
Half an operating system: The triumph and tragedy of OS/2 - jorgecastillo
http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/11/half-an-operating-system-the-triumph-and-tragedy-of-os2/
======
Stratoscope
> Long before operating systems got exciting names based on giant cats and
> towns in California named after dogs, most of their names were pretty
> boring.

Ah, yes. Mavericks, California. It's a great little offshore town, just off
Pillar Point. I love that town.

Kidding aside, this is a great article.

Related to this story, the Windows 3.0 visual shell was originally not
supposed to be Program Manager and File Manager. It was going to be a program
called Ruby that I worked on with Alan Cooper and our team.

Ruby was a shell construction kit with a visual editor to lay out forms and
components, which we called gizmos. You would drag arrows between gizmos to
connect events fired by one gizmo to actions taken on another.

The shell was extensible, with an API for creating gizmos. A really weak area
was the command language for the actions to be taken on an event. It was about
on the level of batch files if that. But we hoped the API would allow for
better command languages to be added along with more gizmos.

BTW, this project was where the phrase "fire an event" came from. I was
looking for a name for process of one gizmo sending a message to another. I
knew that SQL had triggers, but for some reason I didn't like that name. I got
frustrated one night and started firing rubber bands at my screen to help me
think. It was a habit I had back then, probably more practical on a tough
glass CRT than it is today.

After firing a few rubber bands, I knew what to call it.

(As one might guess, I've always been curious to know if the phrase "fire an
event" was used before that. I wasn't aware of it, but who knows.)

Anyway, Ruby didn't become the Windows 3.0 shell after all. The went with
ProgMan and FileMan instead. To give Ruby a better command language, they
adapted Basic and the result was Visual Basic. Gizmos were renamed "controls"
(sigh), and my Gizmo API became the notorious VBX interface (sorry about
that).

And we still don't have a programmable visual shell in Windows.

~~~
InclinedPlane
_> And we still don't have a programmable visual shell in Windows._

Very true, there isn't one. But there are several. None of them all that good
though. Windows Workflow, System Center Runbooks, Biztalk, they've all made
their mark. I've seen serious systems built using all of them, ultimately I
have to wonder whether visual programming on that scale is even a good idea.

~~~
mariusmg
No, it's not. Visual is basically bad for anything but toys.

~~~
pmelendez
It is not a good language indeed. It doesn't allow you to express proper
abstractions or anything particularly interesting.

But it did allow you to get things done very quickly, and that's why you see
that was used a lot in several industries for small things that doesn't
require to be maintained a lot and still do useful things.

------
protomyth
I bought OS/2 for work to run on some DEC PC (not the damn Rainbow, the decent
486 DEC sold). The graphic card (S3) wasn't supported out of the box, so I
called the IBM and got nowhere other than an acknowledgement it existed.

I called DEC and they too believed it existed, so they (while I was still on
the line) called their contact at IBM. After being transferred twice, we
arrived at the person who could mail me the driver, but I would have to sign
an NDA. Myself and the DEC rep explained we didn't want source or a beta
driver, just the release one. He insisted every customer had to sign. I said
I'd think about it. After hanging up, the DEC rep couldn't stop laughing. He
asked if I wanted a free copy of NT compliments of DEC. I took it and it had
the correct driver.

I tried, but they had no chance.

~~~
baldfat
> not the damn Rainbow

Hey I had a Rainbow! It was pretty amazing IF it had it's full potential it
would have been the best computer until the Amiga came out.

Rainbow: CPUs - Z80 (8 Bit) and a Intel 8080 OS - CP/M and MS-DOS Could be
upgraded to 286 later.

Would have been perfect BUT they didn't get things setup correctly and I was
really stuck in Z80 CP/M land.

~~~
protomyth
One man's innovation is another man's Frankenstein Monster.

It was actually an 8088 not an 8080.

Anyone who had to deal with people using those damn Rainbow floppy disk drives
has my eternal sympathy. I really, really want to know what they were thinking
on both the format and how you inserted those disks.

