was (MacOS evolved slowly over the course of 15 years, and eventually merged with NExTSTEP, DOS was writen and never signifigantly updated after version 2.0, Linux was an accident, NT was put on the backburner at MS for several years, The commercial unixes were expensive, and Win9x wasn't really an OS at all.)
OS2 had a good GUI with a powerful backend. Nothing else has this today. Windows XP/NT is all proprietary, and 'dumbed down' to an extent. Granted, windows has a lot going for it on the backend - it's simple, yet powerful (ie. device drivers,
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Open OS/2 Up? I mean dumping something like that into
opensource could help the Wine guys out, right?
I mean, how about getting back to MS. IBM and MS worked together on the Win32, and since MS screwed them, how about putting it our there for all of the GNU/World to see?
"If you have done 6 impossible things this morning, why not round it off with breakfast at Milliways" -- hhgg
For a number of reasons, Photoshop didn't run on OS/2. The OS/2 community accused us of conspiring with Microsoft (!) to purposely make Photoshop incompatible with OS/2.
Technical note: One of the reasons was OS/2 "FindResource" API wasn't compatible with Microsoft's. And IBM kept telling its users to complain to us, instead of fixing it.
If you want the gory details, search google os2 groups for "microsoft conspiracy".
Best Buy can have you arrested
I'll take a moment to mourn the passing of OS/2. It was my primary OS from 1992 to 1998, and saved me from ever having Windows 3.1 installed on my machine.
:)
Don't forget that OS/2 came out in 1992! The competition was Windows 3.1. And it still beat Win95 and NT 3.5 (which had the Win3.1 GUI). Wasn't until NT 4.0 (1997?) that something clearly superior for the desktop came out.
- OS/2 offered a 32-bit, multi-tasking, multi-threaded OS, vs the unreliable, rudimentary nature of Win 3.1. With 8MB of RAM, I often ran multiple applications with 200MB of virtual memory in use -- slow, but reliable. Win 3.1 could only use 4x physical RAM iirc.
- OS/2 included a real file system (HPFS). True, not as good as NTFS but more robust and capable than FAT32 -- let alone FAT, which is what windows had until Win95 OSR2 (1997?).
- OS/2 had a true object-oriented and highly customizable desktop in 1992. Win 3.1 was a glorfied program launcher, not a GUI.
MS didn't get something comparable until the Win98/2000 interface.
- OS/2 included a full-fledged scripting language, REXX. MS didn't include VBS until the late 1990s. It was especially nice for those of us with IBM mainframe experience -- same language.
-- OS/2 was better at games. Many games (like MS FlightSim, or Doom) that could not run at all in Windows 3.1 (you had to boot up DOS and run standalone) would happily run as just another multi-tasking window in OS/2.
-- Much better support. WHen OS/2 crashed it'd give you a whole screen full of info (and could dump to disk), and IBM had a much stronger problem tracking process than MS at the time. They also released frequent patches with clear info on what they fixed. They were also ahead of MS at online distribution (ftp, or web) of patches, drivers, etc.
OS/2 had its faults (horrible installation, for example) but compared to running Windows 3.1, or even Windows 95, it was light-years ahead.
Actually, Passport was an acquisition, not a Microsoft innovation.
Hey, Windows users, there is no such thing as "forward" slash, there is only slash and backslash.
I have the Japanese versions of OS/2 3.0 and 4.0.
MS targeted OS/2 with competitive upgrades. The upgrade version of Win95 would install if it detected OS/2. The hack was to feed it an empty file named os2boot.
Back in the day, I helped some mainframers connect up to some BIG iron from a japanese OS/2 PC to test japanese capability of the BMC mainframe software. Can't say that I really miss os/2. BMC on the other hand was a great place.
suse linux
openbsd
need I say more.
My cat would have to agree with you. When she was a kitten she'd sit on my lap and be absolutely transfixed by the cat on the screen. Then the Darkness fell, and she was completely unimpressed with the DOS/Windows machines I ran after that. Then I switched to FreeBSD, and I think I really made her day when I came across a similar program that ran under X. It was nice to see her, years later, still able to be hypnotized by it.
I'll miss OS/2, even with all of its warts.Even after IBM broke off with MS on OS/2 development , IBM would not put OS/2 on their own PCs. Genuine IBM PCs came with MS-Windows installed. I guess it was some sort of licensing agreement.
I thought it made IBM look bad. If OS/2 was "a better DOS than DOS, and a better Windows than Windows." Then why did IBM put DOS and Windows 3.1, on their own machines, instead of OS/2?
I may get the dates wrong, but around the 1993 timeframe I was part of team at a large Cdn. oil company that built a CICS system under OS/2. The interesting part was that we were using the mainframe (big IBM iron - 3090-600) as a terminal server. At the time, CICS OS/2 was meant to be used as a terminal for host CICS. It was such an innovative use of the technology that IBM did a special story on our project as part of the S/390 Magazine (it was broadcast over their internal TV network - woo hoo). Unfortunately, all the suits got the credit for all the work that us grunts did. Cest la vie.
