
Was OS/2 a viable alternative for daily DOS and Windows tasks? - whereistimbo
https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/5907/was-os-2-a-viable-alternative-for-daily-dos-and-windows-tasks
======
whereistimbo
From:
[https://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=155912&cid=1306984...](https://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=155912&cid=13069840)

Will they finally open the Workplace Shell? It's a truly object-oriented
desktop design that's still superior - a decade later - to anything Windows
has to offer. Looking back it's hard to believe a lot of the early FUD from MS
against OS/2 was aimed at scaring people away because, hey, 2 megabytes of
memory was just an absurd requiremet! They also claimed multithreaded
programming was no big deal. If they open up the Workplace Shell maybe OS/2
could preserve some of its legacy. It would rock on Linux.

From:
[https://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=155912&cid=1307025...](https://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=155912&cid=13070250)

What does this even mean?

Inheritance. In windows (or Linux) a file is an extension and is associated
with an application or collection of applications. In OS/2 a file can inherit
from various parents. So for example you could have a file xyz.mp3 of a
lecture:

1) Since its an .mp3 the sound programs work on it and "edit" opens it up in a
sound editor

2) Since its part of a lecture it will inherit from the word transcript and
when you "open for transcription" it opens with another (say word doc)
transcript

3) Since the lecture an be associated with other lectures which have video
with them when you "open for viewing" it can pull up the associated powerpoint

etc...

Now the important thing is that these behaviors are inherited because the
xyz.mp3 is a member of class lecture in addition to being a member of the
class .mp3. Members of the class .mp3 are sound files while members of the
class lecture have associated transcripts and lectures.

It also made some attempt at polymorphic behavior (i.e. edit, open, etc..).
Finally information was encapsulated at the lowest level (the file, the
folder, etc..)

~~~
karmakaze
Ah Workplace. That was the best (and worst) aspect of the v2 release. It came
as a shock to me and many others that it was included and was a divisive
feature. The bad part was the instability of early versions. The great part
was the metaphor and programmable possibilities.

In terms of the programming, the whole CORBA influence on SOM and its use on
making Workplace objects seemed like overkill or at least wasn't executed well
to make the developer experience smooth.

For me the killer app was the Icon Editor which you could fire up by right
clicking on any icon you see on your desktop. More time was sunk in there than
I ever spent playing Solitaire and FreeCell on Windows.

------
whereistimbo
From:
[https://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=155912&cid=1306964...](https://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=155912&cid=13069642)

We wrote a large body of building automation software subsystems in OS/2\.
There was no easy way to provide the same functionality in Windows, so it was
never cost effective to port it.

To this day, we keep the central routing server and all the subsystems in OS/2
boxes that are treated like embedded control systems, and have written Windows
2K-based interface code that proxies everything as BACnet devices.

OS/2 was a good combination of modern OS services (named pipes, threads, etc.)
and easy development. Given how simple it was to access serial ports, we could
easily interface via DigiBoard multiplexers and such, and could write a new
system driver (including reverse engineering time) in less than six months.

I'm the primary contact for IBM in our office, so they've been flooding me
with information about porting these apps to Linux, which sadly, may never be
cost effective.

I am _very_ sorry to see this event, even though I fully understand and
appreciate all the factors that led to OS/2's demise. It's like watching a
very dependable ship being sent to the bottom of the ocean because it's too
expensive to keep it afloat.

Oh well...

Tim

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whereistimbo
From:
[https://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=155912&cid=1306981...](https://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=155912&cid=13069812)

Good luck with that son, but I'm sorry to tell you that Microsft did NOT help
IBM code OS/2 so it would run Windows. As a matter of fact, Microsoft did far
more to STOP OS/2 from running Windows and Windows applications. When
Microsoft was releasing betas of Chicago( Win95 ), IBM had Chicago apps
running under OS/2\. When Microsoft found out, they changed the OS so that a
very small portion of the Win32 resources loaded up at the 1GB memory address.
This was so OS/2 could not run ANY Chicago applications or the OS. It worked
because OS/2 supported virtual memory up to 512MB.

So you got that WAY WRONG. The bit about Microsoft licensing issues preventing
opensourcing OS/2 is correct.

LoB

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karmakaze
I used OS/2 as my primary OS v1.3 thru Warp 3 including the betas and SDKs. It
made for a great development environment with true multitasking and HPFS (the
high-performance file system) which really was much faster than FAT. In that
context it was a good daily driver.

For DOS and Windows, it could run legacy apps but not the newer Win32 (i.e.
Windows 95) apps and if you needed those versions it wouldn't be viable. That
said, there were just enough apps to make it work if you cared, similar to the
current situation with Linux. I remember the Describe word processor which was
the first non-desktop-publishing editor that handled styles properly.
Development tools and hardware support continually improved. What was lacking
was interoperability with folks using Windows 95 (e.g. Office).

After the whole IBM/MS OS/2 v2/v3 (aka NT) ordeal, we all switched to Windows
NT and everything was fine (except for IBM).

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blodovnik
No it really wasn't.

If you want to understand the mindset at the time, it was all about hardware
drivers. The only thing that mattered was hardware drivers, and the hardware
manufacturers created drivers for dos/windos and _nothing else at all_.

Drivers was one of the primary challenges holding back any competition to MS.
True also of OS/2.

OS/2 was seen as a solid architecture, but it arrived without a GUI, right at
the time that the GUI became the key feature needed in any OS. It didn't take
long for the Presentation Manager GUI to arrive, but it was nothing exciting.

The other thing seen as an issue at the time was that OS/2 was built for the
rather terrible 80286 when really what was needed was full 32 bit 80386
support. It eventually got the 32 bit support but this was a bad start.

Microsoft released Word and Excel for OS/2 then discontinued them. That was
the finish of OS/2.

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ncmncm
Define viable.

Could you buy a white-box PC with it already installed, for the same price as
one with Windos on it? Were there drivers for all the hardware likely to be
needed? No and no.

Sure it would run the programs, way more reliably than Windos could.

The playing field was sharply tilted, so there was never a possibility of fair
competition.

------
_Codemonkeyism
As a former OS/2 lover, no.