~~~
Someone
Had to look up what that was about. According to
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_100#Floppy_disk_drives](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_100#Floppy_disk_drives),
they could do away with one drive motor, with only a 'minor' disadvantage: _"
Of note was the single motor used to drive both disk drives via a common
spindle, which were arranged one on top of the other. That meant that one disk
went underneath the first but inserted upside-down."_

------
melling
If anyone wants an insider's view, here's a Usenet post from one of the early
Microsoft employees, Gordon Letwin:

[http://gunkies.org/wiki/Gordon_Letwin_OS/2_usenet_post](http://gunkies.org/wiki/Gordon_Letwin_OS/2_usenet_post)

Somewhere in the Usenet archive is Gordon trolling the OS/2 users for weeks
(or months?) on end. I can't remember the exact details, but he had a bet with
several people that Windows would have multitasking, or that OS/2 wouldn't
have some sort of multitasking before Windows. The bet was to fly the winner
to any city of their choice and buy them dinner.

The discussions were quite heated and it was particulary memorable because he
was one of the first 12 employees at Microsoft.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Letwin](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Letwin)

~~~
twoodfin
Letwin was also _the_ guy for OS/2 on the Microsoft side while the alliance
lasted. His _Inside OS /2_ is a detailed account of trying to squeeze a real
multitasking, protected memory OS into a '286:

[http://www.amazon.com/Inside-OS-2-Gordon-
Letwin/dp/155615117...](http://www.amazon.com/Inside-OS-2-Gordon-
Letwin/dp/1556151179)

The cover photo is also classic.

~~~
adamnemecek
The photo should be in a National Geographic captioned "A Unix beard in his
natural habitat".

~~~
sliverstorm
In _its_ natural habitat. A Unix beard is genderless; it merely seems to
exhibit a preference for male hosts.

~~~
peatmoss
I thought Unix greybeards were like Tolkien's dwarves in exhibiting little
sex-based dimorphism.

------
jboggan
Up until March of last year a lot of ATMs in the US were still running OS/2 .
. . I "upgraded" a lot of them to Windows XP. Yuck.

When I would take the OS/2 system offline and replace it with a Windows cage
the payment network would sometimes tell me the uptime on the deprecated
machines . . . one network operator claimed 8 years of uptime at one
particular machine. I have no way of confirming that, but I definitely felt
the OS/2 machines were rock solid, especially compared to the vulnerable
Windows machines. Most small banks with NCR machines are running two software
packages (APTRA Edge or Advance) with default admin passwords and are really
behind on the monthly bug patches. Eek.

The OS/2 machines required you to input config info in hex though, so I was
glad I didn't have to work on them in the field too much.

~~~
gnaffle
When you think of it, 8 years of uptime isn't special for a machine running on
a UPS and not needing a reboot for software updates. There simply isn't a
reason for a well-built operating system running on solid hardware to crash.

~~~
LinaLauneBaer
ATMs usually do not have a UPS.

~~~
TallGuyShort
Then I'm more impressed by the local utilities than the OS :)

------
steven2012
I actually bought a copy of OS/2 Warp when it came out because I was
interested in its preemptive multi-tasking, and it was a decent operating
system for what it's worth. I was definitely more stable than Window 3.11, but
its real problem was compatibility. Back in the early 90s, everything was
about getting compatibility, and while OS/2 had good compatibility, didn't
have perfect compatibility.

As well, I worked at a bank, and as the article correctly stated, the entire
bank was run on OS/2, most notably the ATMs, except the ATMs I worked with was
using OS/2 2.0.

However, when Windows NT 3.51 came out, that was the game changer. I was the
only person I knew who even knew what it was (I read about it in a magazine at
the time), and I was able to get a student-priced copy at my college
bookstore. I started using it, and it was awesome, everything just worked,
except for some games. You couldn't even compare NT 3.51 to OS/2, it wasn't
even in the same level. The look and feel of NT was exactly the same as
Windows 3.11, and all the programs worked.

~~~
jonah
My computer had 8mb RAM at the time and NT required 16 to install so I
"borrowed" another 8 from one of the school computers, installed NT and then
returned the memory. It ran well enough on 8.

~~~
steven2012
I was lucky enough to have a 486DX-50 (not a DX2-66)with 16 MB of RAM, so it
ran perfectly for me.

Even with what was bleeding edge hardware at the time, I still remember trying
to finish writing my senior project using Corel Draw and Microsoft Word on
Windows 3.11, and having my computer crash ever 30-45 mins, and my project
partner eventually broke down and started crying because of how frustrating it
was.

