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:If Windows had never existed on the home deskto

[justforaday]

And then they would've been slapped with a "look and feel" lawsuit that they wouldn't have had the resources to fight off...

"What if?" can be fun

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, "What if?" can be fun, especially when you apply it to wars. What if Hitler had never invaded Russia? What if he had invaded Britian earlier in the war? Fun, if you're in that mind set.

This one is a little bit too "If" for my liking; it goes back a little too far and tries to extrapolate too much. None the less, it's an interesting read.

So heres some more:

• What if AT&T never sued and BSD386 had been completed?
• What if MULTICS hadn't been cancelled?
• What if Dave Cutler didn't join the NT group at Microsoft?
• What if Ed Roberts laughed Paul Allan out of MITS with their BASIC interpreter?
• What if the Lisp Machines/Symbolics split had never happened and the hacker stayed at the MIT lab?

Re:If Windows had never existed on the home deskto

[dave1791]

Nah, they would have been ripping off WPS, which would have made a better Linux. I used to run OS/2 back in the early 90's and the win95 interface was a step backwards.

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

[justforaday]

Apple did briefly explore that route (mkLinux - linux on the mach kernel). Instead, they used their experience there, along with that little bit of technology they acquired known as NeXTSTEP to make OSX...

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

[LoRdTAW]

Or even microsoft if they still existed.

Re:Hmm

[mirko]

Apple, or Be ?
In 1996 BeOS stood as the most promising environment around.
There was also RiscOS, BTW. which could have gone very far (it's actually present in loads of set top boxen).

bs

[essreenim]

Nothing much would be that different. Everyone would hate IBM because they are where MS are (in the real world ; ) ever here of it?). Some othere big corp would have funded early Linux work...

Instead of using Slackware Linux I'd be using FreeBSD or even OpenSolaris or something, big deeeeeeeeeeeeeel....

Move along now, get back to reality...

Would this have been so bad?

[Gr8Apes]

While the PM interface did have some shortcomings, the OS was rock stable by 94. Heck, the PM shortcomings were minor compared to those of any other OS of the time. Multi-threaded applications, flat memory model, inherently non-fragging file system, the concept of shadows (closest weak analogies are symbolic links or shortcuts) that dissappeared when the root file was deleted, and the addition of extended file attributes that let a file name be anything and still tied to a particular application. A truly great OS with features yet unmatched by any other system, including, dare I say it, Mac OS X. (FYI: I'm about to purchase a Mac, so put the flame throwers away;)

If anyone wants to flame the 2MB cache cache limitation of the file system, do realize that the HPFS386 file system used in the server did not have that restraint. Also recall the time period that this OS came out in. 2MB was a significant portion of 16 or 32 MB of RAM. (Yeah, that's right, OS/2 would run just fine in 32 MB of RAM. Heck, it'd run on 4MB machines if you wanted it to, with the smallest system I recall hearing about was a 2MB system minus the PM.)

I still recall being able to run C&C in a window with sound while running Word 6, and several OS/2 apps with nary a problem. (Pentium Pro in 97).

A trip down Nostalgia Lane once more. Would I run it again? Sure, if it had the applications needed today.

Re:Would this have been so bad?

[NutscrapeSucks]

Funny how you fail to mention Windows NT, which was superior to OS/2 in every way execept the graphical shell.

The fact is that OS/2 was "gimped" in certain ways -- no integrated networking, no file permissions, no multiple users, various 16-bit legacy limitations in the kernel. This was done on purpose because IBM had no intention of letting Intel-based OSes intrude on it's midrange AS/400 and RS/6000 server business.

When NT hit the market, it immediately started taking over server applicaitons. Something that OS/2 never would or could do. At least for servers, NT has always been the hardware driver, pushing the x86 platform upwards, and Linux has benefited hugely from that.

If Windows never existed, the entire proprietary server market (DEC, SGI, HP, Sun, and IBM) would be very much richer and happier today.

Umm, no

[kuwan]

I don't believe that Microsoft ever intended to push OS/2 even if apps couldn't run in protected mode. Microsoft was going to push Windows no matter how crappie or inferior it was to OS/2. Their flirtation with OS/2 (telling people that it was the future and that they should support it) only made other large developers of the time, namely Wordperfect, spend their time on creating OS/2 versions of their software instead of Windows versions.

When Microsoft put their full push into Windows they were able to put MS Word (along with their other apps) out ahead of everyone else and drive Wordperfect into obscurity. That's not to say that Wordperfect didn't expect this. I used to work with a former Wordperfect executive and they knew full well what Microsoft was up to but they thought that the combination of Wordperfect and IBM would be able to beat Microsoft and so they put pretty much everything into OS/2. By the time they realized that OS/2 wasn't going to catch on it was too late, and the rest is history.

--
It works.
Free Flat Screens | Free Mini Macs

I have to say...

[angst7]

OS/2 Warp was goodness in the extreme. (Bugs aside). I ran it for a while trying to stay away from Windows and knowing that someting would drag me away from DOS eventually. The interface and capabilities of OS/2 made me a bit giddy I recall. I still have rather bizarre memories of decentered happieness while running it. Weird.