A few years later, as part of the same project, I developed an X.25 based POS authorization server using OS/2. A small 386 with 32 MB of memory ran DB2, CICS, and the POS application (written in C++ using CSet++). It supported 150 locations, with no problems *at all*.
After I left the company, I was then contracted to redevelop the POS server code to support some vastly expanded functionality. Again, all done under OS/2. We upgraded everything to Warp 4, all new products. It worked flawlessley.
Today, the same code is *still* running, and is handling over 250 locations, processing roughly a billion dollars of business a year.
It was inexpensive to put together, relatively inexpensive to support, and rarely ran into any problems. It was *very* stable. I attributed a lot of the stability to the OS itself. It was well laid out, and a joy to develop in. Yes, the API's were a bit strange, but once you got the hang of the strange API names (DosQueryThis, DosOpenThat), it became very easy to do things.
IBM never knew how to market OS/2. First it was a business OS (1.3), then it was a home OS (2.0), then it was a business os (3.0), then it was an everything OS (4.x). They could never make up their minds.
Technically, it was very well laid out OS. I liked it *much* better than NT 3.5.1, but that was just a personal feeling more than anything else - I really disliked the API that Microsoft carried from Windows to NT. It still sucks, and I avoid it like the plague.
The big problem with OS/2 is that it never got off on the right foot. Memory prices were so high when it first came out that it was a very expensive OS to run. So it was restricted to the corporation. When memory prices did come down, the FUD from Microsoft kept people from adopting it for home use.
I even ran an OS/2-dedicated BBS - it was the second OS/2 BBS in Calgary, and it was up and operational for about 3 years. Then the Internet happened, and that, as they say, was that.
While I do mostly Unix development these days, I do miss using OS/2.
RIP OS/2.
I loved OS/2 Warp
So many great memories.
The first ime I saw the Work Place Shell. It was work of art when compared to that monstrosity called PROGMAN that Win 3.1 had. I still think that Win9x/XP's shell is not as good. Even the simple Eye candy stuff like transparent background on ICON text.
The first time I used PMMAIL for OS/2. Still a great e-mail app and the only shareware I have EVER resgisterd... I still use the windows version of PMMAIL, it is showing its age but it is great. http://www.blueprintsoftwareworks.com
The first time the Single Input Que was completly SMASHED beyond recovery, and the many many other times after that. Sure the system was still running, my downloads continued, apps kept grinding away ok, just couldn't do a thing with the computer (this had a 'bandaid' fix in version 4, but it dodn't work very well).
The first time I realized how many webapges had converted to FRAMES, which IBM's Webexplorer did not support. I kept wondering why so many pages looked like trash.
When winnuke was making the rounds a lot of cheating Quake players would try to 'nuke' my machine to make me lose. Too bad I was playing Quake under OS/2. That pirated/leaked/whatever copy of QUAKE/2 was faster than the native DOS version and the Win32 version on my machine.
What killed OS/2? In my opinion...
1 - The lack of a good browser, IBM's webexplorer blew chunks, Netscape OS/2 version were old and unstable.
2 - That GD Single Input Que. Not problem with if the apps being use are well written and 'bullet proof'. But there wasn't much choice for apps in the OS/2 world.
3 - No games. Thats why I changed. Online gaming was adictive. It was the oonly reason I turned on my computer for about a year or so.
4 - Marketing. Who gives a flip if some italian/spanish/portugues/whatever nun is using Warp? Good grief! lots of their commercials were in FORIEGN languages with subtitles. That alone excludes the majority of windoze lusers that are too lazy to read!
5 - It did not grow with hardware. Good luck getting almost any new soundcard, modem or video card working under OS/2. Have a large hard drive? Anything over 4.3GB is going to require some updates. Want to use any USB devices? Have fun writing them.
That said. I miss OS/2. I think I might keep an eye out for a low end P2 system to install it on just for old times sake. There are a lot of open source linux apps ported over now... sure it seems illogical to install warp just to use ported linux apps that are allready installed on my Win2k or Mandrak machine, but who said geeks are logical?
~Z
Seriously, you moderators who modded this canned drivel up to 5(!) should have your mod priveleges revoked.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
First, it was compatible with Win 3.1. IBM had rights from thier failed agreement with MSFT to distibute the Win16 binaries as part of OS/2. Developers saw that they could write one version of code that would run on both Windows and OS/2. This made development of an OS/2 native app hard to justify.
Second, I remember doing accounting software back in 87/88 and evaluating a port to OS/2 for an important client. IBM wanted $800 up front, plus a $200 OS/2 sale for access to their SDK's. Thanks, but..
MSFT does give away a LOT of info about thier platform, and proselytizes quite effectively.
And to those who say OS/2 was good, remember that this is where LanMan was born. We are still paying the price for this with ANY MSFT based lan, weak encryption, NetBIOS exploits, etc.
The law is a weapon of the government, not a protection for the likes of you. Surely you understand that.
I said this before many times about IBM ...
.NET they will pick it up in no time. Thus, this is why they are a successful company.
1) IBM is NOT a product company. I.e.: they are a solution company.
2) IBM targets its bottom line like no other tech. company does. I.e.: they will kill anything that doesn't translated to $$$ and start things that do.