~~~
jonah
Yeah, mine was a Pentium 90! (I decided to scrimp on RAM and get the 90 in
stead of the 66.) It was a huge jump from the 286 I had before. (Upgrading
memory meant socketing rows of individual DIPs.)

~~~
72deluxe
Wow, I remember the Pentium 90s coming out and being amazed. I of course had
rubbish old late 1980s British computers to use whilst everyone else was on 16
bit machines, but when the Pentium II came out, I finally got hold of a 486
DX2 66Mhz. It is strange how you learn to "make do" with hardware and systems,
and learn patience. I finally bought an Ivybridge i7 last year after "making
do" with machines for a long time. I fondly remember spending hours and hours
tinkering with slow systems, but being just as productive!

~~~
mschaef
There are times when you need to have high CPU performance, but the reality is
that all semi-current machines are amazingly fast and capable of productive
work.

------
mdip
I worked at a large computer chain (R.I.P. Softwarehouse / CompUSA) from 1993
- 1996 and had been building clone computers for businesses from 1990-1993. I
remember how this played out _very well_.

At the time, IBM had sent in scores of company reps to train up our floor
staff on the advantages of OS/2 over the always-soon-to-be-released Chicago.
They did a good job getting all of us to "drink the Kool Aid". I received a
free (not pirated, promotional) copy of blue OS/2 Warp 3.0. It was a fantastic
operating system for running a DOS based multi-node Telegard BBS and it did
well with Win16 applications.

The impact of Windows 95 coming on the scene, though, is difficult to fully
appreciate unless you were there. We had been selling pre-orders for months
and there were a myriad of promos. I remember some of those preorders were
sold under the threat that there wouldn't be enough copies to go around on
release day. I had been playing with pirated copies of the betas of Windows 95
for the prior two months. Even in its beta form, it ran circles around Windows
3.0/3.1 in terms of reliability. I even remember reloading my PC with the most
recent beta after release because a DOS application I used ran more reliably
in it than in the RTM code.

Then launch day came. It was unlike anything I had ever seen in terms of a
software release. We closed up at 9:00 PM and re-opened at 12:00 midnight to a
line of customers that went around the building --- A line of customers ...
for an operating system. We joked at the time that "Windows really was _that_
bad". There were tons of additional promotions to ensure people came and lined
up--Some RAM / hard disks selling under "cost" and others. And the atmosphere
of the store felt like a party. We had theme music playing (start me up?) and
some Microsoft video playing on our higher-end multi-media PCs. It was obvious
to us, on the floor, trained by IBMs marketing machine, that Warp died that
day.

As an anecdote to the stories about IBMs marketing being a little off: I
remember around the release of Warp 4.0 I saw an advertisement at a subway
station something along the lines of "Warp Obliterated my PC!"\-- that
tagline, evidently, meant to be some hip new use of the word obliterated.

~~~
techsupporter
> We closed up at 9:00 PM and re-opened at 12:00 midnight to a line of
> customers that went around the building --- A line of customers ... for an
> operating system.

I grew up in Dallas, SoftWarehouse (somebody else remembers that name,
awesome)/CompUSA's original stomping grounds and this story kept coming back
to me throughout the whole article. Windows 95 was considered _revolutionary_
at the time, even to those of us lined up at the Lewisville, Texas store at
10:30PM to buy an operating system. (Incidentally, the first time I ever
talked my dad into taking me to an overnight release of anything.) Windows 95
was the first operating system I ever saw non-technical people set out
intentionally to buy and I spent months installing it for friends and family.

> We had theme music playing (start me up?) and some Microsoft video playing
> on our higher-end multi-media PCs.

Yep, it was "Start Me Up" by the Rolling Stones. If I remember correctly, the
video was a demo reel of everything new in Windows 95 and was highlighted by
the huge Start button popping in at the end of the video, then fading to
black. It even had a snippet of the waving Windows 3.1 flag and the bear from
the "Help / About" Easter Egg hidden in 3.1.

------
jjguy
If you liked this article, you should read Show Stopper. It's out of print,
but there are ample used copies via Amazon.

[http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0029356717/](http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0029356717/)

~~~
tokenrove
It's not quite at the level of Soul of a New Machine, but I still think every
programmer should read this book. A great story from the trenches. It gave me
so much respect for Dave Cutler, and confirmed so many things I suspected
about Microsoft at the time.

~~~
_sh
Yeah? My reading of that book was that there was such an inhuman marriage/life
destroying crunch getting NT out the door that nobody covered themselves in
glory, much less showed themselves worthy of respect.

And it explained to me, in clear terms, why Windows was such a buggy pile of
shit. It was created of its culture.

------
sehugg
OS/2 had many flaws but its multitasking was unseen on a PC at the time. I
remember formatting a floppy while running two 16-bit Windows sessions (which
were communicating with each other) and multiple DOS windows, thinking I was
in the future.

Even Windows 95 was limited by many system calls being funneled through single
threaded BIOS or DOS 16-bit land.

