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."

Comments

When OS meant Computer

[alphatel]

In 1995, OS2 desktop was as popular as Macintosh. Now the field is pretty much 85% Windows with 10% Mac and under 2% Linux.

Re:When OS meant Computer

[Theophany]

I guess it's testament to the machine that is Microsoft - their sheer unrelenting power in the marketplace. It also creates that feeling of support for Big Blue as an underdog, something you wouldn't really associate with them. Still, TFA is just a romanticisation of fierce and underhanded business tactics. Either you win big or you're blasted into mass insignificance by the big boys when it comes to the consumer desktop OS market.

In a way, it's almost like RIM and Nokia/Symbian's rather tremendous falls from grace, care of Apple and Google; i.e. they never stood a chance.

Re:When OS meant Computer

[SQLGuru]

IBM was pushing OS/2 Warp to compete with Windows NT. I was in college at the time and did a co-op with IBM that year. I had to opportunity to go to COMDEX and IBM gave lots of people a t-shirt that said "Nice Try" (with the N and the T really emphasized) on the front and "OS/2 Warp, Up and Running, Not Up and Coming" on the back. We were to wear the shirt in the audience of Bill Gates keynote when he officially announced Windows NT.

I still have that T-Shirt.

Re:When OS meant Computer

[unixisc]

I actually considered abandoning Windows myself for it, after a friend showed me what OS/2 Warp could do (its multitasking blew away Windows 3.1, and unlike Mac's, it could run DOS games/software). It may have succeeded if it Warp had come out just a couple of years earlier. As it was, it only beat Win 95 to market by a year or so, and so most people just held out for another year and stuck with Windows.

I don't think it was the timing of Warp's release - after all, even OS/2 2.1 was superior to Windows 3.1. Problem was that OS/2 had double the memory requirements, which was a major showstopper at the time. Although it supported all DOS device drivers, there was always the problem of which systems wouldn't run it.

Also, for PC makers, IBM was a competitor, while Microsoft was not. That too was a part of the decision. Also, IBM took way too long and ultimately aborted Workplace OS, which was to have succeeded OS/2. That turned out to be the death knell for the OS.

After Microsoft merged Windows 9x and NT in Windows 2000, the rationale for OS/2 was pretty much gone. Which, alongside the demise of Amiga, NEXTSTEP, NT-RISC, was some of the tragic reasons for which all we have today is Windows and Unix (I'm considering Linux, BSD, Solaris and all their derivatives as Unix).

It was great... once upon a time.

[AntEater]

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.

Titans of the industry

[jayhawk88]

"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.

Re:CIBC

[ArhcAngel]

OS/2 is still being updated/supported just not as OS/2. eComStation Is currently available and works with most current generation hardware.

One.Word

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

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.

Re:One.Word

[operagost]

I'm not sure why you're going on about Virtual 8086 mode, because that was supported from the release of OS/2 2.0 in 1992. How do you think it ran DOS and Windows 3.x programs so well? It certainly trapped CTRL-ALT-DEL... but all it did was flush the caches and reboot. That's because it was single-user, and had no need to trap the CTRL-ALT-DEL sequence to avoid being vulnerable to password harvesting programs. OS/2 2.0 beat Windows NT to the market, so acting as if it somehow lagged in this regard seems revisionist.

Re:One.Word

[cpu6502]

I find it hard to believe the CTL-ALT-DEL would be enough reason for users to quit OS/2 and pick Windows instead.

Of course both of these 80s and early-90s OSes sucked compared to the simplicity of the Mac System 6, or Atari ST-TOS, or the preemptive tasking of the multimedia-capable Amiga OS (since 1985) which was used to create graphics for seaQuest, Babylon 5, and Voyager (one season).

People who wanted power, like for gaming, were not buying either OS/2 or Windows 2/3 on PCs. They were choosing the Atari STs or Commodore Amigas.

Re:os/2 was not able to windows 32 bit apps just 3

[dryeo]

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.

My old fart rant. Ex-IBM'er contractor.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

OSFree

[unixisc]

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

Re:os/2 was not able to windows 32 bit apps just 3

[Locutus]

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