Of course my memories from around that same time of running early slackware linux are even better. It was on a 386 linux box with 5MB memory that I first saw the (then new) WWW in Mosaic on X. Windows couldn't grant me that pleasure at that time. (Trumpet winsock my ass)

Re:I have to say...

[Gr8Apes]

2.3 and 2.4 were pretty darn nice. I don't really recall too many issues with bugs. At least not in comparison to MS's bugs. I recall rebooting my machine 3 times in a year. I'd often hear colleagues scream in frustration as hours of work dissappeared in the all too familiar BSOD. (Well, familiar to them... ;)

Had IBM capitulated to MS Office's underhanded call for memory @ 2GB when starting, even though it'd never use it, we might still be running OS/2.
That manuever made Office95 incompatible with OS/2, and along with the then incompatible default file formats, the beginning of the end was near for OS/2.

What if...

[wayward_son]

What if Linus Torvalds had known BSD existed?

Linus admits that he basically re-invented the wheel with linux, BSD had what he wanted, but he didn't know about it or that it was freely available.

OT: Re:"What if?" can be fun

[Kjella]

Yeah, "What if?" can be fun, especially when you apply it to wars. What if Hitler had never invaded Russia? What if he had invaded Britian earlier in the war? Fun, if you're in that mind set.

Actually, if Hitler had the sense to "finish off" Europe by taking Britain before going east, it's overall not fun. Extremely creepy is more like it. He probably could, had he not sent all his troops east to fight the Soviets and wasted his missiles on civilian targets. What would happen is anyone's guess, but there'd be no US build-up in the UK, no D-day. Remember that the only thing that finally stopped Hitler was both the future superpowers of the world as well as resistance movements in half of Europe put together. Don't blame it all on the French ;)

Kjella

Re:Engineer?

[burnin1965]

Actually it was "...feathers up your butt..."

But thats beside the point. What I find interesting is how the quote could be used either way. You see, it is quite possible that some may view the bestowal as being similar to sticking feathers up your butt.

IMO it is more likely that the actions of the individual which led to the bestowal is what made the person an engineer not the generosity of some accredited group. And that being the case it is possible that not every person who has become an engineer will be fortunate enough to be bestowed.

That being said I do believe that the title of Engineer is heavily over used and is diminished by its improper use.

burnin

In every way? Methinks not...

[Richard Steiner]

"Funny how you fail to mention Windows NT, which was superior to OS/2 in every way execept the graphical shell."

Since you mention the graphical shell, I'll assume you're talking about OS/2 2.0 or later with the WPS and not earlier 1.x incarnations.

What about the fact that OS/2 came bundled with Rexx while NT had nothing at all similar?

That OS/2's MVDM was significantly better than NT's VDM at running DOS programs?

That OS/2's GUI could be decoupled and replaced with a smaller shell (TSHELL or similar) for use on older hardware for small servers?

That OS/2 consistently beat NT in various performance tests over the years, and even did a cleanup when a single-CPU Warp Server box was put up against a 4-CPU NT Server box on file and print sharing benchmarks sponsored by PC Week?

While NT and its successors certainly have definite advantages, mainly due to market position, I think you vastly overstate its relative position in terms of technology.

Later versions of OS/2 from Warp 3 Connect on had a decent networking stack based on BSD, and most of the 16-bit portions of the kernel are gone at this point in time, so those limitations are no longer current.

Microsoft, Microsoft, Microsoft, bloody Microsoft

[ayjay29]

Microsoft this, Microsoft that, life without Microsoft. Microsoft vs Linus, Microsoft vs Google, Microsoft vs the world, Microsoft ate my dog.

There's more Microsoft stories here than anything else, about 20 in the past week. Isn't anything better to post about??

Lucky streaks and closed minds

[A nonymous Coward]

Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and every other dictatorship suffer from the same malady, what the Japanese called Victory Disease. A successful madman, like Hitler, overwhelms anyone who disagrees, whether explicitly by murder or implicitly by the shadow of his popularity. You can see the same thing happening in the Bush administration. The leader has a closed mind by definition of being a genius madman, the followers have closed minds by virtue of being followers, and those who do not follow are sidelined.

Hitler's successes in the beginning of the war were half due to his madman attitude taking the French, British, and Soviets by surprise. They had expected at least rational war plans, as had his own general staff, only to be overruled by his ego. Not only did this element of surprise gradually diminish as his enemies learned what to expect, the gods of random chance eventually turned his lucky streak into disastrous failure, as is the fate of all lucky streaks. Either they are so short that no one notices them and they are never labeled lucky, or they are successful at first, people begin to depend on that, and when they fail, so much more is riding on continued success that the riders are utterly devastated by the failure, and have no Plan B to fall back on, because they have gambled all on continued success.

