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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).
Let's hope this starts the downfall of all Centralised Desktop Terror Computing (CDTC, t/m); too many people have been forced into utter frustration and unproductiveness for far too long already by SuckTricks and like products.
He did many good works; but by no measure did OS/2 "fuel the PC craze"... (Unless you're defining "craze" as "insane mass-market failures.")
I find citrix to be a useless platform mired in the past and unable to step forward into the future. Weird inconsistencies poor implementation it could all be replaced by a small shell script.
I couldn't agree more, but for secure remote desktop access on a large scale its the best there is. It could be a lot better but the others are worse or unproven in enterprise settings
I'm not a citrix user, I was only mildly interested in OS/2, but nevertheless both those things are interesting achievements, and should be recognised as such.
And 59 is way to young to die.
RIP
Also see the original MS OS/2 2.0 SDK announcement from 1989:
http://www.os2museum.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/1989-12-29-m3974.html
And my blog post on is at here (notice the mention of DR-DOS and PX00307, which is another exhibit that don't seem to be well known:
http://yuhongbao.blogspot.ca/2012/12/about-ms-os2-20-fiasco-px00307-and-dr.html
Speaking of Chicago . . .
Team OS/2 went external that spring, when the first Team OS/2 Party was held in Chicago. The IBM Marketing Office in Chicago created a huge banner visible from the streets. Microsoft reacted when Steve Ballmer roamed the floor with an application on diskette that had been specially programmed to crash OS/2; and OS/2 enthusiasts gathered for an evening of excitement at the first Team OS/2 party.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_OS/2
After hearing that story, soon after it happened, I was never surprised by anything else that he has done since then. It just showed me the "content of his character", as MLK used to say.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
This guy created Citrix? Sounds like they'll need to build a whole new nastier level of hell to accommodate him. Citrix is one of the worst products ever made. Years later and it's still clearly nothing more than a nasty hack. Give me a Citrix box and I'll give you back a p0wned box. As for OS/2, well that just makes me sad.
I love idealists not because I am one, but because they make life bearable for pragmatists such as myself.
Bah. I hate history when retold by those who lost. MS battled against OS/2 and won, yes, but unethical? No. MS just had the resources and will to play dirty, and evidently IBM did not. That's just modern business and honestly I think most companies nowadays, whether they be MS, Apple or the open-source fan's champion Google, would do exactly the same "unethical" actions necessary to win against the competition.
First Gandolfini and now Iacobucci.
I hope someone's looking into any connection. Pavarotti better watch his ass.
You are welcome on my lawn.
MS was unethical because they were paid to develop OS/2 in the first place and used that position to, against the terms of the agreement they signed, copy the best features into their own OS AND to write the original OS/2 so as to make it work less well than it could have.
That being said, ultimately the failure of OS/2 resulted from IBM's original attempt to keep PCs from advancing beyond the 80286 chip. While they abandoned that position, it left them with a major PR hurdle that they were never able to overcome.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
...and deserved to be successful. It never quite made it though...and it wasn't the Microsoft grassroots attacks that did it in, at least not directly. No, it was IBM and, more specifically, Lou Gerstner (the IBM CEO at the time), who publicly admitted that a few years later right before he retired. People have wondered for years about the WHY of that. Gerstner disdainfully referred to "desktop operating systems" as something that was detracting from IBM's image so perhaps the reason was simple corporate stupidity.
After hearing that story, soon after it happened, I was never surprised by anything else that he has done since then. It just showed me the "content of his character", as MLK used to say.
Ballmer is the G. Gordon Liddy of computing. He makes about as much sense when they let him talk, too.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
See, I can accept that. At least you see OS/2's failure as being more than just due to Microsoft's actions. Same thing with Internet Explorer vs Netscape really. People say MS muscled Netscape out with IE being free and bundled with new computers/Windows. But by the time IE 4 came around it WAS better (in performance at least) compared to Netscape Communicator at the time. Heck, I use Firefox now but I distinctly remember using IE by choice because of how much better it was at the time. Netscape just didn't take the threat of competition seriously.
I dunno about other Citrix products, but in my experience Xenapp blows. Overly long application launch times, force quitting an ornery app causes a server disconnect (thereby force quitting all its apps), clipboard gets out of sync between local device and the server (or between servers)...and (though I imagine it's just a setting in which case I can blame my company for the policy) auto-disconnect after about 35 minutes of inactivity, which likewise closes all served apps - no saving your work.
In short, the cause of multiple headaches daily.