If tomorrow IBM sees less value in Linux, they will drop it too. If they see value in
Karma stuck at 50? Add 2-5 inches.. err.. 2-5x Karmas Count to your pen1es.. err.. Karma all naturally and private
This is complete utter nonsense. By late 1994 early 1995, almost all cdroms were IDE.
Agreed. Total nonsense. Hence, why I moved to Windows. Not all CDROMs were IDE, and OS/2 also attempted to support not only new hardware, but also some of the older hardware. I guess there were a few bugs.
Remember, because OS/2 supported FAT AND HPFS, the installer would ask you if you want to format it FAT, HPFS, or not at all. To suggest it just formatted your drive is insane.
I'm not merely suggesting it, and believe me if it had not happened to me I would be leery of believing it too, I'm outright claiming it. I didn't care to replicate the problem, and I certainly won't go back now and try to figure it out. I went through my share of installs on more than one machine (none of them IBM, strangely enough), and I recognized the format question. I was not given a prompt. It just took the initiative. Perhaps the CDROM driver made the hard drive look corrupt and it no longer recognized any real data on it?
Let's leave the personal attacks out of this. It would be one thing to say that it never happened to you, but it's another to state that my claim is insane.
At a trade show, he went to the Microsoft booth, and asked what he had to do to get started with Windows development. They handed him a developers kit right there.
He went to the IBM booth, and asked then what he had to do to get started with OS/2 development. They handed him an application to their developer program so he could ask for permission to develop for OS/2 (for a large fee, of course).
I realized OS/2 was truly doomed about a year later, when I went into Egghead, and saw MSDN Library subscriptions for sale. The only OS/2 development tool I saw at Egghead was the Watcom C/C++ compiler.
Another thing that hurt OS/2 was the lack of good third-party documentation. Where was the equivalent of Petzold's wonderful Windows books, that got so many of us started on Windows programming? There IS a book on OS/2 programming by Petzold, but it was often out of print. I'm sure IBM could have managed to get it back into print if they'd wanted.
In fact, it's even better. You can still purchase directly from IBM via their Passport Advantage program. You pay for license _and_ annual support subscription.
A license sounds pretty much like a brand new copy of software to me.
That point of purchase has not been end-of-lifed.
...The genius running IBM at the same time OS/2 was doing well made some pretty stupid remarks about the internet as well.
:)
Doing well is a relative term, it was doing well as far as I was concerned because I used it
So far, I always seem to like the underdogs. OS/2, Linux, Mac OS X....
sigh.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
OS/2 may have the support cables pulled and IBM is pulling the sheet over it's head, but it's still in wide use in a lot of industries. It was a solid 32bit pre-emptive multi-tasking system for it's time (before Win95). The only other alternative at the time was real Unix systems but that was a huge cost for small businesses. OS/2 provided the reliability and stability that some businesses needed.
The majority of the current user base is banks. They have (or perhaps had?) a HUGE investment in OS/2. Most ATMs ran and are still running OS/2 for their operating system. The uptime is incredible so without support or the ability to continue the product, most businesses must get off of OS/2 asap. Of course we've known that it was a burning platform for years now but with such a large installed base and legacy applications running off it, who has the time or budget to move off.
We currently use OS/2 with our train control systems as well as a few other key safety systems. It's just as reliable as it was years ago and our plan to move to another platform doesn't manifest itself until the 2004-2005 timeframe.
Yeah, and there's no such thing as a left-click, only a click and a right-click!
I think OS/2 deserve to get one minute slience from all slashdot readers on the day it withdrawn from market..... and remember the good things they bring you: Boot Manager, Presentation Manager, Your Manager, blah manager....
A funny story: when we (IBM) realign all the servers from their IBM names to Marketing names (x/i/a/z-series), they need to rename their OS. So, as we all know System/390 (IBM mainframe) turns into Z-series. The marketing department needs to decide a new name for the OS/390 (which runs these mainframes)... so guess what, they first come up with this name: OS/Z....and you can tell the OS/390 team is not pleased.................... "I WILL NOT HAVE MY OS NAMED AFTER OS/2" - apprantly it can be heard in the floor below and above by one of the manager.......
OS/2 Rest in peace. We will remember you.
IBM had ported CICS to it and it ran flawlessly.
I actually wrote code for this platform for Sears about 10 years ago - and they're still using it.
---- "Logoff! That cookie shit makes me nervous!" - A. Soprano
osFree
They're currently creating drop-in replacements for OS/2's command line utilities.
I know there'll be a ton of OS/2 jibes here, but I was using V1.2/1.3 on an 8M 25Mhz 386 to control the scrubbers in some large power plants, and it ran 24/7 for months when Windows wouldn't run Word for a day. But for most people installation was a nightmare, and IBM expected all the printer and video companies to write drivers immediately which they didn't. V2 was also great for doing DOS development. Ah well... I might pony up for a copy of the last version just for old times sake. :-)
The revolution will NOT be televised.
PC-DOS 2000? Does this mean that DOS has officially outlived OS/2 Warp?
OS/2 also had a program similar to Windows Update in 1995 or so, except that it didn't require a browser and used open protocols to run.