~~~
kenjackson
Couldn't the Amiga already do all that multitasking on a 256KB machine, years
before?

~~~
megablast
I don't think the Amiga had real multi-tasking, from what I understand. I may
be wrong.

~~~
mnw21cam
Yes, the Amiga had proper honest multitasking. A normal boot of an Amiga
system would typically result in over twenty processes running in the
background. In fact, its particular style of multitasking (static absolute
priorities) was well-suited to real-time operation. Back in the days when CD
writers could create coasters from buffer under-runs, I had more success
writing CDs using my 25MHz Amiga than my 400MHz PC. Also, it was a microkernel
system with things like device drivers and filesystems as separate processes,
which had some fairly nifty consequences. For instance, it took Linux ages to
lose its single kernel spinlock, which was a problem because of the huge
amount of stuff done in kernel space. The thing the Amiga didn't have (mostly
because of lack of hardware capability) was memory protection.

------
dangoldin
I remember my dad getting a promotional shirt for OS/2 with the caption
"Flight 4.0 to Chicago has been delayed, I'm taking off with OS/2"

The idea being that Windows 95 was internally called Windows 4.0 with the
codename Chicago.

I keep on searching for it but can't find it anywhere.

And Bill Gates on OS/2 in 1987: "I believe OS/2 is destined to be the most
important operating system, and possibly program, of all time."

~~~
huxley
You can find many of Microsoft's codenames here:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Microsoft_codenames#Win...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Microsoft_codenames#Windows_3.1x.2F9x)

My favourite codename sniping had to do with Windows NT (codename Cairo) and
NeXT. When announcing NeXTSTEP 4.0 (codename Mecca), Jobs quipped, "Why stop
at Cairo when you can go all the way to Mecca?"

[http://www.paullynch.org/NeXTSTEP/Expo.1994.htmld/](http://www.paullynch.org/NeXTSTEP/Expo.1994.htmld/)

------
mschaef
I have fond memories of OS/2 from the summer of 1995. At the time, I was a
undergraduate at the University of Texas at Austin, and IBM needed summer
intern testers for a product they were calling "OS/2 Lan Server Enterprise".
OS/2 LSE was IBM's effort to re-platform OS/2 LAN Server on top of OS/2 DCE
(in development on the lab next door to LSE). The general idea was to provide
a way to scale up OS/2 so that it would interoperate with other DCE-based
systems (mainly RS/6000 AIX, IIRC).

Anyway, the machine IBM gave me to use was a PS/2 Model 80. This was a
1988-era machine that had been brought to the semi-modern era with 20MB of RAM
memory installed via several MCA expansion cards. Against my best
expectations, the machine ran well, despite the fact that its CPU was at least
10% the speed of the then-state of the art.

From what I remember, the OS/2 LSE product itself was fairly solid. However,
the biggest memory I have from that summer was the afternoon we spent playing
around with the Microsoft Windows 95 beta disk we received for compatability
testing. Towards the end of the afternoon, we tried to DriveSpace (compress)
the disk. We got bored during the wait for the compress, so we pulled the
power on the machine thinking that would be the end of it. However, once we
powered the machine back up to install OS/2, Windows 95 just resumed
compressing away like nothing happened. A few weeks later, a friend and I went
to CompUSA for the Windows95 launch. Even at midnight, there was a line out
the door, winding past the Windows 95 boxes, then the Plus Pack, then Office
95, and then memory upgrades... Didn't hear much about OS/2 after that...

------
damian2000
Incredible that companies like Apple (Mac), Atari (ST) and Commodore (Amiga)
weren't able to fully capitalise on their leading position in GUI based OSes
of the time, which were miles ahead of both MS and IBM.

~~~
nl
Those of us around then know exactly why this was: PC Clones were too cheap
and got better too quickly for other platforms to compete.

