Linux in a World Where Windows 3.0 Never Happened

covertbadger writes "Larry Osterman said farewell yesterday to David Weise, the developer he credits with getting applications to run in protected mode on Windows 3.0, which led directly to Microsoft choosing to push Windows instead of OS/2. Today he speculates on what the IT world would be like if Weise had never completed this work. Windows 95 would never have existed, OS/2 would be the de facto standard, and IBM would never have put weight behind Linux because it had its own operating system to push."

Comments

Re:Doom only ran on DOS

[SCHecklerX]

It ran fine on OS/2. And the (illegal) port of quake I to OS/2 ran far better than it did on dos. The only reason I bought Quake was because I had a native OS/2 version, and I let Id know this.

Re:"What if?" can be fun

[Otter]

• What if Gary Kildall hadn't been too busy to negotiate with IBM about licensing CP/M for the PC?

Ford didn't develop it

[madaxe42]

Colt developed the first production line model, for making their famous 6 shooters, 30 years before Ford applied the model to car manufacture.

Re:Would this have been so bad?

[ashSlash]

I loved the OS/2 WPS & PM. Drag & drop colours or fonts to any OS/2 windowed app and they are remembered by the app. Maybe too O-O for some ppl but I liked it a lot myself - I found it quite consistent.

Pity 2.0 didn't ship with a TCP/IP stack, nor multi-user capability (or even logins/passwords for that matter)!

But I still miss the WPS... know it exists on Linux tho.

Answer by Stuart Ballard

[Spy der Mann]

(from comments posted after TFA: )

re: Tipping Points 2/3/2005 1:00 PM Stuart Ballard

I guess I put it the other way around: the corporate interest in Linux was fueled *by* its undeniable technical and grassroots-level adoption success.

Remember that in the real world IBM picked up Linux despite having its own Unix brand. Linux beat out IBM's best efforts (AIX and the stillborn Project Monterey) on *merit*, so convincingly that IBM themselves decided to scrap their own work in favor of it. I have a hard time thinking of any corporate involvement (on the scale you're contemplating) before that point that could be said to explain IBM's decision to adopt it. So I'm forced to conclude that if not IBM, one of the other hardware/Unix vendors would have done what they did. The other hardware/Unix vendors, in the no-Windows scenario, would be in the same place that IBM was in today's world, with the same options available.

I'd definitely add one to your list of things that fueled Linux's success, although it doesn't affect the "what if" because neither of our future-histories modify it: the widespread availability of the Internet. Linux is an (IMHO inevitable) product of the fact that suddenly anyone with programming talent can easily get the latest version, submit a code patch, and see it integrated into new versions within days, if not *hours*. Linux couldn't have happened if the developers had to mail around 3.5" floppies :) My guess is that the absence of the Internet is pretty much the only thing that really *would* have erased Linux out of history.
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(end of comments)

Frankly I think this is much more plausible. Thank God for the "reply" button in the blogs! :)

Re:Answer by Stuart Ballard

[sab39]

Thanks for the endorsement ;)

When I saw that this had made /. I wondered if anyone would have bothered to read my comments, and what the feedback would be. Glad to see that somebody did :)

Re:"What if?" can be fun

[SydShamino]

Are you implying that, if Hitler hadn't invaded Russia, Stalin would have had enough extra troops after WWII to move into the northern Europe, occupying Sweden and Finland? Then, given how many more US troops were required to defeat Hitler without Soviet help, the United States was left in a weaker position compared to USSR that later prevented the Soviet collapse in 1991?

In other words, if Hitler hadn't invaded Russia, Linux today would be greatly changed because Linus would have been a Soviet citizen in a communist state?

"What if" scenarios are fun...

Re:Who is to say someone else wouldn't have

[Leo McGarry]

It seems like some people don't know the story there.

Back in the mid-90s, Apple developed their own port of Linux running on Power Mac hardware. It was called MkLinux. Apple shipped a number of developer releases.

The problem was that, compared to the work Apple was doing on what would eventually become XNU, the Linux work was just not very encouraging, particularly in the area of device drivers. The Linux modular kernel model was also inferior to XNU's. So when it came time to choose a kernel for their new operating system, Apple dropped Linux like a hot potato and chose XNU with I/O Kit instead.

