
25 years of OS/2: the legendary failure that refuses to die. - technologizer
http://techland.time.com/2012/04/02/25-years-of-ibms-os2-the-birth-death-and-afterlife-of-a-legendary-operating-system/
======
protomyth
I tried to give OS/2 a try, but what happened was kind of bizarre. I had a DEC
PClone with a 486 (cannot remember if it was DX or SX) inside. OS/2 needed a
graphic driver for the S3 chip. I called DEC support to ask for the driver and
they said they didn't have it but IBM did. The DEC rep kept me on the phone
while he called the OS/2 support number. DEC had incredible service at the
time.

Then the bizarre happened. The IBM support person said I needed to sign an NDA
to get the driver. Both the DEC rep and I tried to explain to him I was a
humble end user and not interested in anything but the driver. There must be a
mistake as I did not want source code. Nope, just the driver required a NDA
and some verification. I said I would think about it, and we hung up. The DEC
rep apparently had quite a few people gathered around him and they were
laughing pretty hard. He then asked if I would like a nice copy of Win NT with
no NDA and all the drivers for my machine.

I really wanted to like OS/2.

~~~
msluyter
I used to do OS/2 support as an IBM co-op back when I was in college. In many
ways it was pretty sweet -- I did some cool stuff with the built in Rexx
interpreter, which -- though not as or widely supported as, say, perl -- was
still pretty nice.

Regarding your specific problem, I'd add that IBM's support structure was
byzantine, with multiple groups with different agendas and tons of snafus
like: "this isn't our issue, contact Thinkpad support," followed by "this
isn't a Thinkpad issue, contact OS/2 support." (Aside: I once tried to get a
different IBM group to handle an issue I believed to be theirs, and after
getting rebuffed multiple times, I wrote a rather angry response which got me
in trouble with my manager. Learned a lot from that -- mostly, don't write
angry.)

9 times out of ten, the issues we received boiled down to a) missing / out of
date drivers for some piece of hardware (as in the S3 chipset you mention), or
b) incompatibilities/errors running existing windows apps. I think OS/2 failed
for a variety of reasons, but ultimately, even though it was better than
windows (for a while), people just didn't feel a strong need for pre-emptive
multi-tasking, so it was never a strong selling point, _especially_ if it
meant you couldn't run the latest PC games.

------
tfb
I realize this is off topic, so please forgive the following rant. I'm not
sure if it's out of principle or just stubbornness, but it's gotten to the
point where every time I read an article that is paginated (most likely only
because whoever runs the website wants more page views), I refuse to continue
to the next page and end up reading only a fraction of the article.

My attitude towards pagination wasn't always this way. Over time, however,
it's just annoyed me more and more. When I get to the bottom of a page as I'm
reading an article and see that I'm going to have to click on these tiny
numbers multiple times, wait for a new page to load each time, all while
interrupting my train of thought, I get so annoyed that I immediately say
"NOPE!" and hit the back button, no matter how good the article is.

And out of principle, I'm not installing any 3rd party software (like
readability, etc.) to handle this for me. I shouldn't have to. Site owners who
run articles need to find better ways to get page views, ways that aren't
inconveniencing everyone using their site. Some might say "well that's just
how it is!"... and I say only if you allow it to be.

So as a bit of a followup to this rant, if you submit articles like this to HN
and there's a printer friendly version (or even a "view all" version), please
submit that URL instead.

~~~
christoph
Readability didn't work for me on this page anyway. Very frustrating that
content producers do this and provide no way to view the whole article in a
single click.

~~~
spindritf
As far as first world problems go, this one is really annoying. Especially if
you send an article to the Kindle and don't notice that you only got a part of
it. After a few times, I learnt to view and check first but it really kills
the flow.

~~~
christoph
I have to admit... I did have a "First world problem" meme image in my head as
I posted this and thought it might not be an appropriate complaint to raise on
HN.

------
sehugg
I spent a little bit of time trying to become an OS/2 fanboy. Remember that
this was before Windows NT (and Linux was a gleam in Linus's eye) so a PC that
could walk and chew gum at the same time seemed like a miraculous feat for
anyone used to DOS. It was a pretty sweet development platform for the time,
since you could run multiple DOS and Windows 3.x sessions -- I even set up two
Windows sessions to communicate over null modem to test a game.