I can't for the life of me remember the exact name, though. Anyone else remember?
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
OS2 has much code not owned by IBM. When it's gone it's gone. For those wanting to know OS2, visit your library for _The Design of OS/2_ by Deitel and Kogan. ISBN is 0201548895 http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0201548895/ qid%3D1039634259/sr%3D11-1/ref%3Dsr%5F11%5F1/103-7 383789-4055863
In terms of ease of use on the whole I don't remember many people complaining about that. Configuring OS/2 to run a dos game inside of a window was much easier then configuring a Windows 3.0 .pif. Modifying icons and stuff was much easier. Certainly in the 1.0-1.2 days and the perhaps in the 4.0+ days; but from 1.3-3.0 it was no harder than windows for sure.
I remember people complaining about the OS/2 desktop being ugly. Which was weird because with the color coded folders and some neat icon effects OS/2 really could look quite modern (again much better than windows in its day); but the initial installed desktop.... blech. BTW you still hear this quite a bit about Linux apps.
It's ironic, because today I took out my old Warp 3 CD, and downloaded the fixpacks. I plan to revisit this OS, see what it can do, and overall, just let the nostolgia of this pre-win95 OS toy with me. :)
It's been a long time.
Changing drivers in a config.sys was part of using a PC back then. Anyone who installed an OS needed to know there way around autoexec.bat and config.sys. It was only with windows and the massive (and undocumented) .ini files that people started to give up on understanding what was going on during boot.
Anyway an OS/2 install back then is much easier than a Windows install today; much less a Linux install.
I remember seeing a video of an OS Shootout where IBM and MS people showed off their respective operating systems. It went something like this:
IBM guy shows off OS/2 playing two differents AVIs simultaneously with the sound of both being simultaneosly mixed in real-time on a 486 box.
Microsoft guy: Windows NT has animated icons!
"Passport was an acquisition, not a Microsoft innovation."
Most things are.
Not everyone deserves a 320i
To suggest it just formatted your drive is insane.
I wish you would have told that to my 3.0 installation which merrily formated some of my "extra" partitions for me without bothering to ask. It used that to delete an NT and a lunix installation.
The real travesty is that I continuined to try and use the OS for about 3 months after that foul up, despite IBM never being able to explain why it happened. Their best suggestion was that my partition table wasn't "standard".
--- I do not moderate.
...because you can still get PC-DOS.
This time-tested and useful operating system is now Y2K compliant and it supports the euro symbol.
That's the IBM experience - value and support.
And the best part? It's only a $50 download.
They should have more aggressively pursued the PC platform to keep costs down. Commoditize the HW to make money selling the OS like MS did.
IBM tried to push their own proprietary HW with their micro-channel technology to combat the fact that the PC that they originally built had become a commodity. I know, I know, OS/2 did run on standard PC's at least at some point but it was obvious that IBM was trying to make money on selling their own PC's rather than selling OS/2 on its own merits.
Here's a 'troll' for you. Apple failed to beat MS for the exact same reason. They were obsessed with non-386 architecture's, first the 68k and then the PowerPC.
Excellent as it was, OS/2 was also hopelessly tied to the i386 architecture
So what??? If anything they should have more aggressively pursued the PC platform to keep costs down. Commoditize the HW to make money selling the OS like MS did.
IBM tried to push their own proprietary HW with their micro-channel technology to combat the fact that the PC that they originally built had become a commodity. I know, I know, OS/2 did run on standard PC's at least at some point but it was obvious that IBM was trying to make money on selling their own PC's rather than selling OS/2 on its own merits.
Here's a 'troll' for you. Apple failed to beat MS for the exact same reason. They were obsessed with non-386 architecture's, first the 68k and then the PowerPC
Oh, well, you can only blame it on IBM's marketing dept.
IBM could learn a thing or two from MS's marketing strategies. Market a half usefull OS and make it look as it's a complete package!!
OS/2 discontinues YOU!!
This Yakov Smirnov post goes out to Joe!
Apple failed ??
They still retain a large market share. (5% global) that's fairly good for only one company.
And the difference with PC's is that Macs are not a comodity. They are a luxury item so you pay premium for them keeping Apple's wallets healty.
BTW: I love my PowerMac
BSD licensed software can't be stolen....
Once I installed OS/2 on my 486 I was able to work on other projects while POV-Ray did a 45 minute render in the background. This was a major improvement over the previous situation. Also, I was able to get IBM's APL2 interpreter for OS/2 for $150, whereas versions for other systems were around $1500. I would like to see a good OS/2 emulation on Linux so I could run APL2 again.
--- Brian
Both the micro-channel and the push for PPC also had another reason: the "PC platform" is 70's hardware patched up with many ugly hacks and a few good ones that thrive on other platforms as well (USB, PCI...) . The much hyped IA64 platform will hopefully finally kill off the antiquated crap mots of us are using now.
It sure is. Tag lines are the modern day equivalent of bumper stickers :)
_______
2B1ASK1
I have native versions of StarOffice, Phoenix, GIMP, Embellish, FTE, Pine, Yarn, Z!, FileJet, and Links.
