
Half an operating system: The triumph and tragedy of OS/2 (2013) - eaguyhn
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/11/half-an-operating-system-the-triumph-and-tragedy-of-os2/
======
shrubble
A couple things to add:

1\. Microsoft got paid about $400 million for their work on OS/2, supposedly,
through to v1.3 .

Development of Windows through to v3.0 was much much less. It is safe to say
that Microsoft made money from the partnership with IBM.

2\. OS/2 installation had a fatal flaw: if your PC had cache memory you had to
disable it while the installer copied the files from floppy. It didn't hurt
install speed since floppies were the bottleneck but it was very confusing to
the newbies to OS/2 that IBM was trying to attract.

3\. The Ziff-Davis magazines were pay-to-play in editorial content and they
plugged Microsoft as being the better choice all the time. And pre-Internet
they were a big source of information.

~~~
blantonl
The other OS/2 installation fatal flaw was there were 20+ installation
diskettes, so your chance of coming across a bad disk halfway through a 2+
hour installation was pretty good.

If you were an OS/2 administrator back in the day, hearing the disk drive
start trying to re-read sectors on Disk 18 was a terrifying prospect.

~~~
jeffnappi
Who here remembers installing Slackware 1.0 from 24 floppies? Same story,
except at least it was free!

~~~
anon4242
A few years later they were passing out free copies of OS/2 CDs as if there
was no tomorrow (which, by then there really wasn't...)

~~~
jeffnappi
Free as in beer unfortunately.

------
mcguire
" _So a rogue group in Boca Raton, Florida—far away from IBM headquarters—was
allowed to use a radical strategy to design and produce a machine using
largely off-the-shelf parts and a third-party CPU, operating system, and
programming languages._ "

At IBM around this time, Boca Raton was known as the place where people who
weren't competent but couldn't be convinced to leave were transferred.

~~~
kls
Yep never underestimate the capabilities and ingenuity of people, especially
those with curiosity and time on their hands. They where basically sent to
Boca to rot, so they really did not care what they did, they gave them a
marginal budget and approved almost any project that did not increase
headcount or budget. You would have thought IBM would have caught on then or
at least after Bell Labs that incubators work and funding incubators is a good
bet. The only strange part is incubators never seem to be able to retain their
culture and seem to be temporal in nature.

~~~
Asooka
> The only strange part is incubators never seem to be able to retain their
> culture and seem to be temporal in nature

Because incubators work only as long as they're not administrated and
controlled. The moment they produce a successful project that brings in money,
you need to control the process and put administration in place.

~~~
kls
Not if you spin said project into an independent company, take the key players
and replace then with energetic and creative individuals. Incubators need
product guys that can see beyond the technicool aspect of the project and spin
it into a company. The problem now days is there is just too much cargo-cult
around incubation. There is a happy middle between Bell Labs and today fake it
till you make it incubation. Don't get me wrong it takes some believing in
yourself and I think Job's and Musk had and have the right amount. But
believing and outright lying and borderline scamming is what we see more of
today, with no technical assets and a story. Where in the days of Bell Labs
you had the tech but no one to sell it into a product, much less an
independent company.

------
WalterBright
I liked OS/2 and used it simply because it meant I could develop 16 bit code
using a protected mode operating system, which made development much faster.

Only as the last step was it ported to real mode DOS.

~~~
Gibbon1
Combine 16 bit mode with pointer magic --> bird shot the OS.

~~~
WalterBright
Usually it's the interrupt vector table that got scrambled. Enough to scramble
your hard disk. I would always simply reboot after any erratic program
behavior. This is why OS/2 was soooo much better for development.

Intel made a large mistake putting the interrupt table at 0000. It should have
put the boot ROM there.