However, there were defects both large and small that didn't seem to get
resolved -- from missing files on the custom Windows installation to
filesystem corruption when the swap file filled up (this last one was the
final straw for me).

Still it's interesting to think how its shared DNA is in Windows today, just
as NeXTStep is in Apple's products. In fact many APIs between Win32 and OS/2
are similar (I once made some OS/2 API bindings for Borland Pascal).

~~~
pacaro
I remember buying multiple copies of OS/2, but never installing it, at one
point it was so discounted that it was the cheapest way to buy good quality
floppies. IIRC warp came on about 40

~~~
blantonl
Yes indeed. I remember thinking I had gone to heaven when I got my hands on a
Warp 3.0 CDROM. Installing any OS that has 40 floppies is painful. Kind of
reminds of of the slackware days as well...

------
patrickgzill
Wow, this brings back memories. I was a total OS/2-Head until about 1993 or
1994 when I got both an Yggdrasil Linux CD for my 486, and, a NeXTCube; and
from there, ended up a Unix fan.

The problem with installation, was that all development was done on PS/2s. The
developers never did much testing on non-MCA (MicroChannel Architecture, a
pre-PCI intelligent bus design) hardware.

That is why, for instance, when installing OS.2 2.0 and 2.1 on certain PCs you
had to disable the CPUs L2 cache by using the legacy "non-turbo" mode and do
part of the installation in 8Mhz AT mode; otherwise the installer would crash
and you wouldn't know why.

I think a lot of OS/2 users went to Linux and their disgust for MS' admitted
astro-turfing and plain outright lying, fueled Linux adoption.

ADD: OS/2 ran well in 32MB and flew in anything more than that. Unfortunately
at that time, 32MB was hundreds of dollars, and some systems couldn't even
take that much RAM.

~~~
seclorum
Hey, nice to meet you .. I also had Yggdrasil (and SLS!) systems back in the
days of OS/2, which I very briefly flirted with (IBM compilers, yay!) then
seguéd back to MIPS and RISC/OS and Irix and SGI (grr.. why you no make
laptop, SGI?!! wtf..) with a bit of a dodgy diversion from Linux in the 90's
through NextstepX86, sustained a lusty affair with a BeBox, until .. like a
lot of other people .. here I am with my 'best unix workstation ever', an
Apple.

Apropos the living-on factor of OS/2 nuts keeping it running, its a good,
healthy thing to 'not-abandon' technology.

There is a scale to this.

I personally really like the guys at forum.Defence-force.org, burning the
machines in current glory with new code. The Oric-1/Atmos is still a computer,
and its values during its market period rose (and fell!), but yet the working
machines, today, are still getting new code written for them.

It is actually some sort of utter joy to have new titles for a very old,
memorable machine or system, which can still be enjoyed!

Computers don't die. Their users do. Lets hope the kids can still turn every
single one, on ..

------
mark_l_watson
I really liked OS/2. I could run several varieties of DOS under it and early
Windows - very flexible when I needed to develop using several operating
systems.

The real reason OS/2 was not widely adopted? Maybe this: the first time OS/2
was booted after an install, the bootup time took a very, very long time. I
was once in a computer store and some guy was practically screaming at the
sales people. He had bought OS/2, installed it, and the next time he used it
hit the one time only long bootup time. He was ranting how he immediately took
it off and reinstalled Windows. There must have been at least 10 other
customers who heard this.

I wonder how often this scenario happened.

~~~
jgw
Never used OS/2, so maybe you can clarify this for me:

I thought that one of the limitations of OS/2 was that while it could run DOS
programs, it could only run one DOS program at a time (in addition to a number
of native ones). Is that correct?

~~~
metric10
No, OS/2 2.0 and later could run any number of DOS and Windows 3.1
applications at once. I'm not sure about the 1.x series. You're probably
remembering Windows 9x's feature of being able to automatically reboot into
MS-DOS for running games.

~~~
mark_l_watson
You are correct.

------
clawrencewenham
I used to be the Editor In Chief of the OS/2 e-Zine!
(<http://www.os2ezine.com>), although I began as just a contributor. The
e-Zine was started by Trevor Smith, who slowly handed over more
responsibilities until eventually retiring to do other things.

I have fond memories of that era, and of constantly working to keep your chin
up as IBM's support grew more and more reluctant. Probably the most important
lesson I walked away with was understanding how deep the roots of zealotry can
go, how something as cosmically unimportant as an operating system can get
woven into a person's identity until the two are indistinguishable.