:-)
What else is needed?
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
Linux is IBM's new version of OS/2, in a way.
But far better supported by them than OS/2 ever was.
not that anyone would want to though...
I have yet to try OS/2 due to the sticker price. So, whwn IBM vo longer sells it, will they make free (or cheap) downloadable versions? I'd like to add OS/2 to my collection of OS'es I run.
If you're not a Liberal in your 20's, then you have no heart.If you're still a Liberal in your 30's you have no brain.
Just to pick one example:
At the time of the OS 2.0 release you really couldn't multi task in a Windows / Dos environment. You had task switching with lots of problems and dos apps pretty much didn't run inside of windows.
The way you would do real multi-tasking with Dos and Windows apps was
a) You needed to reconfigure your base memory setup with a 3rd party memory manager like QEMM (Doses EMM386 came later and wasn't good emough even when it did come out)
b) You used a better task switcher like Desqview
c) You ran a copy of windows inside of Desqview which ran your windows apps.
The whole thing was complex, slow and prone to problems. For example a lot of the modems had tiny buffers and used interupts so you either needed to give them like 80% of the CPU or downloads would always fail.
All that changed with OS/2.
The Dos window had something like 750k of ram even with the nut for the virtualized Dos so all Dos apps had plenty of room. Further the virtual screen on OS/2 was excellent so they didn't have to run full screen
In terms of windows apps you could run them in individual virtual environments (sort of a mini-windows just running the single app) or you could run them in one giant shared windows session.
So for example I ran Mathematica 1.3 which crashed all the time in its own windows session so when it crashed it didn't bring the whole environemtnd down. All the other windows apps ran in a shared session (which reduced the amount of memory they needed). I'd could also run one or two Dos boxes. Because the dos apps weren't in the same memory space as the windows apps they didn't make windows unstable.
Since terminals were native OS/2 apps they never failed and downloads were a breeze.
All this sounds very natural today. I mean after all we all use networking and run a zillion apps. But the Windows 3.0 world was nothing like this.
Pretty much OS/2 2.1 is somewhere in between NT 4.0 and Windows 2000.
At one CeBIT show a several years ago, they showed an OS/2 running (in SMP mode, even!) on a dual CPU PowerPC box.
I think OS/2 died because their disk cache was so horribly bad. It always was at least an order of magnitude slower than the Linux one. Oh, and I have no idea why they smoked when they named their file system "HP"FS. High performance is about the last thing I would associate with HPFS.
But I was a geek, I would have tried to use it anyway, but my S3 graphics card (which was THE standard graphics chipset) did not work with their driver.
And don't believe anyone who tells you their internals were beautiful. An operating system where a 2d graphics driver (without video acceleration, even!) is over one Meg in size can't be beautiful internally. I once wrote a driver based 2d library for DOS any my S3 driver had about 1000 bytes. That's three orders of magnitude less!
No, OS/2 has always sucked. Good riddance.
At that time you either had SCSI or you had some proprietary bullshit. Just look in the Linux kernel, they still have all the drivers in it. Aztech CD-ROM, Sony CD-ROM, the whole enchilada.
;-}
At that time, I had a SCSI CD-ROM on my Pro Audio Spectrum because I couldn't afford a real SCSI controller. Those were the times...
I know of several companies that still use OS/2 in production, especially for point of sale machines, I wonder what they will choose as a replacement once it is no longer worthwhile for then to continue using OS/2. I think a logical next step for many of these companies would be to adapt their applications to a *nix environment.
Thats assuming of course that IA64 even takes off.
So far it's looking like it won't be priced for the consumer market and can't be considering the huge die size used to provide room for the massive amount of transistors needed to even get it to preform on par with X86.
And that's in native mode of course I don't imagine emulated is anywhere near as fast. Can you remember why the PPro flopped? That's right it wasn't as fast for 16 bit code still being used in many apps and a certain consumer OS as the time. I don't imagine anything that runs 32 bit code slower than the current 32 bit CPUs will do well at all.
If anyone pulls it off it will be AMD with the Opteron whoes demo systems offered a 30% speed advantage over Athlons running at the same clock speed.
And that of course will pull all of the backward compatabillity crud with it for another generation of processors.
I don't see this changing until everyone is running an OS that allows apps to be ported between arches with a simple recompile. Unfortunatly I have my doubts about that happening in time to save the Itanic.
Who cares?
At one time most things ran on IBM mainframes.
Even IBM recommends Win2K for ATM type machines.
You tell me what that means.
If you believe OS/2 "brought in billions of dollars" for IBM, then you're silly.
If OS/2 brought in 1/10th of that, it would be a miracle.
Story: Gates and IBM's suits are at the first demo of OS/2. They turn the thing on and wait for something like 5 or 10 minutes for it to boot. The IBM guys, used to mainframe boot times, think this is really fast; after all, it takes much longer to boot a mainframe! Bill looks at them and realizes that he's going to go ahead with Windows/Win32. As a former user of OS/2 at IBM, I know that even internally it was hard to get support for it. The first thing many people did was to re-install Win95 over their laptops...