~~~
colejohnson66
Is there any known reason for _why_ the IDT is initially at address 0 and the
boot address is 0xFFFFFFF0?

~~~
Gibbon1
I don't think there is any technical reason it couldn't be anywhere. Except
that they were expecting the IDT table to be mapped to DRAM. And you have
basically two memory areas, DRAM and the BIOS in ROM. If the addresses don't
start at 0 and max memory then you end up with RAM being non contiguous which
is a fat wart. Pick your poison.

Also remember too C and C++ weren't really a thing back in 1977. C and C++
tends to love splating low memory when you mess up your pointer magic. Other
languages didn't have that problem.

------
anon4242
> IBM rules about confidentiality meant that some Microsoft employees were
> unable to talk to other Microsoft employees without a legal translator
> between them.

Haha, this is so ironic. I've worked on projects for MS that were just the
same. We had to have code names for their code names and a code name for MS
itself. Even our own code names had to be uttered with caution. Maybe they
learned from IBM? Edit: Thinking about it some more, maybe they really did.
None of the other big tech companies we did work for were _that_ secretive.

------
xvilka
There is Arca Noae[1], but I don't know how successful their business is.

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

~~~
acqq
Thanks. Didn't know they existed. From their page:

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

"ArcaOS is more compatible with modern hardware, makes more efficient use of
memory and system resources, and installs more easily than any other OS/2
distribution…ever. Really.

Do you have a system with 16GB of RAM in it? Want your apps to really fly?
Configure ArcaOS to utilize all memory above 4GB as a RAM disk, and at bootup,
copy your most frequently used applications there. It’s like running your
OS/2, Windows, DOS, REXX, Java, and ported Linux applications on air."

And they develop further for the newer hardware:

[https://www.arcanoae.com/arca-noae-progress-report-usb-
arcao...](https://www.arcanoae.com/arca-noae-progress-report-usb-arcaos-
updater-multimedia/)

"When IBM left off USB driver development, OS/2 had a working, 16-bit USB 1.x
and 2.0 driver stack. Fast forward to 2019, and this is no longer adequate for
the needs of today’s hardware.

The Arca Noae USB stack is now fully 32-bit, and USB 3 support development
continues to make good progress. Implementing USB 3 support has been tedious
because the OS/2 USB architecture didn’t accommodate the peculiarities of USB
3 well."

"entry last updated: October 16th, 2019"

------
pjmlp
SOM was much more advanced than COM and nowadays it is almost impossible to
find any documentation online.

WinRT is closer to it, but still lacks the metaclasses capabilities that SOM
had.

~~~
chiph
SOM was pretty cool, for sure. But using SOM objects (more than a couple) and
it would bring my 486 to it's knees.

~~~
pjmlp
Interesting, I never got to use it, only wonder in awe reading articles and
OOPLSA papers about it.

My OS/2 experience is based on playing around with it at trade shows.

When I finally got a PC, I went with a 386SX, which was unable to run OS/2, as
the only shop in town selling PCs with OS/2 was selling it with alongside PS/2
systems, about 1000 € more expensive (in today's money) than compatibles
running the DOS + Win 3.x combo.

------
dang
Discussed at the time:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6792010](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6792010)

One comment from 2017:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14070102](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14070102)

------
majewsky
(2013)

> This story first ran in November 2013, and it appears unchanged below.

~~~
JeremyReimer
I was pleasantly surprised that Ars re-ran this story. It was one of my
favorites to write. Also probably the most popular single article I ever did.

------
eaguyhn
I almost got to use OS/2 for a commercial project.. we had fetch information
from a PC desktop and feed it to an IBM mainframe while servicing up to two
simultaneous users.

OS/2 1.1 EE had EHLLAPI support but was still a few months from release and I
couldn't wait for it. I was really disappointed I didn't get to explore it
fully because first look was really impressive.

I ended up using DOS + DESQview, and it worked out fine.

~~~
xenospn
DESQview. Now there’s a name I haven’t heard in 20 years.

~~~
glandium
I never used it, but I remember being blown away at the time by the
screenshots and advertized features.

------
pmarreck
OS/2 was the most impressive "prosumer" OS of the time.

Wasn't as impressed by anything else that was not from Apple or Microsoft
except NeXTStep and BeOS.