This Web page gives a decent very high-level overview of how XNU was designed, explaining why it was a better fit than Linux for a robust, general-purpose, reliable operating system. Of course, Apple's Darwin documentation is the best source for up-to-date information.

Re:Would this have been so bad?

[Gonzoman]

from "OS/2 Programmer's Guide" (forward by Bill Gates): "I believe OS/2 is destined to be the most important operating system, and possibly program, of all time. As the successor to DOS, which has over 10,000,000 systems in use, it creates incredible opportunities for everyone involved with PCs."

I loved OS/2. I ran Warp on a 486 with 8M memory and it ran just fine. It also ran windows apps much better than windows did.

Re:Who is to say someone else wouldn't have

[Guy Harris]

No, there aren't, for licensing reasons. Linux is encumbered by the proprietary Gnu license, which Apple has rejected out of hand. There is no Gnu-licensed code in Darwin.

There is GPLed code in Darwin; Samba is part of Darwin, for example.

There's no GNU-licensed code in the Darwin kernel, so, no, there's no Linux code in the Darwin kernel.

Re:Hmm

[dduck]

From the next article in the series I quoted:

When Apple decided to go with NeXT over Be, Be couldn't even print. Be, while blazingly fast, was blazing fast for a reason. Nothing was running on it. Apple chose to go with the OS that was stable, proven, and gorgeous. Apple also got NeXT's unbelievably fast development environment, the leading application server software WebObjects, and the Mac's father and Apple's savior, Steve Jobs. (Personal note: I still remember leaving work late for Christmas vacation ecstatic after reading that Steve Jobs was back at Apple.)

Now, nothing I have read about it so far contradicts the facts mentioned here. In fact, at least one member of the team at Apple that evaluated the options has posted here at /. saying pretty much the same thing. Well, at least someone who CLAIMED that he was ...

Yes, I know it doesn't make for quite as good a story... but personally, as a recent switcher and software developer, I'm ecstatic that Apple went with the NeXT (and hence, the Next Step) environment. The X-Code environment absolutely ROCKS!

I Smell a Teamer!

[Greyfox]

No one gets that rabid about OS/2 except folks that used to be on TeamOS2 heh heh.

In the '95 Atlanta Comdex one of the displays we set up was a huge dual processor (I forget if it was high speed 486 or pentium. Top of the line) Compaq with a whopping 32MB of RAM! Our intention was to run 3 or 4 AVIs side by side next to the NT machine that was happily spewing polys with their poly screensaver.

This was too slow from disk, so we made a 6 or 7 MB ramdisk and stuck our AVIs there. It was pretty smooth from the ramdisk so we locked it up and left.

I still have a thank you letter from an IBM director, thanking me for helping out at that COMDEX. Ahh those were the days...

It wouldn't have taken much to make OS/2 more competitive with Windows. The number one problem the customers always complained about was the Single System Input Queue. They added some hackish workarounds for that thing, but were unwilling to redesign the OS to actually fix it. That would have broken all those apps that the Navy was running (probably still does) on OS/2 1.3.

Hell of it was, even IBM wouldn't properly design their apps to not lock the queue. Several of their apps were direct ports of Windows 3.0 programs. Since they didn't process their messages in threads, whenever anything took a long time (Like indexing files across the network) the entire OS would lock up. It was actually better to run the windows versions of those apps, since that would at least let the OS continue to run.

Windows still displays signs of this problem to this day, since window frames are handled by the application itself. If you lock an app up, you can't minimize or move its window. The X model is much more sensible about this. In OS/2 you couldn't do anything with ANY of the applications on the screen at that point, but they fixed THAT in a fairly early Windows NT.

Re:Who is to say someone else wouldn't have

[Leo McGarry]

Samba is part of Darwin, for example

Samba is distributed along with Darwin. It's not part of Darwin. Similarly, iTunes is distributed along with Mac OS X. It's not part of Mac OS X.

Here's a web site to read

[A nonymous Coward]

The mechanics of a Pearl Harbor invasion