But Citrix will probably last longer than the pyramids. It's impossible to ever kill an application that shitty. The only way to make it worse would be to run Lotus Notes on it. "Yeah, our corporate E-Mail system is Lotus Notes, run over Citrix..." *runs screaming from the building.*
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I couldn't agree more, but for secure remote desktop access on a large scale its the best there is.
I still prefer ssh access to a nicely configured Unix box though ...
That was the the thing with Microsoft, they could have behaved fairly ethically and between IBM shooting themselves and the luck of ram prices staying high they would have won the desktop but they still behaved very unethically.
With IE vs Netscape, Microsoft making IE free meant that Netscape couldn't sell their browser and with no income coming in they obviously couldn't compete and fell behind the company that could afford to spend lots of money on a freebie.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
I still have a boxed copy of OS\2 Warp, and probably an old enough computer somewhere around here to run it. As recently (recently... yea right) as 2000 I worked for a company that maintained old IBM mainframes running system 390. It was always fun to watch engineers crack one open only to see that there was an OS/2 workstation crammed in the middle. I think I just might take it for a spin as a tribute.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
well, you're reiterating the IBM retro-history a little there. Microsoft had a huge role in developing the 32b 2.0, but the main problem was that IBM wanted to take it in the direction of huge, ramified mini/mainframe OSs. to my way of thinking, Linux is actually the proving counterexample of what was bad about OS/2 2.0: modularity and conceptual layering, but without the sclerosis of insisting that modules/layering be reflected in explicit, static APIs.
I worked on OS/2 1.3 and 2.0 at Microsoft. It was very clear then that dealing with IBM was a huge agility problem. And there was no way to foresee that AMD would be the salvation of x86 (the NT stood for "new technology", and referred to both RISC and Mach-inspired microkernels.)
Though the best solution would have been not making this mistake back in 1990 in the first place.
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.
Can we just quit with the "shills trolls vampires" trope already?
A REAL SHILL is frankly as easy to spot as a goth kid in a bible camp, that is because corporate makes them "stay on message" so it never fails you end up with "buzzword bingo" that no normal human actually uses in a day to day conversation. we have seen such gems as "vertical synergy" "enhanced user experience" and so on and so forth. Seriously guys they are REALLY not hard to spot, a real shill is as subtle as old Twitter was when it came to Linux, corporate just won't let them deviate too far from script.
So can we please stop with the whole "Shills trolls vampires" thing already? All it does is derail the conversations which if you truly believe they are there to insure positive feedback for a product YOU JUST HELPED THEM by totally killing any discussion of the product in question. if a person is really shilling any discussion will quickly take apart their position, and as i said they can't help but slip in marketing speak so it will quickly become self evident, why fuck up the conversation for everybody else? Its as pointless as being in the middle of a discussion of chip designs and having somebody scream "NIGGER!" at the top of their lungs...thanks for sharing, please go away now.
The same goes for throwing the "troll" word around, if you think they are full of shit? Then you should be able to produce multiple counter examples and citations to blow away their position. We are SUPPOSED to be geeks here, use your brain and come up with a counter argument. Screaming troll or just answering a post with nothing but mindless insults with nothing to back it up reminds me of those 14 year old CoD players screaming "FAGGOT!" and claiming someone HAS to be cheating to be able to pop a cap in their snot nosed ass. If you think they are wrong? PROVE IT, provide an intelligent counter argument with multiple examples that picks apart any position they had and let everyone see and judge the evidence for themselves.
Personally i think its sad how far this site has fallen, I really do. We used to have 300 post threads where various positions would be argued, pros and cons weighed, even when it was heated you LEARNED and would leave the site better informed than when you left. Now it seems to be all about group think and name calling, one must join the herd and bleat the same talking points endlessly with nothing to back it up, else it quickly turns into "shill troll vampire" name calling. Kinda sad really, and I wonder if that isn't why more and more of the old guard are just walking away.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Bullshit, as somebody in the trenches MSFT didn't do anything but capitalize on some seriously DUMB SHIT moves by IBM.
IBM tried to fuck the OEMs over with MCA bus and then followed that with crazy prices for copies of OS/2 to try to force themselves back into the market leader position, the OEMs rightly looked at OS/2 like an STD and stayed the hell away from it. Intel refused to allow second sources for 386 and later (which is why Intel and AMD ended up in court and why the AMD 386 and 486 didn't come out until around the time of the Pentium I, and why Intel started using names instead of numbers) and since IBM had a license to produce 286 chips while the gang of nine were selling 386 and 486 systems by as much as 50% cheaper than IBM old big blue was trying to get premium money for 286 chip based machines and that naturally didn't go over well.