------
smcnally
I was at IBM in the mid-90s and OS/2 was my first prolonged exposure to GNU
tools. I got in deep with TCP/IP as part of practicing to become a "Certified
Engineer." We ran NCSA httpd and cgi scripts on it. Mucking with OS/2 and its
configurability on a PS/2 tower (that you could about crawl inside of) lead
directly to mucking with Slackware and working our S. American teams who'd
created an MCA patch for the earlier Linux kernels. (Getting DOOM to run on
that PS/2 386 was a banner evening.)

Marketing was always an uphill battle. Fans didn't like the Betamax analogy,
but it was apt (w/r/t stronger specs and weaker sales). MSFT already knew how
to market a dung pile.

I didn't realize NYC Transit used it. I still see it in ATMs and know UPS had
a huge install, enmeshed base.

------
forinti
A few years back (around 2008, maybe) I stumbled upon an ATM that had failed
to boot all the way and was pretty surprised that it was running OS/2 (and a
Rexx script). This was for Brazil's largest bank (Banco do Brasil). Since then
I think they've moved to Linux.

~~~
microcentury
Same thing here, also 2008, but with an Allied Irish Bank ATM in Dublin. The
machine crashed as I was using it and permanently relieved me of my bank card,
but the up side was that I got to watch the entire OS/2 Warp boot sequence
play out.

------
tzs
OS/2 Warp has a nice system. Too bad IBM refused to support it.

They had a golden opportunity, when it was clear that PCs would be
transitioning from 16-bit operating systems to 32-bit operating systems.
Microsoft had WinNT for 32-bit, Win3.x for 16-bit. WinNT didn't do a good job
at the time running people's existing 16-bit Win3.x applications, so migrating
to NT was a tough sell. This put MS in a hard place, because they needed
something that ran existing Win3.x stuff reasonably well but supported 32-bit
for the future--in other words they needed a transition system.

That transition system was to be Win95, but it was months away when Warp came
out.

Warp had _excellent_ Win3.x compatibility. In fact, it arguably ran Win3.x
applications better than Win3.x ran them. And it had excellent 32-bit support.

IBM should have aggressively pushed Warp as the 32-bit successor to Win3.x.
They could argue that instead of waiting for Win95, switch now and you'll get
the benefit of 32-bit, and you'll get a better 3.x experience than you have
now (or that you'll have under Win95).

What would Microsoft be able to do? If they countered by downplaying the
importance of 32-bit, they'd just make people reluctant to switch to Win95
when that came out.

Instead, IBM basically just made Warp available, and then ignored it. Here are
some examples of how they ignored it.

1\. They didn't spend any money promoting it in stores. A lot of consumers do
not realize this, but in retail stores shelf positioning is for sale. When you
see a product featured in an end cap, or on a shelf at eye level, or in a high
traffic location, it is because the manufacturer of that item paid to have it
put there. If the manufacturer doesn't pay for good placement, their product
goes on in inconvenient shelf in a less trafficked part of the store.

Guess where OS/2 was in Egghead and CompUSA? Someplace in back, where the
lighting was poor, sitting on the bottom of a shelf.

2\. They didn't give a fuck about existing developers. I recall reading a
column by, I think, Jerry Pournelle, where he went to a trade show. First he
went to the IBM booth, told them he'd heard about OS/2, and would like to
develop for it. He asked what he needed to do.

They have him a form to fill out. It was an application to apply for developer
status. It asked all kinds of details about what he planned to develop, his
business plan for it, and so on, and there was an application fee.

Then he went to Microsoft's booth, and said he'd heard about Win95, and asked
what he had to do in order to develop for it.

They gave him the SDK and tools right there.

3\. They didn't give a fuck about beginning developers. Flash forward to after
Win95 was released. Microsoft made developer tools available IN THE RETAIL
MARKET. They were for sale at places like Egghead.

Think about that. Some kid playing with Win95 gets an idea for a game, and
wants to start programming. He could go out to his local software store, and
get everything he needs to start being a Win95 programmer!

Could you do the same for OS/2? Well, actually you could--but not from IBM.
Watcom C/C++ was available in retail shops and could build OS/2 applications,
and even had some licensed libraries from IBM included. However, Watcom really
was aimed at the professional developer. The licensed documentation wasn't as
complete as the Microsoft documentation for Win95.

4\. They didn't give a fuck about developers who actually developed for OS/2.
If you persevered, and actually made OS/2 software, you were on your own. They
wouldn't help promote your application. They wouldn't feature it in any ads or
provide any co-marketing funds to help you promote it.

