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25 Years of IBM's OS/2
harrymcc writes "On April 2nd, 1987 — 25 years ago today — IBM announced OS/2. It was supposed to be the next-generation operating system that would replace DOS. It never did. But for a famous failure, it's doing okay — it still runs the computers that manage the New York Subway's Metrocard fare cards, for instance. Over at TIME.com, I've taken a look at its occasional triumphs, frequent tribulations and enduring legacy."
In 1995, OS2 desktop was as popular as Macintosh. Now the field is pretty much 85% Windows with 10% Mac and under 2% Linux.
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
I spent may hours working in the ICLUI interface building apps for OS/2. For the most part it was good at memory management, tools were mature and the interface was object oriented. I was always frustrated about the MS & IBM split on the interface and I think MS took the wrong route in getting to Windows. Had the alliance stuck around who knows what would have happened to this OS.
Audi, vide, tace, si tu vis vivere
...on aggressive partnering and OEM tactics. That was his real contribution to MS, nothing technical.
I hate being bipolar; it's awesome!
Most ATM's (Deibold, Interbold) run OS/2.
Don't release software if the majority of hardware is not ready for it. Microsoft has made these mistakes several times, recently with Microsoft Vista. Software companies try to push innovations too fast, before anyone is ready for it.
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
For a brief period in the nineties I was an OS/2 evangelist/snob/fanboi...It's too bad IBM wasn't a little more savvy with marketing and branding. Scratch that, it's too bad OS/2 belonged to IBM. I was in the local DMV a few years ago and noticed they were still using it...and its circa 1989 graphics. One feature I loved and haven't seen duplicated on any other OS is the ability to create a work folder. Not sure the actual term for it any more but if you put a shortcut to an application/spreadsheet/document in that folder and set the folder as active whenever you opened that folder every one of those items would come up front and center. The closest thing I know of is the startup folder in Windows but that is only when you log in.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
I ran OS/2 extensively from '93 to '03. OS/2 was way ahead of it's time in many ways - maybe too much so. It was a great solid system and the GUI was much better than most of what we have today. it's a shame that IBM couldn't market it properly but they were working against the massive marketing force that MS had back then. That, and the fact that OS really ran best with at least 16mb or RAM back in a time when 8mb was considered excessive. Once Win95 came out OS/2 was pretty much on a fast path to it's death. That clearly demonstrated that the PC industry was more about marketing and deals than producing a better product because windows 95 was absolute trash in comparison.
Alex, I'll take keybindings not used by Emacs for $400....
os/2 was not able to windows 32 bit apps just 32s v 1.25, Now with it where able to run windows 32 bit apps then it may of killed windows 95.
But MS played it's tricks and os 2 was not pre loaded on that many systems.
When I was in college (about 3 years ago), they were discussing upgrading one of the wood shop's machine control PCs from OS/2 to Windows 95. I never found out if they went ahead with it, or where they planned to get a non-buggy version of Windows 95.
But for a famous failure, it's doing okay â" it still runs the computers that manage the New York Subway's Metrocard fare cards, for instance.
No offense, OS/2 was a great OS and ahead of its time, but I think it is safe to assume that most people would consider this a failure of New York Subway's and not an indication how good OS/2 really is.
"More than 250 companies declared their intention to deliver OS/2 apps, including biggies such as Lotus, WordPerfect, Borland and Novell."
OK, that made me smile.
Using RoboBoard graphical BBS software. O/S2 Warp allowed two serial modems to operate independently....talk about cave paintings and stone tools.
Only a few years ago I saw a CIBC ATM crash and it was OS/2 but recently they went with much larger screens and when that crashed it was Windows.
The question I have is in maintaining OS/2 applications what programming tool do you use? So regardless of the potential quality of such an old system I would think the costs in staying in that game would be prohibitive. Where do you get a 386 these days?
Micro Channel. I really liked it. Easy to install and setup. I remember those days fondly.
Paul: Father... father, the sleeper has awakened! - Dune
Had excellent scripting, good multitasking, was very stable at the time compared to just about anything that you could run on PC hardware. I also remember it as being very fast, unless you ran Windows applications on it.
IBM was just not flexible enough to win. The exact same thing is happening to Microsoft right now with the only difference being that while IBMs desktop efforts died with very solid products at hand, Microsoft falls on their nose with crapware. Dont get me started on the duct taped Windows Phone 7 GUI with dripping glue onto Windows 7 that is called Windows 8. Every single engineer involved in that crap should be ashamed to the bones.
HTTP/1.1 400
Some community banks still run OS/2 to power their Voice Banking systems. The reason being is that the hardware dies before the software does.