Back then we all thought "computers" was a hardware game. Only Microsoft
realised the hardware didn't matter, software was the main game. And yes, I
realise we have swung back to the "integrated hardware/software platform"
thing being important again. Picking winning strategies in platform wars is
hard.

~~~
kabdib
Also, Atari didn't get marketing (Jack Tramiel was very reluctant to spend
money there). Atari really didn't get systems software, either, and never
hired to the extent needed to make a good impact there. The world was
basically safe from Atari being anything other than a low-end consumer
computer company.

And the thing that probably saved Apple in the late 80s was the desktop
publishing business.

~~~
nl
_Also, Atari didn 't get marketing (Jack Tramiel was very reluctant to spend
money there)._

I know that is the conventional story (and pretty similar for the Amiga). I'm
not convinced.

I think that both the Amiga & the Atari ST were too far ahead of their time.
They were multimedia workstations, without anywhere to play that multimedia
(except on other Ataris and Amigas).

Like you said, the Mac managed to hit the desktop publishing wave, which was
exactly right for the the paper-centric late 80's and early 90's.

~~~
_delirium
Yeah, the Amiga seems like it completely dominated the multimedia niche, but
the multimedia niche of the time essentially consisted of the demoscene. Which
was great, except that the demoscene was not that large.

~~~
Keyframe
Huh, Amiga (1000 onwards) was big in video. Especially smaller TV stations
that couldn't afford SGIs. Amiga (and SGIs) were light years ahead of Macs in
graphics. People often forget this fact.

~~~
bnastic
Amiga 2000 (mostly) + NewTek Video Toaster[1] were the driving force behind
the TV graphics back then.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Toaster](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Toaster)

~~~
Keyframe
My earliest forays into CG were on amiga and earliest paid jobs were with
video toaster / lightwave and softimage on SGIs. Great times. With tools we
have today they seem so primitive in comparison.

------
michaelhoffman
> IBM licensed Commodore’s AREXX scripting language and included it with OS/2
> 2.0.

I find this hard to believe, given that Rexx was developed by IBM.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rexx](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rexx)

~~~
rodgerd
Indeed. And IBM do, in fact, still make other OSes, contrary to the subhead of
the story: zVM/CMS, zOS (MVS), AIX, and whatever they're calling AS/400 these
days.

~~~
pjmlp
OS/400 is very interesting OS for those interested in OS architectures.

The complete userspace is bytecode based, regardless of the language.

Applications are compiled on installation phase, or when the generated code is
deemed not to be valid any longer.

When there was an architecture change for the PowerPC, many installations only
required a regeneration of the installed software.

A concept that Microsoft tried with Longhorn and Windows Phone 7. Or we could
even say, the model Android almost has as well.

Native Oberon and Inferno also tried a similar approach, to certain extent.

~~~
chiph
The thing I find interesting about OS/400 (or whatever it's name is this
month) is the single-level store. When your program needs access to the
contents of a file, it's just a memory offset. The OS relies on the swapping
mechanism to bring those pages into available memory. Which, when you have
flat 64 (one could argue 65) bit addressing … why not?

~~~
angersock
Wait wait wait...so it effectively memory maps all the things?

Mainframe environments are weird.

~~~
pjmlp
And OS/400 files are libraries that you need to open, as another example of
strangeness.

Or the OS/360 which uses virtualization for all OSs, like Hyper V does on
Windows.

The first OS to boot from the hypervisor has master rights, but all OSs are
virtualized.

~~~
fulafel
> Or the OS/360 which uses virtualization for all OSs, like Hyper V does on
> Windows

No, the hypervisor was called VM. According to WP it most frequently ran CMS
guests, which was a light weight single-app OS. But could also run OS/360
guests (which predated VM).