I actually saw a field service guy working on an ATM that I go to on occasion. I watched it booting when he was finished. It most certainly was running Warp 4, though it didn't have the WarpCenter running and was using the LaunchPad instead.
When the ATM application loaded it had fancy new graphics and such. . .It had been upgraded!
Yep. . .this was last week and in the US even. . .OS/2 dead? That was the news back in `96. This Microsoft cheerleading is getting rather dull. . .
I don't see this changing until everyone is running an OS that allows apps to be ported between arches with a simple recompile.
That would be one of the fine open source operating systems around then. Well, you can always dream...
I just put OS/2 on an old p120 laptop with 24mb of RAM. It works fine. Had some trouble with networking but that, ummm, was my fault. See the discussion at the digital cobbler.
OS/2 was my full-time OS choice from about 1992 to 1997. I'm glad to have a chance to get back to it. It's still one of my favourite GUIs. And truth be told, this old laptop was surplussed from my office because it was 'broken' but what was actually broken was the fact that its Win95 network/modem drivers were garbage that kept BSOD-ing.
I think the 'death of OS/2' aspect of this discussion is greatly exagerated. It can still happily exist on systems where it is the most appropriate OS. In my case that means networking with Mac OS X and Win 2K simultaneously on the same home LAN. Nothing 'dead' about that.
Dcobbler
Compared to the other mainstream alternatives available at the time (DOS, Windows 1 - 3 and 95, MacOS) OS/2 was great. Compared to BeOS or some of the Unix clones available today, it is nothing special. It all depends on your point of reference.
The one time I saw a cashmachine reboot (somewhere in Italy) it ran OS/2. So in Italy it is still in use for money-counting purposes...
" I'm kinda sceptic about the performance in "demo systems" vs. performance in real systems. Remember Intels claims for how much MMX would speed just about everything up?"
In this case the demo systems were 800mhz and handed to a third party(I forget if it was anandtech or tom's h/w though). Not sure what that will come out to in real life
"That would be one of the fine open source operating systems around then. Well, you can always dream"
Yes your correct but we still have a few years before any of them can take over the mainstream market. Personally I would prefer it.
I might be wrong - IBM is still pushing DB/2 hard, even to open source hosting facilities and even by killing PostgreSQL installations. But is this what IBM tried with OS/2 before? It didn't safe OS/2 and that's why I think that DB/2 will be next.
Less is more !
I tried installing OS/2 on three different machines from three different PC manufacturers. On one, the hard disk drivers didn't work. On the second, the graphics drivers didn't work. On the third, the CD-ROM drivers didn't work.
So I gave up on OS/2.
It was probably great if you ran it on IBM hardware, but that just wasn't a realistic requirement.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Hey IBM if your listening, OPEN SOURCE OS/2.
;)
That's a great way to stab you know who in the back.
-GG
Native version of Visual SlickEdit
Fight Spammers!
We were all writing window managers and GUI apps on our Amigas and Atari STs. The sales guy comes out and says, "This is so impressive because there's this ring 0... and it's separate from ring 1... look at this chart, showing which ring the device drivers are in". When we asked about a GUI, he said that would be in the next version.
I laughed at the time (well, we all did), but later wound up working at IBM on GUI applications under, you guessed it, OS/2. (That only lowered my original opinion of OS/2.)
So why are Handspring, Sony, etc. developing PDAs based on Palm OS?
Hey IBM, Team OS/2er's. Why don't you OpenSource OS/2! Your starting to use Linux as a major OS from IBM. Linux is OpenSource. IBM is taking from the OpenSource community. Why not give something back. OpenSource OS/2!
Ah them were the days, a 486sx (wow), a 4x cd rom and 2x 540 hd's..... cool...... and not to mention the 16 meg Stealth Video card.... and of course OS/2. Used to run my BBS for over a year, before I acutally sold it got on a bus and travelled around australia.... (obtw the BBS lasted a week after I left town as the idiot who paid $3000 AUD in the mid 90's didn't know what he was doing:-)) I run OS/2 with just the cmd to do just about everything on my DOS based 2 line bbs, I would defrag drives while formating a floppy and having people download files all at the same time.. (just cause I could). It kicked arse in its day and will unlike a number of other bits of software be remembered fondly.....
If at first you don't succeed, destroy all evidence you ever tried.
I hate to tell ya'll but IBM have Built OS/2
into just about every Enterprise scale Server
and Networking Device.
IBM's High end servers use a special Laptop
looking Console PC for Config/Monitoring Etc.
Guess What it's running for an OS...Yup OS/2
IBM 900/374x Series (NCP) Network Control
processors (Big Box's that connect Mainframe
Components) also run...Yup OS/2
So.. IBM may stop selling OS/2 but they will
be supporting it for a very long time..
I too had to hunt down drivers for my cdrom, but I never had any "reinstall without concent".
The other thing is that the poster may have done an "express install", which does reformat c:. This is stated in the installation guide.
OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.
It's been several years ago, but there it was, OS/2 2.l running the software for the voicemail and the phone system for a company I used to work for... never really had a complaint with it. It just worked.