The other amazing thing is how OS/2 will run on PC's just made a few years ago. As long as it has a PS/2 port, IDE port, and a PCI slot for your ancient 3com NIC.
I remember getting OS/2 Warp as a freebie when I bought my first PC. It was from a short lived high street retailer called Escom, who could sell machines cheaper if they had OS/2 rather than Windows. Since I was going to slap Linux (RedHat 3.0.3) or NetBSD on the machine I didn't care about the lack of Windows - for those that expected to get Windows it mustc have come as a surprise! I tinkered a bit with OS/2, but the interface felt clunky and cluttered. The Windows 3.51 machines that were gradually supplanting our SunOS boxes at work felt pretty elegant in comparison. The biggest problem was a lack of apps, and although there was some sort of DOS emulation I seem to recall you had to effectively reboot the machine into a weird hybrid OS/2 and DOS mode.
Really? :o
Some apps are WYSIWYG. Some others are WYSIWTF.
you might have a valid point in there somewhere - but, sadly, your grammar and punctuation are so poor that it is lost
congratulations, your written english is even less readable than perl!
I didn't know it, but it was Micro-soft that developed the OS/2 for IBM.
was when I heard him give a talk on OS/2 and how it was the future of Microsoft. This was at the University of Washington, and obviously sometime between late 1987 and 1988. A very narrow slice of history indeed.
I was using OS/2 when I signed up for this /. ID!
...those printers run OS/2 nowadays
(as for sure the bizhub c452 does)
If I remember correctly (I can't find my notes), OS2 was a port of IBM's mainframe 32-bit OS scaled for the microcontroller. If you connected using a 3270 terminal or emulator you could get some pretty fast apps going. Of course, people wanted to work from the desktop, not a terminal. The killer was the graphical interface, which never worked right. Furthermore, new apps for the desktop were hard to write, and required developers to be fully immersed in the IBM programming paradigm and mindset. On the other hand, once written, applications worked like they were supposed to. For what it did, the OS2 was one of the sweetest, most elegant OS's for the PC environment. I was hoping something would come from the osFree folks, but it is apparently tough sledding. I was really disappointed that IBM didn't release the OS2 source. A great learning opportunity has been lost.
"The mind works quicker than you think!"
CONFIG.SYS
Well, there's a longer story. Anybody interested should look into the blind luck and frustration that led to MS building Windows as "PM lite" and chancing into Dave Cutler's expulsion from DEC. The book "Big Blues" is a decent start.
When IBM pivoted hard toward PS/2 and 16-bit computing, Gates took one of the 3 or 4 intuitive gambles that defined both his success and that of Microsoft.
There's ONE simple use case, that illustrates the technical failing of OS/2, vs Windows NT - particularly in face of the claim IBM made for a "Better Windows than Windows". > > >. OS/2 didn't perform a special trap for that key sequence. Nor could it - without the 32-bit native, 'Virtual 8086" mode of the 386 processor. This simple illustration exposes the huge architectural gulf that OS/2 was unprepared to cross as 16-bit. Bill's certainty that 32-bit architecture was demanded by multi-task/multi-user computing in 1989 paid off. Inheriting the VMS brain-trust allowed him to execute, while leveraging the design and code contributions his team had made to the OS/2 project.
Besides that? CONFIG.SYS. Really! A whole /etc directory reduced to the parsability of one file! In this context, the follies of the Windows registry appear to be, comparatively enlightened.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
10 I
20 REM FIXED CAPITALIZATION
30 might have a valid point in there somewhere - but
40 REM EXTRA COMMA REMOVED
50 sadly, our grammar and punctuation were so poor that it is lost.
60 REM PERIOD ADDED
70 Congratulations,
80 REM FIXED CAPITALIZATION
90 my written english is even less readable than INTERCAL!
100 COMEFROM: 10
110 Fixed that for you.
120 And congratulations on learning INTERCAL, I'm still stuck in BASIC dialects.
130 SYSTEM
http://www.theinquirer.net/img/7144/os2thing.jpg
You can also argue that their excellent support for Windows applications contributed to their downfall.
Where I worked, we made the decision to support only Windows because OS/2 could run it just as well (actually better). There was no point in supporting OS/2 natively for us.
no GOTOs? That's not real BASIC
Microsoft used to update win32s every week it seemed then IBM would fix OS/2 to run them. Finally with Win32s v1.30 Microsoft hardcoded some DLLs to load in high memory and as OS/2 only supported 512 MBs per process, no more Win32s support without a lot of work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
How come you remember all that but don't remember that it's means it is? Too complicated?
I was in college at the time and did a co-op with IBM that year.
My group used to call you CO-OP guys "NOP"'s - no operation - as in assembly 'NOP'.
