

Thoughts on the occasion of the 25th Anniversary of IBM OS/2 - boopsie
https://plus.google.com/106875990476951662693/posts/9aDbieL2ncH

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m0nty
My first real job in IT was at an IBM training centre, so OS/2 and the PS/2
share the same warm place for me as for OP. The original PS/2 was literally
the size of a suitcase, and very, very heavy: but I could lift two at once if
I was in a hurry to set up a room for teaching. Real computers.

At the same job, I was probably one of the first people to use Windows:
Windows 286, that is, with PageMaker, which we used to make course materials.
It was slow and clunky at the same time as awesomely cool. Windows 386 was
even better. Then IBM launched OS/2, and we did our level best to like it,
install and use it, but it never really felt that good. It needed too much
RAM. It didn't support our legacy apps (not many of them, anyway) and the UI
felt weird.

On the day Windows 3.0 was released internally, on the IBM network, I think
just about everyone who used a PC downloaded the seven or so floppy disk
images needed to install it, and we were passing them around like a crack
pipe. Everyone wanted it, and this was apparently happening all over IBM UK.
Although it's ultimate demise took a long time after that, we all knew it was
basically over for OS/2 at that point. Which is a shame, because (looking
back) it still seems cool and interesting and Windows soon became very boring
indeed.

------
kickingvegas
I remember marveling at the first time I saw multiple DOS prompts, all
separate memory protected processes running on OS/2, knowing that rebooting
the entire OS to handle a crashed program on 286 systems would be a thing of
the past, knowing what a sham Windows 95 was compared to OS/2 and that NT was
still a future milestone.

~~~
redstripe
NT 3.5/3.51 was released prior to win95. It still had the old win3.11 look,
but it had preemptive multitasking and protected virtual memory spaces.

I was excited about it as you were about os/2 apparently. And even as good as
it's compatibility was it still didn't take off until winxp (3 versions
later). So I think all the os/2 conspiracies need to be taken with a grain of
salt when the slow NT adoption shows that os/2's biggest problem was probably
corporate inertia.

~~~
flomo
Yep. For both OS/2 and NT, you had to buy an expensive high-end PC off a
pretty narrow hardware-compatibility list, and the user experience wasn't too
great (long boot times, laggy UI, etc.) The genius of Windows 95 was that it
could sit on top of whatever strange legacy DOS drivers you were using and
still provide some modicum of stability.

However, as the article mentioned, OS/2 did have huge corporate adoption,
especially in finance and insurance. (Largely because IBM bundled it to their
mainframe customers.) Most of these places switched to Windows when new OS/2
software dried up around 1996, but it wasn't uncommon to see an OS/2 terminal
on a bankers desk well into the 2000s. (And I'm sure some places are still
running it in a VM for some old internal software.)

Where IBM didn't have a clue is when they tried to market OS/2 to consumers
and smaller businesses. Yes, you could go into the store and buy a boxed copy.
But if you wanted to connect your computers to a network, you had to call an
IBM enterprise sales rep. Assuming they even returned your call, and you
figured out which alphabet soup packages to order, it was about $200/machine
for the same basic filesharing which was included in Windows.

~~~
yuhong
"The genius of Windows 95 was that it could sit on top of whatever strange
legacy DOS drivers you were using and still provide some modicum of
stability."

On the other hand, this helped Novell continue the DR-DOS lawsuit against MS.
OS/2 1.x had little drivers initially, but it was beginning to improve by
1991, and OS/2 2.0 could use OS/2 1.x drivers.

------
ams6110
My first "real job" was a with Andersen Consulting. Not uncommon for their
clients to be 100% IBM shops, from the mainframe to the network to the desktop
(which was either an IBM 3270 "tube" or an IBM PC running OS/2). I had a PC,
and I do recall it never, ever crashed. It did take some minutes to boot up,
but that wasn't necessary very often.

~~~
re_todd
Yeah, mine never crashed too, unless I ran a DOS game. But even then, it
crashed only a few times in a year. If I ran it on Windows, it would crash a
few times a day.

------
smashing
Wow, this takes me back to the first PC operating system flame wars. I
remember listening to the most anti-Microsoft vendors at the sidewalk sale in
Dallas back in the early 90's who claimed credit for everything that a
computer could do. Multitasking in Win-95? OS/2 did it first. Anti-trust? IBM
did it first. mISV's who ignore and deny problems in a system architecture to
upsell their products? OS/2 had that with a vengeance. I was only a teenager
but I remember the lesson well: Fanboy's have no real effect on a computer
ecosystem because they put people off and ignore peoples questions about the
issues and concerns. People will buy what their friends use because that is
where they get their help from. Fortunately or unfortunately, OS/2 was just
too complicated compared to Win-95 to compete. Given the shift in the
interface from Win 3.10 to Win-95, OS/2 had the perfect opportunity to
introduce itself to the market but didn't stick. I cast my eyes towards what
goes on now with "<system> evangelism" and wonder how much of a waste in money
and time it is.

