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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."
put weight behind Linux? Maybe Apple goes that route instead of using Darwin.
IBM evil (again) and no Linux? I think you're going to blow a lot of /.'s minds.
And then they would've been slapped with a "look and feel" lawsuit that they wouldn't have had the resources to fight off...
I'll turn into a supernova and burn up everything. Well I'll turn into a black little hole and you'll turn into string.
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:
And we would still be on OS 8 right now, waiting until 2006 for OS 9.
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.
So all those college-age kids with their DOS computers would still be using DOS.
Microsoft would have ruled the roost.
Nothing is different than it is now.
If "ifs" and "ands" per pots and pans then tinkers would be rich men.
Who says Microsoft wouldn't have embraced and extended OS/2 and shut IBM out, leading to the same conclusion?
What a waste of space stories like these are.
If Ungh Blungh didn't invent the wheel, some other proto-Sapiens halfwit would have invented it in the following year. It's not like there was a shortage of halfwits in the golden crescent.
If Henry Ford didn't invent the assembly-line production model, someone else would have invented it in the following decade. It's not like there was a shortage of development in the industrial arena.
If this developer at Microsoft didn't fix "enhanced mode" Windows, then some other developer at Microsoft would have. It's not like Microsoft was aching for cash to hire smart developers to tinker with 80386 instruction sets.
The size and complexity of an invention AND its environment are also key: If Linus never wrote a whole and usable kernel and published it, chances are that no other homebrew kernel would have grown with the same fervor. The complexity of the task, and the complexity of the eco-political forces at work, helped to spur the adoption in a unique way.
[
Rube Goldberg would have been proud of that article.
- Tony
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).
Trolling using another account since 2005.
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.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Where Old Biff steals the DeLorean and gives the Sports Almanac to young Biff? Then Doc and Marty come back to a hellish timeline where Biff is a billionaire.
:)
I think something like that happened, where old Bill goes back in time and gives young Bill some tips on how to get lucky in the IT world, plus some source code for Windows 3.0. And we're living in the nightmarish timeline that was created.
Only Doc and Marty can save us now. Or Linux. Whichever does it first
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." -- Linus Torvalds
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)
StrategyTalk.com, PC Game Forums
Actually, just having a degree doesn't make you an engineer. Passing your EIT is the first step to that path. "MSCE" is a disgusting use of the word engineer to anybody who is a real engineer.
People with a Phd can be called doctor too.
Besides, not all engineers design bridges.
Maybe they'd call it Gnome, or something like that.
GETPKG - Package Management for Slackware
2. He wrote the Linux kernel on a 386 PC - yeah, i guess he could have been using SCO UNIX on it but I seem to recall he was using MS-DOS a bit also.
3. Richard Stallman started GNU during the 1980s, emacs, gcc, etc were already in widespread usage and being handed out as free source code.
Therefore, the catalyst that sparked off Linux doesn't appear to have been Windows 3.0 anyway.
Sure, with more OS/2 users, there may not have been so many people developing for Linux but it would still be here.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Therefore, due to the increased number of blue radiation given off by windows machines, there has been an exponential increase in short wavelength, high energy electromagnetic radiation - which of course has been linked to skin cancer.
Colt developed the first production line model, for making their famous 6 shooters, 30 years before Ford applied the model to car manufacture.
Degree's don't mean crap. If you have the experience and skillsets and not the degree you still can be an engineer.
News Reporters Make Tasty Polar Bear Treats!
And I've been thanking Linus Torvalds for all of these years???
Dave Weise... You 'da man!!!
Having a degree doesn't make you engineer, solving problems does.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
What the hell are you talking about?
There is not FUD. Fear? Uncertainty? Doubt? He didn't say a damn thing against Linux, and even argues that the business model which pushed IBM to invest in Linux (and which was partially caused by Linux) would still exist. They'd just open up OS/2 instead of porting OS/2 code (and AIX code, since those code bases have intermingled) to Linux.
It's not unreasonable. OS/2 already has a strong presense in enterprise workstations, and that's a strong consulting market. A stronger OS/2 very possibly might have kept IBM (and only IBM mind you) out of the Linux game.
Stop yelling just because someone said something you didn't understand.
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.
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
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
(from comments posted after TFA: )
:) My guess is that the absence of the Internet is pretty much the only thing that really *would* have erased Linux out of history.
:)
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
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Frankly I think this is much more plausible. Thank God for the "reply" button in the blogs!
If 'buts' and 'ors' were filthy whores...I'm still working on this one.
"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.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
"If 'buts' and 'or' were filthy whores, we'd all be covered in chanker sores."
I used to be a paranoid, now, I'm just a noid.
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
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Since Slashdot rejected my submission, enjoy: http://www.divisiontwo.com/articles/MacMini2.html
If Windows 3.0 never happened, we wouldn't have funny Flash animations like this:
http://tinyurl.com/44te2
Keep your eyes to the sky.
I think comparisons with Nazi Germany are fatuous. GWB is not Hitler, on dozens of levels. He's not even that important - the political movement of which he is a part is not his vision, is not really dependent on him in anyway, and would survive his disappearance without batting an eye.
Also, GWB has not engaged in the activities you've described.
However, I do think that the rise of the Japanese militarist regime is a far more productive metaphor. Replace state Shinto with Christianity, and the parallels really start to fit. The slow erosion of civil liberties, the pressure to put media in the service of state goals, the increasing authority given to law enforcement, the hostility to dissent, the use of rhetorics of victimization to justify intervention (Japan used the fact of European colonialism to legitimize its own empire).
The "slow boil" effect is the key parallel, I think. In 1933, the Nazis took over a fairly democratic society, and the flags went up. Nazi ideology was explicitly racist, with an agenda for racial domination. There was no such moment in Japan. Yamato suprematism was never part of official doctrine, and was often repudiated by members of the military who wanted to encourage the cooperation of the co-prosperity sphere members (while the same sort of "boys will be boys" apologetics you would hear for Abu Ghraib and other abuses would be used to minimize or deny responsibility for events like the Rape of Nanking.)
As in Fascist Italy, there was room for some (limited, monitored) dissent - Communists were able to operate throughout conflict, though many leaders were imprisoned.
The parallels aren't perfect, but I don't think the last chapter in the US' rightward drift has been written yet, either. The attitudes that are looming are worrisome.