------
lbarrow
Great read. In the end, it seems like a classic failure to resolve the
innovator's dilemma. IBM decided that the future of computing would revolve
around mainframes because _they liked mainframes_ , not because that's where
the facts led them. And ultimately they paid the price for it.

~~~
smacktoward
I think it's a bit more complicated than that.

Put yourself in the shoes of someone who'd grown up on mainframes. The systems
you're used to are fabulously expensive, sure, but their operating systems
have sophisticated architectures that allow them to easily juggle multiple
users running multiple programs while maintaining the security of the system
overall. They are the completest expression ever realized of forty years of
progress in the field of information technology.

Then, one day, someone drops a PC in your lap. You are _horrified._ It's a
single-user, single-tasking system with absolutely nothing stopping the user
from trashing everything by running the wrong program.

To you, this new... _thing_ , whatever it is, is barely worth the name
"computer." It feels more like a toy -- like something you would give to a
child to play with. Certainly nobody would ever run _critical systems_ on it,
you think.

And here's the thing. You're absolutely right! All your concerns are one
hundred percent valid. But it turns out that _nobody cares_ ; the PC is much,
much cheaper, and it lets everyone have their own dedicated hardware right on
their desk running any software they care to install, instead of time-sharing
a mainframe and begging for permission each time they want to try a new
program. Or, put more bluntly, it lets them escape from having to deal with
the corporate IT priesthood (i.e. you) anymore.

The market speaks! You are derided as a pointy-headed nerd and swept into the
dustbin of history.

Now fast forward ten or fifteen years. People start taking all those PCs they
bought and hooking them together into networks... and suddenly all those
things you were worried about back in the day come roaring back to bite them.
Users discover that their machine stops talking to the network when they click
and hold the mouse button, because the OS can't walk and chew gum at the same
time. And the complete lack of security makes their machines super easy to
compromise.

The PC vendors panic. They scramble to rewrite their old systems into systems
that can live comfortably on a network. And when they're done, they roll out
systems that look an awful lot like what you were insisting the baseline for a
"real computer" was fifteen years ago. The world cheers and lines up to buy
back all the sophistication they had happily thrown away before.

In other words, it's not so much that the IBMers were wrong, it's that they
were _early_. When OS/2 arrived, the world didn't understand yet why it needed
something like OS/2\. And by the time it did, OS/2 didn't exist anymore. But
in this business, being early is effectively the same thing as being wrong.
The market doesn't give out points for foresight.

~~~
wglb
Regarding vulnerabilities, which many think (wrongly) are not present in
mainframes, because they are networked nearly as much, and have massively
fewer programs running on them, don't show up as much. But they are there.

~~~
tokenrove
Certainly, but it's also worth noting that the environments in which programs
execute on most mainframes are much more restricted than those of even the
typical servers of today, and have been by default for decades.

------
kabdib
When OS/2 Warp came out, I remember it being insanely cheap ($20?), so in a
what-the-hell mood I bought it. Took it home and tried to install it. It was a
hopeless mess of disks, both optical and floppy, and I never got it to run.

One of my cow-orkers at Apple had worked on the OS/2 Presentation Manager at
IBM. I tried talking with her about it, but she said the experience had been
"absolutely awful" and she didn't want to say much else.

IBM never had a chance.

~~~
baruch
I have OS/2 Warp 3 and 4, both boxes at home. They both worked on my computer
at the time and run my tiny BBS and allowed me to work on the computer
flawlessly. This was much better than my peers who had to dedicate a computer
to this. But then I had a loaner modem and a shared voice/BBS line and they
had a private line for the BBS too.

It worked nicely and the install wasn't bad, it was quite a few disks but than
Windows didn't fare much better in that regard. It was also a mess of many
floppy disks to perform an install.

I remember fondly the Team OS/2 meetings where we could geek out our love for
OS/2 and mourn the inefficiency of IBM marketing to push it.

And then I found Linux.

------
outworlder
And not a single mention of Babylon 5.

The special effects were created on Amigas:
[http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/making/effects.html](http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/making/effects.html)

Also, while looking at Video Toaster's entry on Wikipedia, I found this gem:

"An updated version called Video Toaster 4000 was later released, using the
Amiga 4000's video slot. The 4000 was co-developed by actor Wil Wheaton, who
worked on product testing and quality control.[6][7] He later used his public
profile to serve as a technology evangelist for the product.[8] The Amiga
Video Toaster 4000 source code was released in 2004 by NewTek & DiscreetFX."

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Toaster](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Toaster)

------
kickingvegas
A previous HN thread on OS/2.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3785819](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3785819)

~~~
yuhong
Also see these threads with my comments:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3785819](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3785819)

[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3441885](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3441885)

------
nnq
Why aren't the unix-family OSs of the era part of the story? Why didn't IBM
even consider porting a unix-family OS to the PCs instead of paying an
unproven company like Microsoft to write an OS?

(...all the events from this stretch of computing history seem so weird to me,
like from a steampunk-like alternate reality movie. There's surely _lots_ of
context missing and stories that nobody will ever tell, since most of the
decisions taken by all the key players seem so anti-business. Computers may
have changed a lot from back then, but business is still business and all the
decisions made seem either "irrational" or based on "hidden information" that
is not part of the story.)

