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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!
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....
"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.
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
When you consider how reliable the Metrocard system is, I wouldn't call this a failure by any means.
Also, MTA Is a big enough customer that they probably still get direct support from IBM for OS/2. If the system is supported, then it's not really "out of date".
I hear some ATMs (as in bank machines) still run OS/2 too. It's a very robust system and had a lot of popularity in embedded commercial "appliance" devices.
OS/2 is still being updated/supported just not as OS/2. eComStation Is currently available and works with most current generation hardware.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
I was using OS/2 when I signed up for this /. ID!
One of my main customers is the Italian Railways and they still run their whole ticketing system (that dates back to 1995) on OS/2 Warp 4.5. Recently they started a migration effort in order to upgrade the hardware they're using (from IBM P4 pcs to HP i3) and they run OS/2 in VirtualBox on W7. The next step is to ditch OS/2 completely and pass to a web-based system, but that is proving difficult for stations with low bandwidth in rural or mountain areas.
... would consider this a failure of New York Subway's and not an indication how good OS/2 really is.
Why is that a failure of the subway system? I live in New York and I take the subway every day. The computer system always works fine for me, there's hardly any time that I swipe my card and it erroneously doesn't open the turnstile for me. From a customer perspective, whatever software they're using, it's very reliable.
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..."
Up until recently, the teller terminals at my bank ran OS/2, but it was basically just a platform to run terminal sessions to the mainframe. Then they switched over to a browser-based front end to a UNIX back end.
The company I work for still supports old, legacy, OS/2 systems used for telephone menuing systems. It's funny that when there is a problem, many of the employees we support have no idea where the machine is located. It was literally stuck in an office somewhere and has been running completely unattended for years. It never gets updates. It never has to reboot. It just runs... and runs... and runs.
The problem we have now is finding hardware old enough to support it. We have to use 80GB drives for replacement and set up a 2GB partition for the OS and software. The rest just sits there idle. AT motherboards, ISA graphics and PS/2 keyboards and mice are getting harder and harder to find.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
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
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
MS and IBM were partners in the beginning... but Bill Gates got his nickers in a twist and pulled out of OS/2, taking what was to become NT with him (or at least the start of it.)
OS/2 was supposed to be the successor of Win 3.x, but for many reasons (you can google yourself)... it never happened. Ironically, OS/2 got better when Microsoft left the table. :)
It's the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.
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.
There's tons of old OS/2 boxes chugging along in a corner somewhere until the hardware finally breaks. OS/2 sales in the form of eComStation has been tripling each year lately due to places like your work needing to install OS/2 on modern hardware. http://ecomstation.com/
And it will still install and run on modern hardware though you have to choose carefully. No accelerated video and only ATI supported. Barely any wireless support and only a few network cards supported. Sound based on Alsa so most sound cards including built in supported. 512 GB partitions if you want them compatible with other operating systems, otherwise the ancient architecture is limited to 2 TB. Best to stick to Intel hardware, especially if you want to take advantage of all cores. OS/2 is licensed per CPU, not core so it does do SMP. Only 64 cores supported though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
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
No, it was not. OS/2 has nothing to do about OS/400 (I guess you are refering to that one). OS/2 is an independent development, in which _probably_ you can find traces of ideas and implementations in other operating systems, but you can say the same about any OS. Take into account OS/2 1.X was being developed by Microsoft, and it was when MS switched their goals to enhance the Windows Family when IBM toke the lead.
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?
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'm going to invalidate mod points for this, but did you try to use Compact Flash memory cards as hard drives?
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812200175
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820313247
It may be cheaper/quieter/cooler/faster than trying to find working 80G disks.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
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
Funny enough timing wise, just last week at work we had a hardware failure in an old OS/2 computer that controls one of our radial insertion machines on the production line. I too ran into similar issues with replacement hardware.
In my case, the PC has a custom ISA card that acts as a controller to the machine hardware.
I found a product called isa2usb from a company called Arstech combined with VirtualBox that did a good job getting that custom controller board working with newer hardware.
VirtualBox has decent support, and the guest tools work great under both warp 4.5 and eComStation.
I used Linux underneath VirtualBox just due to licensing, but the isa2usb works under Linux as well as Windows.
You can install the OS/2 drivers for generic vga (gengradd) and sound blaster 16, make a 2gb image file for the HD, and allows for much easier backups of the entire VM instead of worrying about what boot CD of the day will work in under 256mb ram.
Just set the VM to auto-start with the host OS and go full screen, and no re-training of employees required.
It might seem like a waste of hardware, but it's still much cheaper than finding a complete replacement solution to remove a perfectly working system out of the mix.
Might be something worth looking into.
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
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
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 */