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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.
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. ;-)
They pulled the OS/2 subsystem from XP.
"Evil will always triumph because good is dumb." -- Dark Helmet
OS/2 is heavily used in ATM (bancomates) machines.
What happens with support for that stuff?
Switching to Linux?
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
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?
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
It depends when it cost a 1/5th as much. IBM was all over the place on pricing for OS/2. At the start it was a few hundred dollars. Then they had a promotion for OS/2 1.3.1 for $99 which included a free upgrade to 2.0. Lots of people got 2.0 final beta for free.
2.0, 2.1, 3.0 were all under $89-129 retail sometimes with $89-99 upgrade offers. Then they jacked the price up again.
As for the marketing it went deeper. IBM couldn't decide what they wanted to do.
My company still uses OS/2 for some functions and they rarely fall down in the way that say NT 4.0 would however NT 2000 seems just as stable it took Windows awhile to reach that point.
I always thought the interface felt very CDE-like and had some interesting features. It is a shame but pricing+bad marketting did them in. I remember when Warp reached the market place before Win95. People at that time were still more worried about Big-bad Blue than Microsoft.
I know there was a theater company that used OS/2 for their platform in some ticketing devices. I remember going by the box and thnking how weird that is.
Where have you seen OS/2 still lingering in IT?
_______________________________
ACK
Maybe IBM could be nice and open some of the OS/2 source code up to the community? At least the parts where they hold IP rights?
Maybe enough source could be opened as to create a server product to run under Linux or other Operating Systems? So current OS/2 shops could have an easy migration from OS/2 to another OS?
Personally, I would love to the WPS running along with my favorite window manager.
Excellent as it was, OS/2 was also hopelessly tied to the i386 architecture. Not that it would likely have mattered, M$ dropped their alpha-version of NT and it didn't seem to hit their sales very much (not so sure about alphas sales, though). The problem with OS/2 (I used it for about 2 years) was the lack of productivity and entertainment apps. Actually it was the lack of variety in said types of apps. IBM made a good java implementation, but java didn't take off fast enough on the desktop (some might argue it still hasn't, even though there are some nice java apps available today) so the risk they took by putting their money on java didn't pay off.
IBM marketed OS/2 Warp 3 very agressively, but it seemed that once Windows 95 was out, they forgot to market OS/2 Warp 4. I think this was one of the reasons it died.
It's not in Windows. NT prior to 2k had a 16-bit OS/2 API module and would run 16-bit OS/2 console programs, and there was actually a 32-bit Presentation Manager for NT available for purchase from Microsoft, but NTOSKRNL was an entirely new development.
.sig: be the majority of voters.
OTOH, what became Windows NT was originally intended to be OS/2 NT, but when OS/2 sold poorly and MS and IBM broke up, MS made Win32 rather than the OS/2 API the default persona for NT and the rest is history.
Remainder of my
Save Maine's economy: write stuff down. All comments are exclusively my own, not my employer.
Apparently DOS+Windows was good enough for their employees too. When I worked at IBM in the late 90's, they were in the process of moving their (non-Unix) desktop systems from OS/2 to Windows. The general reaction was "Hmm, ok. I use Windows at home anyway." It's probably a bad sign when the company doesn't want to use its own product.
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.
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.
The underlying issue is "why"? Why was the install procedure so bad for a company that can do better? Why did they not agressively price the beast? IBMers from the software group that did OS/2 will tell you that IBM set long term internal goals based on selling copies and never revisited them. [information grade=rumor]That meant, they told the engineers, financial guys, salespeople, "Sell X thousand copies this year, Y thousand next year and Z thousand the year after that," and stuck with that statement for all three years. All those goals were met and even exceeded some. What they might have done differently, if they didn't want to revisit the statement, is say, "Capture 10% of the marketplace this year, 20% next year, and 25% the year after that." [/information]
OS/2's GUI was okay, but the I/O performance to the network and storage was excellent. That's where it really shined. Once you could get it going on all your hardware and never had to touch the drivers, that is.
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
This points to the tragedy of the source code to abandoned projects and products ending up in the bit bucket rather than being released for people to study and investigate, if not actually reuse. At least if the code to an open source project goes missing, you can be sure that nobody found it interesting or useful.
If I recall, I read that many ATMs (automated teller machines, not asynchronous transfer mode) use(d) OS/2 as their software. Don't know why. Don't know if they still do. Don't really care.
Overrated / Underrated : Moderation
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.
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
You must have had a different version than mine, because it always neatly asked if I wanted to partition. It had an excellent partitioning program: far better than fdisk under DOS.
Heck, even the famous OS/2 Boot Manager (which ships also with Partition Magic) was completely integrated within the OS/2 fdisk. Even after I stopped using OS/2 (about after 2 years and getting too much Office 95 docs that were unreadble), I still used the installdisks to get my hands on the Boot Manager and be able to dual boot DOS and Win95.
As far as I recall, the OS/2 owners manual actually explains how to make a dual boot system, complete with images and all.
For your comparision with Debian: I still haven't managed to install Debian *today*, but OS/2 worked out of the box *back then*
Sears, for one. All their in-store servers run OS/2. Don't have a link to prove it, but a family member is working on the project.
:-/
But (surprise, surprise!) they're working on migrating to something else
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 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
They dumped one billion USD in a year for the OS/2 marketing campaign
One billion dollars? I seriously doubt that. I don't actually have any idea how much they spent on marketing, but I can tell you that it wouldn't even be close to 1 billion.
-- Never hit a man with glasses. Hit him with a baseball bat.
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 ?
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."
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.
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.
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
No argument there. Microsoft gives it's developers the world and generally kisses their asses too. I mean, like, where else can you or your company pay only a few thousand dollars and get all of their software as long as its for development use (and generally with a reasonable license term too)? MSDN Universal does kick some serious ass. I know the guys at my company love it.
Developers, comments?
pi=sigma{n:0-infinity}[(1/16)^n][(4/(8n+1))-(2/(8n +4))-(1/ (8n+5))-(1/(8n+6))]
Linux is IBM's new version of OS/2, in a way.
But far better supported by them than OS/2 ever was.
Hey IBM if your listening, OPEN SOURCE OS/2.
;)
That's a great way to stab you know who in the back.
-GG
Considering how much IBM loves Linux, they will either try to only bring the "good" parts out to linux, so that they can move their OS/2 customers to Linux. Or they might just wait to open source it at a point where it gives better PR. Who knows? I'd sure like to see them release the whole thing as Open Source and devote 2-3 guys at IBM to handle the whole thing (so that updates, etc can be merged and all that).