You were easy to pick out - shirt and tie for the first week on your NOP job.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, we gave you punks a hard time, but it was out of love, man. You were sharp and ambitious and would end up as our boss. We had to take our shots while we could.
I still have that T-Shirt.
Me too.
I was in my local NAPA auto parts store and this old guy (even older than me) saw that shirt and said, "That's a really old T-Shirt."
Long story short, he was one of those guys that took an early retirement.
When I was at Boca, I watched all those "out of date loser" mainframers come down from NY to do shit jobs. I smugly thought, "That's what you get for not staying current!"
How arrogant I am. And I'm ashamed for it.
I escaped to a so-so business back office programming job while others were poached by Microsoft - the smart ones which wasn't me (Peter, peter rice eater - you rock man! I hope you're a MS Millionaire because you deserve it!).
The ironic thing is that the Hartford Insurers (who still train, btw) need some mainframers.
I met the most obscenely talented and genius people at IBM.
Looking back, it was the most humbling experience ever - and I was too arrogant to take that lesson in at that time. Then again, we have to be arrogant to get jobs in this fucked up industry, don't we? Saying, "I don't know." is the kiss of death.
can i get your phone number or email address!
Unfortunately, I never owned a PC during the time that OS/2 was around, and so never got to experience what it was. But most of the people who ever used it liked it. Just hearing about some of the concepts - dragging a file to a printer icon in order to print - blew me away. An OS that would have been the offspring of OS/2 and NEXTSTEP would have been just purrrfekt!
In college, I learnt about microprocessor design on a PPC 601 - the first PPC to come out after IBM did a derivative design of it along w/ Motorola (now Freescale). Knowing that OS/2 was going to have an uphill battle outside IBM (heck, even Amber didn't offer the OS), I was rooting for OS/2-PPC, which was known as Workplace OS. Unfortunately, as it turned out, Mach 3 turned out to be a horrible choice for a kernel (and Hurd pretty much made the same mistake in going w/ it) and finally, IBM canned it. That was the real death knell of OS/2, and w/ it died any real hopes of the PPC getting popular outside Apple (as far as computers go - I'm not thinking about consoles or other boxes)
Incidentally, today, there is a project called OSFree, which is similar in concept to Workplace OS, except that it uses the more recent L4 micro-kernel as its underpinning. The concept here is good - on top of the micro-kernel, they plan to use different 'personalities', such as Presentation Manager, Win32, DOS and even Linux (there already exists an L4Linux, so they may not do much more on that one), as well as a Neutral personality, which would provide the services that the other personalities require. The advantage here is that the portability of the L4 has already been demonstrated, since after an initial design w/ some assembly code, it was found that replacing assembly code w/ C didn't have any performance impact.
I know that at this point in the game, computers based on anything other than x64 or ARM are pretty much non-starters, but it would be fantastic if such a project actually came to fruition. That would be a good step towards portable computing, while giving just about any architecture the ability to have an environment like OS/2. Hopefully, all the major FOSS software will be ported there, and that platform would then have a chance of being viable. I think that b/w OSFree and ReactOS, there should be enough opportunity for OSs that decide to take advantage of the end of support for XP. Maybe a laptop based on a MIPS or PPC can have a go at it
Does anyone know why IBM wasn't fully committed to making OS/2 succeed. I left IBM as a full-time employee about the time OS/2 was release. I then worked as a contracted in Bacon Raton for six months, where it was developed. It worked in the OS/2 support department. There was a lot of flag waving and talk of making it succeed. But ultimately someone hadn't counted to cost of success.
I got on the OS/2 bandwagon at 2.0. I was doing software development for a company at the time and OS/2 allowed me to run my three applications side-by-side if I wanted to. Its DOS emulation was really quite good and it's Windows emulation wasn't bad either. It seems like Microsoft started rolling out API updates (Especially DirectX) every few weeks just to screw things up and it was a constant problem. The nail in the coffin was them getting the IBM PC Company to drop OS/2 pre-bundles with their predatory DOS and Windows pricing. They may have gotten dinged with an anti-trust action over that but the damage was done. By '95 I'd already seen the writing on the wall and had started experimenting with the Slakware Linux distribution.
IBM could have done some things better with the operating system. They got side-tracked with a PowerPC port that consumed a lot of resources and never amounted to anything. The prevailing attitude in the company was that PCs were toys and not good for much more than acting as dumb terminals to the mainframes or AIX machines. If someone had seen PCs as the future, they might have devoted more development resources to it. Despite the superior (to win3.x/win95) architecture, most of the demo apps were direct ports from Windows apps and didn't make use of the operating system's threading. Ironically OS/2 did better at multitasking Windows apps than Windows did for a long time, but sucked at multitasking most OS/2 apps.