Hitler could not have invaded Britain. He did not have the shipping to land an invasion force or sustain an occupying force, or the air power and sea power to protect the invasion. His fighters had barely enough fuel to sustain 15 minutes of combat over the nearest parts of Britain, let alone anywhere else for the duration needed.

It's the same fallacy with regards to the Japanese invading Hawaii. They did not have the shipping to support even an invasion force that far away, the fuel and munitions and plain old food that would have been necessary, let alone an occupying army or the civilian populace. Hawaii was a food importer then, probably still is. Japan would have had to take up the slack in feeding the locals, just as Hitler would have had to take up the slack of the lost imports from the US.

Re:Lucky streaks and closed minds

[Lemmy Caution]

See, this is why I'm embarassed to call myself a progressive sometimes, despite the fact that the policy I want to promote probably resembles yours. You completely missed the point of my post. GWB is not Hitler. Hitler created Nazism. GWB isn't bright or driven enough to create the new conservative movement. GWB is not motivated by hatred; AH clearly had hatred built into his program. GWB's mindset is less iron-fisted, heavy-handed, etc. than AH's. My opposition to Bush does not require him to be a comic-book villain - it's a sad intellectual deficiency on your part that yours does.

GWB is just a trope. The conservatives have been behaving the way he's behaved every time they've got into power since Nixon. Your abuse of synedoche is out of control.

If Fred Phelps was running the Republicans - and he most certainly is not - then you might begin to have a case. As long as your hyperbole and hysteria dominates the strong-left critique of the new right, then the right has absolutely nothing to worry about.

Re:If Windows had never existed on the home deskto

[Locutus]

Following CUA just means that copy works with Ctl-C keys, etc and has nothing to do with the design of the system. On the otherhand, the WPS was/is based on the OO( object oriented ) design/spec called CORBA( industry standard ). It was/is OO all the way through and therefore those little icons you see are consistent in how they work since they are all based on a few basic objects. The Win95 interface was based on HP NewWave and was/is a shallow GUI interface with special bits of code for some parts and other parts use the same bits.

There is really a world of difference between what Microsoft wants for its system and what IBM wants. IBM( and most C++ developers in the tech sector ) wanted and used a full hierachical object model( z inherits from y which inherits from x ) while Microsoft had tried to stay away from that kind of thing because it "hides" the underlying structure( the Windows APIs ). Back in the early 90's, there were alot of application frameworks out there for devopers to use and most would allow the applications to be compiled on OS/2 or Windows and many times UNIX too. That was bad for Microsoft and they did a great job at making sure OO frameworks went away.

Even computer language history would have changed without Microsoft or Windows 3.0. Without Microsoft hold of the desktop, JAVA would not exist and SmallTalk would have probably be much more popular. In the late 80's and early 90's, IBM was trying to find a language/system to use across all of it's operating systems. SOM and Smalltalk were popular until JAVA came along. But this is speculation and will always be so opinions will vary.

I will say that the stuff from IBM typically looked more like it was designed to solve customers and developers problems, instead of being designed to protect a monopoly( ala Microsoft ). IMO.

LoB

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

[AvitarX]

I would say Oracle.

With IBM having OS/2 and DB2 they would be able to push them together like MS does with SQL Server for Windows.

To fight this Oracle could commit to Linux (which they have done) and had a platfor that they had control of on both sides.

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

[Leo McGarry]

That doesn't actually have anything to do with Darwin, or with XNU. See, on top of the kernel are two user-space frameworks called Foundation and AppKit. These both started out on NeXT, and were ported to the new hardware and kernel as part of the Mac OS X development process, but they've both evolved significantly since.

Yes, if you go spelunking in the AppKit classes, particularly NSWorkspace, you find lots of NeXT-y looking things. But at that point you're not really programming; you're doing archaeology.

Re:Answer by Stuart Ballard

[llywrch]

> 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.

How soon we forget. There were other Unix vendors who decided to throw their lot in with Linux, before IBM made their announcement. DEC loaned an Alpha workstation to Linus to encourage him to develop for their RISC processor over the PPC back in 1995. If Microsoft & IBM had continued together with OS/2, I doubt DEC would have tried to partner with them (as it did with Microsoft to promote NT on the Alpha), & may have decided to start supporting Linux a year or two before IBM did -- & succeeded in turning the company around. DEC may have ended up swallowing Compaq instead of the other way around.

Then there was SGI, who made their announcement that they were supporting Linux a few months before IBM. (I remember this well because I attended their road show when it came to Portland. They provided free microbrews to the attendees.) Had IBM not stolen their thunder, & had they not been previously distracted with their unsuccessful foray supporting NT on x86 (remember, in our alternative universe OS/2 is now the standard), I suspect SGI would likely have become the big Linux name & would be doing far better now than they are. (Perhaps graphic artists would be using SGI Linux workstations as their platofrm of choice instead of Macs.)

It was a big boost to Linux that IBM endorsed it,
but by that point it was only a metter of time before some corporation took the jump. In this alternate universe where Windows 3.0 never happened, we'd probably be in much the same situation -- only the names of the players would be different.

Geoff