
OS/2 2.0, Summer ’91 Edition - djsumdog
http://www.os2museum.com/wp/os2-2-0-summer-91-edition/
======
derpadelt
The superior OS that was eventually killed by the inferior Windows 95. OS/2
did a lot right. The integrated Windows-Environment was initially better than
native Windows: better process isolation (remember Windows 3.1's cooperative
multitasking aka "hangs one hangs all"?), more DOS freespace.

The next thing I liked and adopted was Windows 2000, the less-sucking NT. We
have come a long way since then!

~~~
geocar
It also got a lot wrong: OS/2 also had a single threaded event queue the
entire time it was a contender. It was also very expensive.

~~~
magoon
Microsoft convinced IBM to use a single message queue despite protest from
IBM. Perhaps they were purposely sabatoging the effort, as they clearly wanted
their 386 fork (which became Windows NT) to have the upper hand.

~~~
mcguire
Anecdotally, that was kind of the feeling at IBM about several of the
misfeatures of OS/2 in 1990-92, when I worked there with OS/2.

Typical conversation:

"Why the hell does..."

"Microsoft."

"Right."

~~~
JdeBP
And the feeling of mis-features being the other company's fault was mutual.
Microsoft people viewed the introduction of more UNIX-like features into MS-
DOS/PC-DOS 2 as happening despite the strenuous objections of IBM, for
example.

People do this. I've seen this happen in places that have nothing to do with
IBM or Microsoft. Problems and misfeatures are _all the fault of that group of
incompetent outsiders in that company over there that we have a business deal
with_. It is rarely actually true, in my experience.

------
muterad_murilax
Speaking of OS/2, its descendant ArcaOS will be released April 15:

[https://www.arcanoae.com/blog/](https://www.arcanoae.com/blog/)

~~~
badsectoracula
How does it compare to eComStation? I bought eCS 2-3 years ago out of
curiosity, but the system basically looks like they got the last version of
OS/2 IBM made and piled a ton of binary patches and third party fixes and
utilities, replaced "OS/2" with "eComStation" in several messages, added a few
wallpaper and called it a new thing. It gave a _very_ hacked on feel and
somehow i doubt they even had the source code for the OS.

------
mtkd
around '92 (as a student) I wrote to CEO at IBM to rant that if they want OS/2
to get some market share they need to start letting students/universities use
it for free

a few months later I got a letter back thanking me and noting the letter got
published in some staff magazine and some software would follow

an enormous package arrived soon after full of IBM OS/2 and commercial
development tools - my IBM PS/2 55SX wasn't even up to installing the OS - but
full credit for trying

------
ASipos
Also check out OS/2 2.0 Limited Availability:

[https://www.landley.net/history/mirror/os2/history/os220/ind...](https://www.landley.net/history/mirror/os2/history/os220/index.html)

~~~
yuhong
os2museum link:
[http://www.os2museum.com/wp/os2-history/os2-2-0/](http://www.os2museum.com/wp/os2-history/os2-2-0/)

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gushie
Diskette 1 of 1... The good old days of operating systems

~~~
posguy
Yeah, a full OS with a GUI, drivers and a userland on a floppy. That is pretty
darn small!

~~~
rzzzt
A demo of QNX has been circulated in tech magazines on a single floppy disk:
[http://toastytech.com/guis/qnxdemo.html](http://toastytech.com/guis/qnxdemo.html)