IBM didn't get enough developers on board either. There was a focus on them and I seem to recall they had a decent developer program, but very few companies wanted to devote resources to it. Why do that when you could just write windows apps and run them on both systems? It's entirely possible that IBM's excellent windows emulation may have come back to bite it in the ass on that front. If Microsoft had done nothing for another couple of years, OS/2 may have ended up being the defacto platform to run Windows apps on, but Microsoft was already taking the threat very seriously and wasn't going to let that happen.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
OS/2 became Windows NT, which became Windows Server. A lot of Windows Server is in Windows 7. I'm pretty sure a substantial amount of OS/2 code is still in use today, or at least a derivation of it...
I remember it well, I was tasked with a number of OS/2 projects. Recoding MS's writelog function, making it asynchronous (non-blocking), creating the (AT) VGA driver, creating (AT) ST506 driver, and the biggest challenge ever, I was tasked with creating the final quality control steps/code/testing methodology.
I knew the final QC phase would be huge, an almost impossible challenge, since the Microsoft's core staff was mostly Recent College Grads who would take many of inappropriate shortcuts. Thus it would take something extraordinary to beat their code into something useful.
If I had failed, I suspect the micro computer industry would have been stuck in a dark age for at least a decade, maybe more.
The biggest hurtle was there would be no way to fully test all combinations of system functions, our SUN would burn out first(billions of years). Instead of attempting the impossible, I did the next best thing.
I created a series of revolutionary stress tests for that project. The component programs were a series if self checking programs which used out of phase pseudo random number generators. The resulting (re-creatable) data patterns were used for both the function parameters and content, and the longer they executed, the greater the testing coverage.
Long story short.. The first release of OS/2 (86) never saw the light of day.. It couldn't even pass the individual component stress tests, let alone dozens of them in combination, all controlled by my screen manager. Sloppy coding techniques and shortcuts had forced MS coders to go back to drawing board and start over from scratch.
Net result, those stress tests uncovered many flaws, including hardware problems, and major software issues, some of which were carry overs from PC/MS/DOS. They were discovered and fixed, some of them were folded back into next release PC/MS/DOS, 4.0. Thus making DOS based PC's useful for large databases for the very first time.
In the end, the code, the methodology I created, was so far ahead of everything else they quickly took over all other forms of OS testing at both IBM and MS. And it lives on to this day, Microsoft has ten's of thousands people creating/running modern permutations of those 24hr stress tests I pioneered for the birth of OS2, using it to find and fix bugs in all versions of windows.
I'd say that their real downfall was that they didn't have compelling reasons for people to prefer them. If they were going to run win16 and win32s applications, why would anybody prefer them to Microsoft, who controlled the win32 standard and was evolving it all the time?
I know hindsight is 20-20, but in retrospect, IBM would have done a better job spinning off their OS/2 group (giving them PC-DOS and Lotus along w/ it) and letting them set up the market on their own. They could have then worked w/ universities and other programmer groups in making the Presentation Manager API popular, and used the time that MS was readying Windows 95 to get as many apps ported. They could have also worked out bundling deals w/ various PC makers - there were hundred of them at the time - and established mindshare and marketshare. And had a wide range of apps (price wise) for the market at large.
Letwin was OS/2's chief architect and one of Gates' most trusted employees at the time. He wrote the book that introduced the operating system to applications developers (now available for a bargain price!).
Here is a Usenet post Letwin wrote in 1995, after it was obvious that OS/2 had lost out to Windows 95 (and eventually NT/2000) in the marketplace.
BTW I also found Letwin in an early group photo of Microsoft (Letwin is second from the right in the middle row). By comparison, here is the photo for Mitt Romney and Bain Capital
April 1987 was the date IBM presented the PS/2 computer line and NOT the OS/2 operating system. OS/2 wasn't ready until december.
Automated fuzz testing you say?
Despite all that if you knew what you were doing it was far more superior to anything Microsoft had at the time. I'm sure Microsoft engaged in all kinds of sharp practice but it really needn't have bothered. IBM was its own worst enemy. By the time NT4.0 / W2K were appearing there was no reason at all to use OS/2.
IBM engineers had the full Win32 running on OS/2 but once Microsoft found out they modified Windows 95/aka Chicago to break that capability. OS/2 processes could only access 1GB of address space while Chicago processes got 4GB of address space. So to break the OS/2 ability to run 32bit Windows Microsoft modified their resource compilier to load the applications resources(menus, icons, etc ) up at the top of the address space instead of down low with the rest of the application. Viola, OS/2 was unable to load the full Win32 application.