MSFT ended up getting the business because...well nobody else bothered even showing up. BeOS started with the failed AT&T Hobbit chip and went from that to PPC, by the time they got around to offering an X86 version the boat had sailed, and after IBM tried to fuck them multiple times the OEMs wasn't gonna take shit from IBM because naturally you aren't gonna trust the company that fucked them.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
OS/2 is still used in many ATMs, although flavors of Windows are finally making major inroads in that market.
The place where I work once had a US Gov issued "black box" server on our network, doing data compare tasks that are of no major import but the agency responsible mandated that this work had to happen on their PC. So they supplied the box. It had all the IO blocked and the case was sprayed with a bed liner material to seal the seams and cracks. The only open connections were power, ethernet, VGA and a keyboard they supplied which was also sealed. The bed liner spray made it a pain to fit in a rack.
Interestingly, the box had no way to communicate with the agency that owned it. It had LAN connectivity only. When they wanted to put something new on the box, they had to mail a stack of CDs and get somebody from our company to open drive, put in disc, wait. Put in next disc when prompted. Wait. Repeat. Sometimes it would reboot and we would see the Warp 4.0 logo before the monitor went blank again. The discs were encrypted. Yes we looked.
The point is, they used Warp 4.0 for a reason. It had to be totally reliable because the box was going to be on its own in what was essentially an environment out of their physical control.
Sig for hire.
I'm certainly not "too young to remember". I wish.
It was a different world then. There wasn't an internet to immediately find out that some marketing term was full of shit. If five percent of the population at the time could distinguish OS/2 from PS/2 I'd be shocked. The one thing people knew for certain is that IBM never went hungry. IBM was attempting to run the entire information technology industry as a centrally planned economy, with some success. When the PC division was finally cut loose from the rest of the Blue Machine, it was mainly to free it from the IBM culture of seven layers of internal review on every decision about capability, volume, or price.
The only reason IBM entered the PC business in the first place was to drain away the nimbleness of young legs. If IBM had allowed the PC industry to cannibalize the mid-range sooner and more aggressively, all their employees clinging to incentive clauses in their mid-range operations would have started to circulate their resumes, both within IBM and without. As my brother never ceases to repeat: the first rats off a sinking ship are the best swimmers. Loss of talent off the top would have been horrendous in some of their existing cash-cow business lines. Quarterly earnings reports would have ceased to glow and executives would spending more quality time with family.
Businesses really do paint themselves into a corner with their internal incentive structures. Tearing up all those employment contracts is disruptive. Clinging to the past is dangerous. Operating a company with different rules in different divisions can quickly gut your workforce at the high end, as the best swimmers stampede to opportunity unleashed. It's extraordinarily rare to gut the cash cow, no matter how rabid the skinny upstart across the street.
What IBM underestimated was the acceleration term: how much more quickly a person armed with a crappy PC was able to figure out they had been saddled with an over-built and over-priced tank capriciously constrained to lumber along with an insufficient engine for a decade or more.
Intel 80286 had 134,000 transistors. Cortex M0 can be implemented in 12K gates. Based on logic functions which shows 12 transistors for a general purpose flip flop these designs are at about the same level of complexity. 80286 runs 2.66 MIPS at 12.5 MHz. The M0 runs 0.9 MIPS/MHz (wider MIPS to boot). Now it might be the case that exploiting the Cortex instruction set back in the eighties was a beyond the compiler technology of the day, but somehow I have my doubts that IBM was incapable of crossing that bridge had they chosen to do so.
I'd be very curious to see someone figure out how well a Cortex M0 could have been implemented in the 80286 process technology. Three to one margin? It's certainly possible on the surface numbers. The downside of the Cortex is increasing memory pressure with wider native memory cycles and a more severe performance trade-off when byte-packing or bit-packing every important data structure. The wider off-chip memory path is a significant PCB fabrication cost.
As I correct one myopic IBM decision after another I wind up in an alternate universe where AT&T sues IBM instead of suing BSD/Cortex. Those of us who lived through this era spent a lot of time day-dreaming about alternate universes.
No, that's just unethical behavior enshrined. If most businesses would do that then most businesses are unethical and should have their charters revoked.
The problem with the ethics behind IE is that they fused it into the OS and repeatedly claimed it could not be separated out.
Well, I've met Liddy, sat with him and Tim Leary over a couple of pitchers (Lizard's Underground, East Lansing, ~1982). He talks just fine, or did, back then. As for Ballmer? I dunno, never met him. Don't care much for what I see of him, tho.