------
criddell
Rexx was pretty neat. I'm guessing anybody coming from Unix wasn't very
impressed, but I, as a Windows person, thought it was pretty sweet.

~~~
SwellJoe
When I gave up on my Amiga, I thought hard about OS/2; but I was a college kid
without a ton of disposable income, so I built a DIY PC and stuck a $99 OEM
copy of Windows 95 on it. Soon after that I switched to Linux, and rarely
looked back (I've almost always had at least one PC laying around that could
boot to Windows for audio work and games).

Rexx was one of the reasons I liked the looks of OS/2\. ARexx had been
shipping with Amiga OS since 2.04, and while I only occasionally used it
directly, it enabled a lot of cool stuff between applications (directly
sharing data between apps was neat, and ahead of its time).

Honestly, I don't think UNIX was actually better on that front, at the time. I
never actually used it on OS/2, but on Amiga OS it was sort of universally
accepted as The Way for applications to interact and for users to automate
their applications. Even today, we have tons of scripting languages, often
integrated into bigger applications, but not a lot of standardization between
them. So, there's a lot of friction in getting a program that uses, say, Lua
as its scripting and automation language, to communicate with a program that
uses, say Scheme or Python or Perl or Ruby. UNIX had the command line with
pipes paradigm, which I guess was universal-ish, but didn't play well with big
GUI apps.

So, yeah, Rexx was pretty neat, for sure. It might even be a useful source of
inspiration today (even if the language is a little clunky compared to modern
scripting languages).

------
wdb
Ah yes, OS/2 that were the days. I really enjoyed using Describe/2 that was a
great word processor. For a long time I played with Delphi for OS/2, Sybil. I
still think OS/2 was a great operating system back in the day. Nowadays I am
using macOS.

------
allenu
I loved OS/2\. Back in the '90s I ran the later OS/2 Warp version and it was
pretty solid. I remember running a BBS in a window and was still able to use
the OS for other things. Multitasking like that was still a novel thing back
then.

------
anon263626
Oh OS/2... multitasking that worked and higher reliability than Windows 3/95
(for the most part). A job I had at the time required doing incremental and
full backups of an OS/2 box, and also transmitting backoffice data to
corporate. It was reasonably solid.

Historical minutia c. 1994:

Fry's Electronics botched the OS/2 Warp launch by misspelling, in 192 pt red
font, "OS/2 WRAP [sic]", not once but 3-4x IIRC in their full-page SJ Mercury
News ad.

------
yuhong
One of my favorite is anti-trust exhibits is
[http://www.groklaw.net/pdf/iowa/www.iowaconsumercase.org/011...](http://www.groklaw.net/pdf/iowa/www.iowaconsumercase.org/011607/0000/PX00307.pdf)
Notice that it is about "PM vs. Windows" as it was about API calls only, which
was the wrong way to make the decision.

------
magoon
Microsoft and IBM co-wrote OS/2 initially, then Microsoft unveiled Windows
using a lot of the ideas they came up with together. Classic Microsoft!

When they split, IBM kept the 286 fork (which became 2.0) while Microsoft kept
the 386 fork (which became Windows NT).

~~~
pavlov
Sorry to be the pedant complaining about ancient trivia, but neither of those
claims is quite what happened.

Windows was a Microsoft product already before the OS/2 development deal
happened. The plan was always to have a more or less unified GUI in Windows
and OS/2, following UX standards defined by IBM. This did happen -- Windows 2
and OS/2 1.2 had almost the same look and feel, as well as very similar APIs
(both 16-bit).

2.0 was always intended to be a 32-bit operating system, and Microsoft was
responsible for its development initially. NT was a new kernel that was
supposed to become OS/2 3.0 for a while.

~~~
lobster_johnson
You're probably thinking of OS/2 1.1, which was very close to Windows 2.0 in
look and feel, i.e. flat and mostly monochrome, although it had a proportional
system font where Windows still used monospace (Fixedsys). Comparison:

[http://toastytech.com/guis/os211cpl.png](http://toastytech.com/guis/os211cpl.png)

[https://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/muiseum/systems/win2/01.gif](https://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/muiseum/systems/win2/01.gif)

OS/2 1.2 added the style that would become Windows 3.0's, with beveled buttons
and so on, while Windows 3.0 upgraded to the proportional font (System) that
OS/2 had been using.

~~~
pavlov
Right! 1.1 was the version I was thinking of. (I remember using 1.3 which had
the proportional font and pseudo-3D widgets, and assumed the look was
introduced in that version.)

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finnjohnsen2
OS/2 was nothing but an unimportant distraction to my teenager self. :D

The only software I've got nostalgia towards, is anything related to gaming as
I grew up: C64, Amiga then PC finally took over until this very day.

------
cube00
40 minutes to complete the tutorial, nobody would have the patience for that
today.