There were stories of IBM even solving that problem but deciding that if Microsoft was willing to convolute their OS design to prevent OS/2 from running it once, they'd just keep doing it and so IBM ended the cat/mouse game at Win32S capabilities along with OS/2's already advanced design.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Well played, I'm sure, if I could understand it.... would you mind terribly translating that to REXX?
but I found it sad that when NT kernel based Windows(Windows 2k) finally became _the_ standard desktop it was then I heard all the Windows fan developers praising multi-threading. Me, I was blown away when I found that most of the default Microsoft utilities to manage Windows XP were not multi-threaded or if they were you couldn't tell in the UI. ie way too much waiting for the hour glass pointer.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
"If I had failed, I suspect the micro computer industry would have been stuck in a dark age for at least a decade, maybe more ..." hhahahha dude you certainly think a lot of yourself. Good for you, now go and put the missing letters in your homepage. Try randomizing your keyboard or something.
Not really, the stress tests did so much more, they actually validated the data/contents of video/memory/math computations/files/etc. (I.E. They checked for any unexpected data corruption.)
For example the display stress test component, had a virtual driver(written by me) to emulate the all VGA OS calls, it was run in parallel with the actual hardware, periodically the virtual image was compared with the actual hardware. (note: That particular component stress test, found a flaw in a respin of VGA chip, forcing a 9 month delay in VGA chip production.)
Lastly, this stress methodology predates the fuzz testing by several years.
Up until last month's March 15th ADA deadline, 3 of our ATMs were running it. We'd still be running it if our Audio Board had drivers for it - alas, our venders were forced to load Windows XP Pro. I still have the unopened shrink-wrapped box of OS/2 Warp! :)
This is a well debunked fallacy. The statistics you use only apply to daytime usage when work machines are thrown in. At night, it is closer to 10-20% Linux usage. Even Microsoft has admitted that.
Why do you link to your website? Is that even your website? It's shocking :)
Mainly the "WARP 3.0" model too (it became more 'user friendly' on many a front I felt @ least, vs. 2.1 before it). It was also EASILY 'tuneable/tweakable' in its CONFIG.SYS file (much like how MS-DOS was as well in the file of the same name).
* The truly "astounding" part is, that there is still companies using & working with it (last time I tuned it was for a division of NCR in Kennesaw Ga. that I helped build Boston Market, Burger King, & McDonald's restaurant 'bump bar' system for, coding the SQLServer system in VB4 for mgt. folks to use the report back to the central offices for promotional & pricing data as well as day-to-day financials, etc./et al, circa 1998)...
APK
P.S.=> It was a 'forerunner' to Windows NT-based OS on many grounds (except Workplace Shell was more of a TRUE "OOP" desktop, vs. an "object request broker" than say, Windows' Program Manager desktop on Windows NT-based OS @ the time - & "oddly" (not)? The Win9x shell that became the Windows desktop for MANY years to the present day resembled & acts much like it))... apk
With Warp server. OS/2 did start to support high memory, first 2 GBs then 3+GBs and with FixPak #13 for V4 they combined the desktop and server kernels and updated V4 to V4.5 which gave high memory support on the desktop.
While they never finished porting the API to be high memory friendly they did a good enough job that things like Firefox, that ran like shit with a 512 MB address space, more like 350 MBs after loading shared DLLs, run quite well. And OS/2 has Odin, sorta Wine for OS/2, which allows some Win32 programs to run and is now being used to compile some Windows programs against. This is how Java 6 and Flash 11 work under OS/2 now. (actually we use the native Flash binary with a wrapper)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
The definitive obituary for OS/2 was written in 1995 with this long USENET post fro Gordon Letwin, who was the lead architect of OS/2 on the Microsoft side.
Excerpt: "What was OS/2's problem? Why was it doomed? Because it's main attraction was as an engine to run MS-Windows applications. The problem is one of standards, and one of critical mass. Standards are of incredible importance in the computing world. They're critical in other domains that folks don't often think about. Your HiFi CD player, for example. It plugs into your preamp. And that plugs into your amp. And that connects to speakers. Each of those can, and usually does, come from a different manufacturer. The RCA connectors, and the signal levels themselves, are standardized. Standardization is a big plus in the computer field. You're much better off having thousands of products and vendors compatible with a single standard, even a mediocre one, than having dozens of products, one or two each for each of a dozen fragmented standards."
I remember trying out OS/2, but there where so many bugs in the OS/2 installer that I was unable to install a working copy on my machine. If you can't install the product then there isn't much hope of it gaining a foothold.
