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Citrix Founder and Key OS/2 Player Ed Iacobucci Dead At 59
alphadogg writes "Ed Iacobucci, whose work on OS/2 at IBM helped fuel the PC craze and whose efforts at Citrix and VirtualWorks aimed to bring computing back under control, has died at the age of 59 from pancreatic cancer. Born in Argentina and schooled in systems engineering at Georgia Tech, Iacobucci got his career start in 1979 at IBM, where he held architecture and design leadership roles involving PC operating systems OS/2 and DOS, working closely with Microsoft in doing so (and later turned down a job there). Iacobucci left 10 years later to start thin-client/virtualization company Citrix, followed by creation of on-demand jet company DayJet, and most recently VirtualWorks, a company dedicated to managing big data sprawl. He stepped down as CEO of VirtualWorks in May because of his health."
I didn't mention it in my blog post, but yes Citrix was a major victim of the MS OS/2 2.0 fiasco. It is hardly the worse of it though. Look up "OS/2 Microsoft Munchkins", and remember that wasn't the only unethical attack MS tried against OS/2 later on, which got worse as Chicago (Windows 95) was delayed. Not to mention DR-DOS too (remember OS/2 never depended on DOS).
Oh yes it did. I'm guessing you're just too young to remember. Thanks to massive os/2 tv campaigns, "normal" people suddenly wanted a computer, not just a console to play games on
Citrix didn't get screwed and neither did OS/2, in fact I'd say we'd be using OS/2 right now if it had been put out by any other company than IBM.
I know many will say OS/2 was done in by the "big bad M$" but in reality it actually fits well with my theory that every major success at MSFT is preceded by "And then the other guy did something REALLY dumb" only in the case of OS/2 it wasn't one really dumb thing, it was TWO really REALLY dumb things that did it in.
For those that don't know IBM at the time was royally pissed because the courts ruled there was nothing illegal about taking COTS parts and making an "IBM compatible" as long as they didn't copy the IBM BIOS. So to try to take control of the market back IBM tried to ram through a replacement for the aging ISA bus called MCA that was proprietary as hell and required assraping fees be paid to IBM. Needless to say the other OEMs weren't putting up with that crap and instead what came to be known as the "gang of nine" came up with EISA and had it licensed under RAND. So you can just imagine how little trust the OEMs had for anything coming from IBM, most looked at OS/2 like an offer of plague blankets and avoided it.
But that wasn't the end to the stupidity, nope, if you are gonna go stupid you might as well go full retard and boy did IBM go full retard with their next move. You see Intel around that time had gotten pissed at being required to allow others to make their designs, so called "second sources" that the old guard like IBM demanded, so they flat out refused to let their 386 and later to be second sourced. Now IBM had a license to make the 286 but NOT the 386 or later...can you guess where this is going? Yep while the other OEMs were offering 386 and 486 units for MUCH cheaper prices IBM was demanding premium money for 286 units which considering how fast software was progressing at the time quickly became dinosaurs.
So as someone who actually ran an OS/2 Warp system back in the day YES it was a great OS, YES it was more advanced than Windows but NO it never had a chance because not only did the OEMs not trust IBM any farther than they could chunk a mainframe but right up until the last couple of years, when every store had so much Windows software on shelves it wasn't funny, the ONLY place you were getting OS/2 was on outdated and overpriced IBM hardware.
As I said MSFT won because "and then the other guy did something REALLY dumb" but we have seen that time and time again, where a system that was technically nicer lost because of stupid moves...betamax anyone?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.