Which was a horribly stupid decision. Search for printing related patents owned by Microsoft at that time; MS had a far better printer system, and they made a lot of money licensing it out to other companies...but NT shipped with the stupid OS/2 printer subsystem for political reasons.
OS/2 is still used in some places. My bank still has it installed on every desktop in their branch.
It has been freed.
If that's the case, I should change mine to "You think its bad being behind me?" (born and rasied NJ driver)
Intelligent Life on Earth
I "did" OS/2 at work and at home from 1.1 to 3.0, so this is all a fun walk-down-memory-lane for me. I remember all that time thinking Bill Gates absolutely *had* to have a plant, somewhere very high up in IBM, sabotaging OS/2. No company could so consistently make the bone head decisions IBM made in the 80's and 90's. It was absolutely mind boggling.
But it was the 99$ 1.3 version that proved to be the last piece of software I would ever buy from IBM. I bought it with the promise of a free upgrade to 2.0. Then the month or two before 2.0 came out IBM did everything they could to divorce themselves from their diehard OS/2 fans. Even to the point of letting us know that we 1.3 purchasers wouldn't be seeing 2.0 disks until MONTHS! after everyone else had them. If we didn't like it, we could lump it.
IBM lost a customer in me forever.
My fault for being taken in like I did.
At that time I had one of those slow but reliable proprietary interface Mitsumi CDROM readers. The one where the whole drive mechanism slid out to put in a new CD. I bought that drive at the same store where I bought my first Linux CD set (the first, 1993 edition of Yggdrasil). It was notable because I went into that particular store looking for a cheap CD_ROM drive (they sold a lot of used hardware, etc.) The guy in the shop said (you can buy this CDROM drive in the cash register machine, and took down the POS computer running the cash drawer, pulled out the drive and sold it to me. Now that is a full service computer store.
I think in that first edition of Yggdrasil Linux they offered a bundle, which included a Mitsumi CDROM reader, and the Yggdrasil Linux CD together as a package. Those were heady times when it was hard to know where Linux was going.
....actually Microsoft wrote OS/2. Then they had a fight with IBM and left them to run with it.
I have yet to see an ATM machine running any type of Linux install.
:)
That's because you haven't looked here .
I ran OS/2 on my home built desktop from '93-'97. Was forced to switch to Win9X b/c I couldn't get drivers for a couple of necessary peripherals following a major motherboard meltdown. I installed OS/2 at Sprint for almost a year b/c they found they couldn't access their 3270 sessions or 5250 sessions from either Win3.x or NT 3.x. I also was an OS/2 sysop for a local ISP b/c I was the only person (at that time) who could get it to connect to the 'Net thru their DOS based BBS gateway. (we're talkin' '93-'94)
I loved OS/2 b/c I could run the same apps at home on my OS/2 machine (486DX40 w/ 16Mb of memory) far, far faster than my work machine (a Compaq DeskPro Pentium 90 w/ 96Mb of memory).
I also remember long nights of downloading 32 diskette service packs for OS/2 on my 14.4 modem. Ugh!
I've read thru much of what has been posted here & I see one factor that few if any knew about that truly killed OS/2. IBM had a prior license to use Win16 API's in OS/2. OS/2 developers were able to reverse engineer all the Win32 API, but w/o the license. IBM sought to get a license to code true Win32 API's into OS/2. As it turned out, OS/2, in the development lab ran Win32 apps much faster than Win95 & ran them more stably. This didn't make Micro$oft happy at all. So M$ refused to license the API's to IBM to use in OS/2. (I learned this from an IBM'r.) B/c of the severe drought of apps for OS/2 IBM figured they'd never get it to go mainstream & supplant the preinstalled glut of Win9x. During that time OS/2 was outselling Win3.x & Win9x about 10:1 over the counter. The other problem w/ IBM's support of OS/2 was that the beancounters had way too much control. Developers Packs for OS/2 were stupid expensive while Windows Developers packs were virtually free. Marketers repeatedly called for giving their developer packs away, & for a short time IBM made them very, very inexpensive, but that didn't make the beancounters happy b/c they weren't seeing a return on the investment fast enough. W/in a year the price went back up.
So it was a combination of 2 things that really killed OS/2. Micro$oft knew their OS's couldn't match OS/2's performance. Deny OS/2 the next iteration of Windoze apps (i.e, all the Win apps upgraded to Win32) & OS/2 would die slowly on the vine. The lack of OS/2 apps created this problem b/c IBM made it so difficult for the little developer to afford the developers packs. Too many of the old school IBMer's were still around pulling strings. Their philosophy of never giving anything away combined w/ Micro$oft's fear of OS/2, was truly what killed OS/2.
I knew folks at the National Weather Service that were running complete weather websites on the OS/2 desktops in the background while they did day-to-day work on the same machine. I used voice navigation on my 486DX40 that I still haven't been able to match using Windoze--even on my Athlon XP2100+ running XP at 2Gb of memory. My other favorite OS/2 trait was that is was so easy to port unix apps to OS/2.
CyberRanger cyberranger@gmail.com
At least if the code to an open source project goes missing, you can be sure that nobody found it interesting or useful.