I *loved* OS/2 for the most part. I got it when I was running a BBS and it allowed me to run the BBS in the background while doing other things in the foreground. Couldn't do that with DOS at the time - and Windows was hopeless. :P
IBM screwed the pooch with OS/2, they could have had a great OS on their hands and been a valid choice. They failed at every opportunity though.
My only problem now is that if I wanted to install OS/2 again for some stupid reason, I would have to get a computer that had a floppy drive - it came on 30 or so floppies
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
that's what happened when OS/2 was preloaded by just a few PC vendors in Germany. But in the US where Microsoft had licensing contracts with all the vendors and that license required payment to Microsoft with or without Microsoft's OS, IBM could not crack even a few percentage points of market share.
I remember those days well. Like how Object Oriented Programming was very popular and resulted in application frameworks making cross platform software easy and fun. But with every innovation in software development came a Microsoft counter example of doing it differently and such that it only ran on Windows. OOP on Windows was called object-like. The common 3D graphics system was OpenGL but Microsoft came up with Direct3D on it's DirectX. IBM created DIVE(Direct Video Interface) and hired a small software company called ID Software to port the Doom engine to OS/2 using DIVE to show off OS/2's capabilities. That's about the time Microsoft employees were running around Comdex crashing OS/2 machines with floppy disks designed to do that.
I will send out a big "thank you Linux and the FSF" for GNU/Linux and the ability to stay away from Microsoft's software and the repeating head aches it's brought so many. I see so many on the various social media sites disappearing and then reappearing weeks later saying their Windows computers broke.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
... it would have taken over the world. It's like the first OS that being sold off-the-shelf (and it wasn't cheap either.) So you installed this thing and you computer could boot, but that was pretty much it.
As we used to always joke, it was the best OS that was never finished. I think it was Gerstner who said, "OS/2 was an resounding defeat." The best memory about Warp was it came on CD instead of a gazillion floppies.
I think you can find it in Abandonware
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
so much potential so much laid to waste. But I still use 2.0 .. no really on my craptacular BBS, bbs.superglobalmegacorp.com ...! Nothing handles MS-DOS like OS/2!
Also I've done a full screen/VGA port of QuakeWorld/Quake to OS/2 2.0 ... it runs! but no sound of course, that MP/M or whatever the multimedia thing is was... a disaster even when it was fresh.
Now there was a good idea that never got off the ground.
I have excellent Karma and I am not afraid to Troll it.
say certainly /* "i'll give it my best shot" */
/* retrieve next obvious joke */
/* as long as we've got jokes */
/* need to fill in details here... */
/* need to study more SICP to tell this type of joke; try to read SICP, then reread thread */
/* well done! */
/* but good job! somebody with modpoints get in on this */
/* get the next joke if there is one! */
/* done with the post! */
parse upper pull obvious_joke
do while (obvious_joke)
select
when (grammar_error)
say requote_with_satirical_comments_added
when (recursion_mentioned)
do
NOP
end
otherwise
if modpoints
say mod_up_insightful
else
say wish_i_had_modpoints
end
parse upper pull obvious_joke
end
/* thanks JD, that was a lot of fun */
To make Ctrl-Alt-Del simply flush the filesystems and reboot the machine was a design decision, and a dubious one to boot (scnr), but not a technical necessity imposed by the architecture. Actually, the current OS/2 packagings by name of eComStation do come with a Ctrl-Alt-Del interceptor that switches to a console mode process manager.
Didn't Warp come in a box w/ CDs?
First line needs to be a comment so cmd.exe knows to pass it off to the REXX interpreter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Just for the record – 1998, I started a side-business as a really small, local internet service provider, offering web and mail services for customers on a machine running OS/2. If I remember correctly, until now, 14 years later, there was one major hardware upgrade and two operating system upgrades, with the next major upgrade (both hard- and software) planned this year. The mid-term future will probably be a Linux box with the latest eComStation running what OS/2 specific stuff will then still be needed in a VirtualBox, but the next setup will still be OS/2-only (eComStation 2.1). It doesn't let me do all the things other systems would, especially when compared with Linux in a server environment, but those 14 years mostly were a really low-maintenance time and I'm still quite happy with it. On the desktop, though, my OS/2 days are mostly over for something like 10 years now.
Warp 3 came on CD. You do need to boot from the two included floppies to install it. I'm not sure the bootable CD existed yet.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
First line needs to be a comment so cmd.exe knows to pass it off to the REXX interpreter.
So would it start something like this?
say certainly
Thank you kindly for the correction, by the way. Much appreciated!
Jeremiah (LTNS how have you been?): For instance/example - AutoExec.Bat (for the WinOS2 environment that versions of OS/2 shipped with) & other attributes + system settings that were NOT in CONFIG.SYS also (such as the Windows 3.1 environs it had in WARP onwards iirc & it's .ini files also) ...