~~~
icedchai
What did you think of the Amiga? Early 90's Amiga OS was contemporary with
OS/2 2.x. It had preemptive multitasking, but lacked memory protection.

~~~
tom_
Like everything about the Amiga: in 1985, implausible; in 1989, excusable; in
1991, unforgivable. And by 1994: punishable by death.

(See also, though with timeline offset and/or scaled: RISC OS, MacOS.)

------
magoon
Little-known fact: Windows of today is an entirely different OS than early
DOS-based Windows because Microsoft took ownership of the 386-based “OS/2 3.0”
codebase it jointly developed with IBM, forming the foundation for Windows NT
3 which all modern Windows is based on. This gave them the huge head start in
having a modern enterprise-grade operating system that allowed them to
dominate the market.

~~~
cmrdporcupine
I don't think that's the case; Cutler's NT has VMS-esque foundations, not
OS/2.

~~~
pickle-wizard
Windows NT was originally going to be OS/2 NT. Due to the architecture of NT,
it could support many different APIs.

Due to the success of Windows 3.0 and the lack of OS/2 success, Microsoft
wisely decided to expand the Windows API to the Win32 API and have it be the
default API.

The book Show Stopper, has a good account of the early days of NT.

[https://www.amazon.com/Show-Stopper-Breakneck-Generation-
Mic...](https://www.amazon.com/Show-Stopper-Breakneck-Generation-
Microsoft/dp/0029356717)

It is interesting read.

~~~
sedatk
Original NT contained an OS/2 subsystem layer too, like WSL today. It allowed
running of OS/2 1.x apps.

~~~
temac
WSL is vastly different from the old-school NT subsystems. Both in the
technology and in the result. And rightly so, because while SFU&co was in some
way more integrated, it effectively was a separate platform from anything
else, and who want to support that? Arguably the OS/2 subsystem did not have
this problem because the environment/ecosystem to support was way smaller, and
it was making existing binaries made for this system work. So on that last
point, yes WSL is similar to the OS/2 subsystem; but it could not have been
like that in SFU because Linux was not seen as a serious competitor at the
time (and well, it actually was not...); and the price to pay now that co-
evolution did not happen is a more segregated environment.

------
audition
This thread brings back the memories - I was an editor at a Ziff-Davis
computer magazine back in the day.

Looking back on all this, the only lasting legacy I can identify is the linux
windows emulation layer (wine), which exists only because Microsoft was
required to make the Windows API public so it could be used by OS/2.

Given the difficulty of getting an ancient version of Windows running on
currently available hardware, linux/wine is now the only practical way to run
a lot of old Microsoft Windows application software. If it weren't for wine
(which was made possible by OS/2), that application software would be
unusable.

------
Thorrez
>Long before operating systems got exciting names based on giant cats and
towns in California named after dogs

What operating systems were named after towns in California named after dogs?

~~~
EdwardDiego
Not a town, but I'm guessing a reference to this.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mavericks,_California#Origin_o...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mavericks,_California#Origin_of_the_name)

> In early March 1967, Alex Matienzo, Jim Thompson, and Dick Notmeyer surfed
> the distant waves of Pillar Point. With them was Matienzo's roommate's
> white-haired German Shepherd, Maverick, who was accustomed to swimming with
> his owner and Matienzo while they were surfing.

------
ErikAugust
[https://beta.trimread.com/articles/552](https://beta.trimread.com/articles/552)

------
rado
I was a fan, but looking at the UI now, it's too messy. Has any designer
mocked up something like the OS/2 UI, but good?

~~~
jacquesm
There was something called Tabworks at some point in time, a reworking of the
Windows GUI that I always really liked. Very intuitive and worked well on
smaller screens.

~~~
pjmlp
Don't you mean Geoworks, that was bundled with Phillips PCs?

~~~
jacquesm
No, Tabworks:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TabWorks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TabWorks)

~~~
pjmlp
Ah thanks. I don't remember ever seeing it.

~~~
jacquesm
It came pre-installed on the Compaq Aero, a very early notebook format laptop.