Or, the person running the site that hosted it stops paying his ISP bill, and no one had bothered to mirror it.
That is why you can't find the Unix Midi Plugin anymore (I've tried numerous times - all 404s and invalid domains). So you can't listen to midis embedded in webpages under any non-proprietary OS.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
It has a small footprint and hardware watchdog timer support, what else do you need really?
Umm how about stability?
After the Linux 2.4.20 DATA CORRUPTION fiasco, in a "STABLE" kernel, I'm not feeling too good about that idea...
There still isn't a Linux 2.4.21 out yet, nor any warnings on the kernel sites.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
Then Eric replied with a very short, but interesting point - the only problem would be any legal ramifications (read: patent).
Remember, Microsoft actually had a hand in OS/2's development - and accordingly, some of that code is theirs. We all know that Microsoft considers open source evil in general, but what if part of their work was opened despite their wishes?
As much as my wife and I like OS/2, open sourcing it would be IBM shooting themselves in the foot. No, I hate patents, and I'd love to see this happen, but if they did this it would be a few years, and it may not be worth the effort financially.
This sig no verb.
My regretful and theoretical reply to an early question as to why they don't is here.
This sig no verb.
1999-2000, nearly every computer I used across 3 universities and several private residences, used OS/2. Those that didn't were primarily Macs.
This comment does not really have a point... feel free to extrapolate one and post it if you can.
but come the fuck on
"Amazingly enough, DOS programs ran faster and smoother on OS/2 than they did on DOS! "
That's the kind of shit I expect from a marketing department not a slashdot reader.
Wake up and smell the coffee
lol!
_______
2B1ASK1
Pc Connection has OS/2 V.4 in stock for $256.55.
Grab your own copy NOW, while it is still available!
Apart from the tons of the non-technical issues for failure, my favorite technical issue is "Single Message Queue".
This 'feature' made the fine pre-emptive multitasking rather useless in most situation, as one GUI thread hanging did stop all other GUI threads.
AFAIK there were workarounds and changes to this, but at that time, nobody bothered.
If they had ported it on top of Darwin.
:(
As a Mach "personality" it would have all the MacOSX basic features plus it would be compatible with older version of OS/2.
Forget all hope of seeing any of OS/2 opensourced
I do miss OS/2, and it's sitting on a 486 under my desk. Every once in a while, I boot it up, just for fun. I think OS/2 was where I started leaving my machine on all the time (that system boot on a 486 DX2/66 was a sumbitch). The WPS, as Spoing said, was wicked cool. Try this in Windows: make a shortcut to a file on the "desktop", and then move the file. Now double-click the shortcut. Doh! OS/2's Shadows were the best thing ever designed, IMHO, in terms of a desktop GUI. Brilliant. Also, don't forget the folder technique of creating a workspace (don't remember exact term). Put some Shadows in a folder marked as a workspace, and the next time you boot, all the apps in that folder start up correctly. Brilliant! Finally, OS/2 was the only way I could ever hope in hell to multi-task on that old beast of a machine, without causing major havoc. Win95 would bring the system to its knees, but I could run a bunch of apps, all at the same time (StarOffice, Describe, PMMail), without even the notion of a crash. And in 16MB of RAM! Sweet! I'm sorry to see that IBM is finally burying the old girl. She was sure good to me. QuatMosk [Last sighting of OS/2 in the real world: TD Canada Trust, a bank here in Canada, where you can see OS/2 on their "money distributors" any time you enter the branch...]
IBM refuted reports that it was phasing out its OS/2 operating system, saying the company is merely changing the manner in which it distributes its software.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the War Room!
My point was that if an sizable number of people are using it, someone is going to still have the source. It may take some searching, but you are going to find it. It might not even be in a public location any more, but if someone has it, you probably can get it, and find someone else to re-host it. If not, then it must not have been the good or useful.
Why is IBM so infatuated with the number 2? PS/2, OS/2, DB2?? What gives? Self-fulfilling prophecy I guess.....
Would that BBS happen to be "An OS/2 World" If so, then...Hi John!!!
I too run OS/2 on my 'server'. Come Slashdot me... :-)
http://206.75.228.38/
I'm also running a webmail app, a series of REXX based CGI scripts (web counters for my Clients), an FTP server and my fax server.
The machine is a 200 MHz Pentium Pro; works absolutely great... And I don't need to worry about re-registering the software every 18 months!
Yes, the folks at TD Canada Trust run OS/2 on their desk top terminals. And before you make fun of them running 'old' technology; consider they use something like a VT100 terminal program to connect to a mainframe.
Would you trust your money to a bank that doesn't run Windows?
-AD
Although we modern persons tend to take our electric lights, radios, mixers,
etc., for granted, hundreds of years ago people did not have any of these
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Then along came the first Electrical Pioneer, Benjamin Franklin, who flew a
kite in a lighting storm and received a serious electrical shock. This
proved that lighting was powered by the same force as carpets, but it also
damaged Franklin's brain so severely that he started speaking only in
incomprehensible maxims, such as "A penny saved is a penny earned."
Eventually he had to be given a job running the post office.
-- Dave Barry, "What is Electricity?"
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