I don't remember why exactly, but the Win32.exe installer for Win95 make
Windows much, much better. Maybe their should be a Wikipedia page for this
moment/introduction, but this is when Microsoft officially became a monopoly.
It was not necessarily because of the OEM deals, but because it was a
combination of being enough better than the more obscure alternativeness and
it offered "innovations" that people could take advantage of immediately upon
installation.

~~~
flomo
Haha, "Team OS/2" was up there on the insanity scale with Amiga advocates. The
author described it as 'social media and conversational marketing', but I
recall one magazine columnist who said something like "I stopped writing about
OS/2 because I was sick of receiving death threats."

~~~
smashing
I see Android users are the heir apparent to the OS Persecution Complex.

EDIT: I just realized that what I wrote could be viewed as condescending, and
I don't mean it be that way. It just saddens me that people can get so
attached to a machine. Dogs, cats, and other pets I can understand, but a
machine cannot make you happy, it can only help you be more productive, and I
don't believe productivity directly leads to happiness. Socializing with other
people is the surest means of acquiring happiness and "fanboy-ism" is
inherently anti-social.

~~~
javert
<philosophical>

 _I don't believe productivity directly leads to happiness_

I don't believe _anything_ leads _directly_ to happiness. But I believe being
productive is a pretty important part of getting there.

 _Socializing with other people is the surest means of acquiring happiness_

That seems kind of shallow. Sure, relationships with others are another
indirect part of happiness.

I don't claim to know the answers, here, but I've been pondering these things
a lot lately.

 _and "fanboy-ism" is inherently anti-social_

Sharing closely held values (e.g. a particular OS or programming language) is
a really important part of socializing, IMO, and there's nothing wrong with
that. Being a fanboy isn't the problem; the problem arises if you try to hard
to share that passion with others, and fail.

</philosophical>

~~~
smashing
Socializing is the opposite of shallowness in my opinion. I refer to the
Wikipedia for my definition: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialization>

_the problem arises if you try to hard to share that passion with others, and
fail._

What is wrong with trying hard and sharing passions with others? Or is it just
the failing that is a problem? Be concise.

~~~
javert
I didn't say that socializing is shallow; I don't believe that at all. I said
that the statement, "Socializing with other people is the surest means of
acquiring happiness," seems shallow.

 _Be concise._

You seem to not have understood my sentence, but it's perfectly clear.

~~~
smashing
What do you think _shallow_ means? What do you consider to be the opposite of
_shallow_? Be concise if not for my sake, but for the sake of other people who
may stumble upon this thread.

My questions are not an indication that I am predisposed to agree with your
response whatever it may be, nor do I feel predisposed to respond.

------
Osiris
I've always been a big nostalgic for the days when I ran OS/2. I even still
have a developer install CD for OS/2 Warp laying around. I recall all the
things that made OS/2 a superior OS at the time, like preemptive multitasking,
and the object-oriented Workspace Shell.

I setup an OS/2 VM a year or two ago just to "relive the glory days", so to
speak, and I realized that while OS/2 was one of the best OS's of it's time,
we've come a long way since then. I'm not even sure that had OS/2 become
widely successful that OS's today would be any better than they are right now.

We should certainly praise it's technology but, in the end, the computing
world has moved on to bigger and better things.

------
danbmil99
I recall working on IBM's Comdex '90 presentation -- 7 OS2 machines all
working together on the same network! It was a pretty cool OS, actually
reminded me of Amiga.

------
yuhong
See this too: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3441885>

Lot of stuff about the MS OS/2 2.0 fiasco in MS anti-trust exhibits, in fact.

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drsim
In the UK, ESCOM, a major high street electronics retailer and wholesaler
Makro both decided to default to OS/2 Warp. So my friends and I were all
exposed to it.

But of course the technical superiority meant nothing when we had to wait 5
minutes for a boot, then use Windows 3.11 from within the OS. So needless to
say we all turned our systems into dual-boot or wiped OS/2 altogether.

------
sigzero
I built a NOC for a Satellite program using OS/2. Those were the days. I loved
that OS.

------
cafard
"Unlike Windows, OS/2 didn't crash, and it wasn't from a company that had an
obnoxious sense of entitlement."

IBM as the corporate model for humility? Quite a thought.

~~~
boopsie
Hard to imagine, but true. Largely as a matter of contrast, because Microsoft
was _way_ too big for its britches at the time.

~~~
yuhong
Yea, while the MS-IBM JDA was not very good the alternative MS chose was a lot
worse.