OS/2 also used .ini files (iirc, one was PROTOCOL.INI) but there was MORE too... argh! Gettin' old, can't recall it all...
AND?
Even MORE that I cannot recall the name of the file(s) - there was a 'registry like' construct in it as well, and you could not access it and be able to 'tweak it' via text editors... but, "cat-got-my-tongue" on the NAME of it after so many years now in my NOT using it regularly.
APK
P.S.=> Prize to the person that comes up with the name of that file(s) I speak of @ the termination of the main body of my post above, because this is 1 of those times I realize the TRUTH of what "the infamous they" say, that you're never going to be as sharp as you were sub-40 yrs. of age, & that the mind/memory begins a decline then (my 'cat got my tongue' here proves it in a way, lol)... Thanks for the 'refresher' here too, it's been 18++ yrs. since I used OS/2 a LOT, & 14++ yrs. since I actually tuned it in the workplace, per my 1st post here noting it -> http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2761033&cid=39550525
... apk
Yes, it is still broken though,
R:\tmp>test.cmd
CERTAINLY
5 +++ Do While ( obvious_joke );
REX0034: Error 34 running R:\tmp\test.cmd, line 5: Logical value not 0 or 1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
1GB of space, because that is how much the 80286's virtual address space was... even though its physical address bus was 24bit (16MB) it could map 1GB in the VM. Sadly OS/2's 32bit version wasn't entirely 32bit. hell 2.0 had a 16bit graphics subsystem for PM, and many of the LAN drivers were 16bit as well... I guess they figured that going pure 32bit and requiring new drivers would be death to OS/2, much like BillG didn't want NT to need new drivers, but... if you are going to be all 32bit you need 32bit drivers.
The single message passing queue: There were demonstratable cases where you could "lock it up" solid... this was improved upon in Windows NT-based OS though, by offering multiple message queue design (which is FAR tougher to do that to).
* Heh, I posted about this here years ago too -> http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1618508&cid=31847246
(Other than that though? I had tools/utilities, & compilers (Borland C++ for OS/2) galore going for it to use here... too bad it didn't make it - it should have!)
APK
P.S.=> Well, in any event? Good things came about from it, such as HPFS offering up a GOOD solid 'base case' for a new filesystem design (which, iirc, & others can feel free to correct me on it since it's been ages since I 'exercised this trivia'? NTFS has many of its features, WITH security-based improvements such as ACL's included in a "band based" filesystem with 'extents')... apk
You certainly deserve mod points for the effort. Thanks!
Your comment is truly awesome. I remember binary coding back in those days; frankly I'm amazed at the amount of work you and your team produced in the mid-80s. It took me literally a year after reading Petzold's book to realize that a handle was actually a memory pointer within a heap.
Kudos on you ;)
https://plus.google.com/106875990476951662693/posts/9aDbieL2ncH
Look how long Linux took to get going -- and it's free.
Memory requirements was a problem but it was Windows 3.0, then Windows 95 and the per PC preloading that killed OS/2.
Jobs couldn't have made OS/2 a success. That Microsoft monopoly was unchallengeable.
I've got almost every version of Win32s (yeah there was sooo damned many) I just don't have 1.0 ... anyways now I feel like I almost need to timeline Win32s release s, OS/2 updates and NT releases....
The problem I encountered with OS2 and the thing that forced me to migrate away from it was the simple fact that IBM made the decision to kill OS2 before Warp ever came out. It had already dropped support for OS2 before the warp packages even hit the store shelves. That left a bad taste in my mouth and I migrated away from using OS2 once I found that out, ie it wasn't a problem with the product itself, but the corporate mindset that said sell a product that they were going to discontinue.
I can't really sing the praises of OS2 architecture or GUI, I used it, it worked and was stable unlike windows at the time. I would have continued using it, except for the fact that it seems a bit sleasy to sell people a product that you don't intend to support in the future.
/* TODO: Spawn child process, interest child in technology, have child write a new sig */
considering the memory footprints of the early '90s, it did pretty good. The kernel/OS used only about 4MB while the WorkPlaceShell used another 4MB. Today, many GigaBytes is normal for new PCs but that wasn't the case even 10 years ago. Besides, Loading 3 tabs in FF only shows about 450MB of virtual memory with about half that resident.
The way I saw it back then, if you wanted a "real" computer on your desk, you paid the money for larger disks and a few extra MB of RAM. NeXT hardware was very expensive and WinNT was slow and buggy compared to OS/2 back then.
And remember, that was 1GB per process/application( ie application space including its threads ).