~~~
vesinisa
I guess because, as the article describes, IBM was all for protecting its
workstation business as well as the lucrative mainframe business.

A workstation back then was defined as an expensive high-end computer that was
designed to be used by only one user at a time (i.e. not a multi-user
mainframe), yet was suitable for high-performance applications. They were
intended mostly for corporations and academia where extra juice was needed and
that could afford to buy workstations (think scientific computing, CAD and
graphic design in the 1980s). IBM did at this time already manufacture
workstations with UNIX as the operating system (see e.g. [http://www.old-
computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=867&st=1](http://www.old-
computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=867&st=1) ) But they were way too
expensive for the home user. PC (personal computer) was the low-end product
that you could afford with a normal salary.

I understand UNIX back then was a mainframe and workstation operating system.
Licensing was expensive and the hardware requirements beyond that of a PC. Few
people had access to UNIX, mostly at universities and at big corporations.
These were the very reasons why GNU and Linux were born - to provide a mostly-
compatible UNIX clone for the home users with an affordable IBM PC compatible.

So my theory is that IBM was protecting its mainframe business - it did not
want to put the powerful UNIX to the PC because it wanted to sell more
expensive special hardware to those who wanted UNIX. So it hired a maverick
company (Microsoft) to write a low-end, feature-poor operating system for PC
(DOS). It was (and continues to be) a business strategy to bundle better
software with better hardware so that you can ask customers that want only the
superior software for a higher price (still essentially the business model of
a certain Cupertino, California based manufacturer)

------
swampboy
I enjoyed the article. It was a nice trip down memory lane. Regarding
development tools, there were 2 commercial IDEs based on REXX: Watcom VX-REXX
and VisPro REXX. I used Watcom's VX-REXX and it was a joy to use and allowed
for incredibly fast and powerful application development. I heard the same
about VisPro REXX. IBM's early set of tools C/2 and C Set++ were a bit painful
to use. VisualAge C++ 3.0 was a decent toolset once you got over the weirdness
of it. For a while, if you wanted to write C or C++ code using sockets you had
to purchase IBM's TCP/IP SDK for $100.

The SIQ was a "synchronous" input queue and the problem has been understated
in the article and comments. It was really bad. The base OS was incredibly
stable, but the GUI shell, not so much due to the SIQ problem.

There were a number of Unix and Unix-like systems in addition to the ones
already listed: Coherent, Interactive, and SCO are some that come to mind.
They were pretty expensive IIRC, around $1000 to license.

------
mathattack
I remember an internal training class at a large consulting firm in the mid
90s that was using OS/2\. I thought, "This is an awful sign. Are we doing this
just to get some business with IBM?" They were a big user of Lotus Notes 2.
You never know...

------
nikbackm
Interesting read. This part really brought the current Windows 8 push by
Microsoft to mind.

"These machines were meant to wrestle control of the PC industry away from the
clone makers, but they were also meant to subtly push people back toward a
world where PCs were the servants and mainframes were the masters. They were
never allowed to be too fast or run a proper operating system that would take
advantage of the 32-bit computing power available with the 386 chip. In trying
to do two contradictory things at once, they failed at both."

Not quite the same situation, but they have many similarities.

------
zenbowman
Thank you for sharing, a great article indeed.

I'm glad it ended up the way it did, Microsoft at the time was betting on
openness being a feature, and I think they helped move the computer and
software industries they have gone in since, towards greater openness (and
thereby professionalism).

People associate Microsoft with closed source, but it is of course relative,
they were in their day the vendor who was banking on openness and courting
developers harder than the others.

------
mnw21cam
The article says that the Mac OS was the only OS to ship that ran on PowerPC
CPUs. This is not true - later versions of the Amiga OS ran on PowerPC.

------
picomancer
Here's a perspective from the founder of a successful bootstrapped software
startup that began by developing native OS/2 applications:

[http://www.stardock.com/stardock/articles/article_sdos2.html](http://www.stardock.com/stardock/articles/article_sdos2.html)

I own a copy of the OS/2 Galactic Civilizations 2.