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
that sounds about right and if you had access to HPFS386 there were some nice caching tweaks which really made it scream. I would run the server kernel for multi-CPU capabilities too. Back in the day, we'd have physically more than 1 CPU while today their packaged in a single chip.
OS/2 was, and sounds like it still is, a great platform for running lots of different software. Much like how the WorkplaceOS was supposed to work. There was even a great X11 port which allowed both local X clients to run( via EMX) and remote clients.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Later on, he explains (t)his "insight" and what was made of it as follows:
To be sure, Windows 95 was not on the shelves at this point, so IT as a whole could have been spared that much, and yet:
A quarter-century later, with the Warp 3 & 4 machines still in use, and IBM having found quite a different "role in the industry" indeed, a couple of these claims may merit re-assessment.
You can always trust the American public to make the wrong decision, technologically speaking. VHS, NTSC tv, 44Khz CDs, 18 Khz subcarrier FM radio, music cassette tapes, MSDOS, Windows, Intel CPUs, texting, jpegs, mp3s, .....
Your grammar skills are non-existent. Please die and never comment again.
Actually in practice it was 512MB for the kernel and 512MB per process minus shared memory. Firefox started to really have a hard time running in about 350 MBs so we moved most of it into high memory which the desktop started to support with FixPak 13, which was the one where they unified the desktop and server kernels in favour of the server. (Fixpak 15 before it was really stable)
At this point in time you really need Warp v4 with all the free fixes to run on modern hardware or even a P4. Better to have the convenience pack or eCS.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
that rings a bell as the saying goes. I don't recall what was the last fixpack I'd installed but it was atleast fp13 although I also recall getting the server kernel off of the ibmpc ftp site and running it along with hpfs386 and Warp was a screamer. I think it was when Star Office/Open Office left out OS/2 that I had to go fully into the GNU/Linux world. I do miss the WPS and all the amazing things it could do.
thanks for the corrections.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
OpenOffice once again supports OS/2 due to the work of a couple of developers. LibreOffice sadly removed OS/2 support recently though.
We also have JFS instead of HPFS386 which is even faster in most cases and it comes with a LVM so you can assign any drive letter to any partition you want and JFS volumes can span partitions. JFS also supports files greater then 2GB and very large partitions, 2 TB is the current limitation of the S506 driver, 512 GB if you want it compatible to other systems or for booting.
Linux JFS is a fork of OS/2 JFS. Sadly IBM never opened up the OS/2 JFS excepting what they gave to Linux
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
the last I had read was that OOo was getting "ported" to OS/2 via Net Labs work. The whole Oracle mess with how they caused the OOo fork and then attempt to mend the fence after the horse was out was disgusting. Nice to know at least OOo is still there. And nice to hear a good port of JFS was there now too.
Does one have to purchase eCS or can Warp 4 be coxed into installing on "modern" hardware today?
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Serenity Systems, who put out eCS, is sponsoring the port and the code is getting committed into the main OpenOffice repository.
Installing Warp v4 directly onto modern hardware would be very difficult. It could be installed onto older hardware or perhaps better a virtual machine, updated, and cloned onto modern hardware. There are still many missing pieces for a good experience. Video would have to use gengradd, basically VESA and depending on the actual video card you might get the right resolution for a new LCD monitor or yu might not. The AHCI driver is a work in process but is GPL so unofficial builds are available or SATA needs to be run in compatible mode as only SATA 1 and 2 is supported. Very few network drivers available as well. Sound should work as it is based on ALSA. And Warp 4 is missing ACPI support so you still need a motherboard that supports legacy mode and good luck getting more then one core to work.
Best is just to install it to virtual box and run it from there. One developer reported that on his brand new, top of the line system, that while eCS worked on it, he got 3 times the compile speed running it on vbox under Ubuntu. Of course with slightly older hardware you can have a nice Warp v4.5 system.
Now if you want to use it on a couple of year old system with a slightly older video card you might have better luck.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
that's what I was afraid of. still to many little pieces missing for todays systems. I had to skip VirtualPC/Virtual Box when they didn't have USB support and went with VMWare and VMWare dropped OS/2 support. It seems IBM did some tweaks using obscure parts of the x86 CPU and it's the only OS using them so they are not implemented. Or something like that.
Thanks for the great information on where OS/2 is today.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2772023&cid=39609055
I thought VMWare supported OS/2 now, though unofficial. You do need hardware virtual support though. http://partnerweb.vmware.com/GOSIG/IBMOS_2_Warp_4.html
The x86 feature that OS/2 uses is running some stuff in ring 2, which is how DOS drivers can work under OS/2. Every other operating system just uses ring 0 and ring 3, which is compatible across architectures.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Ur post parent 2 this shows you're in error http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2772023&cid=39609055 (check ur calendar).