------
jgeorge
One of my fondest memories of OS/2 (there weren't many, sorry) was finding a
media file on one of the diskettes called IBMRALLY.MID which was a little
piano rendition of "Ever Onward, IBM" from way back when in the Way Back When
Days of IBM.

------
zura
Hah, I was thinking to Ask HN these days about the availability of exotic
jobs, including OS/2 (or eComStation) programming jobs. I also wouldn't mind
to take Motif jobs. Feel free to contact me if you have any ;)

~~~
yuhong
Motif was recently GPLed, as it happened.

------
justincormack
As this article admits, it is just a rewrite of "Triumph of the Nerds".

~~~
jfb
Yeah, it's typical of Ars these days. Not particularly artful rehashing of
existing info.

------
forgottenpaswrd
"Version 3.0 was going to up the graphical ante with an exciting new 3D
beveled design (which had first appeared with OS/2 1.2)"

I think it was Next computers who got first on this.

------
erichocean
I seem to recall UPS widely deploying OS/2 internally back in the 90s, with
custom (internal) apps written for it.

Probably all Windows by now...

------
mp99e99
This was a great article, thanks for posting!

------
mbennett
>Finally, and most importantly for the future of the company, Bill Gates hired
the architect of the industrial-strength minicomputer operating system VMS and
put him in charge of the OS/2 3.0 NT group. Dave Cutler’s first directive was
to throw away all the old OS/2 code and start from scratch. The company wanted
to build a high-performance, fault-tolerant, platform-independent, and fully
networkable operating system. It would be known as Windows NT.

A couple of decades later, Dave Cutler is still around at Microsoft and worked
on the hypervisor for the Xbox One at the ripe young age of 71, allowing games
to run seamlessly beside apps.

From [http://www.theverge.com/2013/11/8/5075216/xbox-one-tv-
micros...](http://www.theverge.com/2013/11/8/5075216/xbox-one-tv-microsofts-
plan-to-take-over-the-living-room)

>Underneath it all lies the magic — a system layer called the hypervisor that
manages resources and keeps both platforms running optimally even as users
bounce back and forth between games, apps, and TV.

>To build the hypervisor, Multerer recruited the heaviest hitter he could
find: David Cutler, a legendary 71-year-old Microsoft senior technical fellow
who wrote the VMS mainframe operating system in 1975 and then came to
Microsoft and served as the chief architect of Windows NT.

>It appears his work bridging the two sides of the One has gone swimmingly:
jumping between massively complex games like Forza Motorsport 5, TV, and apps
like Skype and Internet Explorer was seamless when I got to play with a system
in Redmond. Switching in and out of Forza was particularly impressive: the
game instantly resumed, with no loading times at all. "It all just works for
people," says Henshaw as he walks me through the demo. "They don’t have to
think about what operating system is there."

~~~
protomyth
I would love to see a kickstarted to buy OpenVMS from HP since they are
retiring it. It was a quirky but solid OS with some great clustering and
security.

~~~
gaius
One thing VMS was not was quirky, DEC went to considerable effort to make
everything consistent. If you didn't know a command you could guess it, and it
would take the same switches as any other command. Contrast that with Unix
whose commands really are quirky...

~~~
protomyth
Given by background was UNIX, it certainly felt quirky, but it was very
consistent. The "why the heck are there 4 of the same file" moment is a little
odd. It was a good OS.

------
yuhong
The sad thing is that I have never seen an article on the entire MS OS/2 2.0
fiasco that is what I call complete and detailed and many omitting for example
the unethical attacks MS did against OS/2 such as "Microsoft Munchkins". I try
with my own blog article, but I admit it is not very good either.

~~~
michaelwww
Wikipedia has some interesting things to say about it.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_OS/2](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_OS/2)

------
derleth
> So the new System/360 mainframe line would run the also brand-new OS/360.

Bad example. _Really_ bad example: Not even IBM could standardize on a single
OS for the System/360.

The System/360 went through a few OS iterations before OS/360 came along:
OS/360 was late, as recounted in _The Mythical Man-Month_ , so DOS/360 came
along, then BOS/360, then TOS/360, and even PCP, which didn't support
multiprogramming. Other OSes were CP-67, which became VM, MFT, MVT, and still
more OSes on top of that.

To this day, there are multiple OSes for the architecture descended from the
System/360, including Linux.

------
jlebrech
don't outsource for the sake of a few months, if things take time, then they
take time.