~~~
listic
Didn't Microsoft win by putting itself into position to preinstall its OS on
new computers?

~~~
tzs
Preinstalls discourage other operating systems for two reasons:

1\. they set a functionality mark that a on-preinstall OS needs to surpass in
order to interest someone in switching (especially if the new OS costs money),

2\. they enable inaction. What I mean by this is that you may find the
features of a new OS interesting enough to want to try it, but doing so
actually will take some effort. If you procrastinate, you've still got the old
OS.

Before Win95, the preinstalls were generally either DOS, or DOS + Win3.

When Win95 came out, it was an immediate hit via retail sales. On launch day,
many stores were open at midnight to sell it as soon as they could, and people
lined up to buy it. I don't have the numbers handy, but I'd be surprised if
Win95 on the first day of availability did not surpass OS/2.

This shows that there was a significant number of people in August 1995 for
whom an OS of Win95's level could entice them to want to try it sufficiently
to get them to actually go out and buy it and install it.

If IBM had properly marketed OS/2, those people could have been their
customers. IBM could have established themselves as the preferred 32-bit PC OS
before Win95 got out of the gate, and vendors would have been rushing to sell
preinstalled OS/2 systems.

One can make a good case that after Win95 came out and was getting
preinstalls, no amount of effort by IBM could have overcome that--Win95 was
good enough that OS/2's advantages probably were not enough to overcome
procrastination. But by the time Win95 was getting preinstalls, Microsoft had
already won from IBM's indifference pre-Win95.

------
dantheta
I was an OS/2 user from 1993 - 1996 or so. I have very fond memories of it -
for those lucky enough to have a supported machine, it felt indestructable.
You could do the most obnoxious things inside a DOS session, and the most that
could be trashed was the DOS session itself. At the time, I was doing x86
assembly and C programming for a college course. The kind of pointer mistakes
that would cause (or necessitate) a reboot on DOS only took out the session on
OS/2.

I only stopped using it because I changed computer to one that didn't have a
nicely-supported Cirrus video card (my replacement machine had a Diamond
Stealth), and there were no drivers for the new machine. Graphics drivers on
OS/2 are a separate story! Two years later, I was on Linux full-time, but I
still find myself longing for a Workplace Shell clone.

------
metric10
OS/2's big problem was it needed 8MB of RAM to run acceptably. 4MB (the stated
minimum requirement) was just enough to boot it up and, maybe, run one very
light weight application (with the HD thrashing trying to swap memory in and
out). Things where worse with Win-OS/2, which was a full copy of Windows 3.1
running in a VM. You really needed 16MB to take true advantage of OS/2
multitasking capabilities. IBM should have billed it as a workstation OS until
consumer hardware caught up, just as Microsoft did with Windows NT.

~~~
InclinedPlane
That's exactly why Windows 95 succeeded. At the time 4mb of RAM was a lot. But
pure 32-bit OSes like NT and OS/2 ran 16-bit apps in their own full VMs. Which
is great from a design perspective but lousy for end-user performance on
average hardware since it meant about 4mb of overhead per app. Win95 ran all
16-bit apps in a shared VM and used a few other quick and dirty tricks to keep
RAM usage low even if you were running lots of 16-bit apps. The end result was
a system that traded maintenance cost and stability for better support for
older apps on more modest hardware. In the end it turned out to be one of the
most successful software products in history, even though it gave MS so much
technical debt it took them nearly a decade to work through it.

------
ch0wn
My first computer had OS/2 Warp 4 installed and I loved it. I remember
checking out the first SuSE Linux release at that time and I was puzzled how
primitive it looked compared to what I was used to from OS/2. A few years
later, I switched from OS/2 to Linux and have been using it ever since.

------
ebbv
1.44" huh? Not 3.5" 1.44MB maybe?

~~~
cydonian_monk
This is why it never saw mass adoption. Strange, tiny, proprietary
distribution method that nobody could use because no companies bothered to
make a 1.44" floppy drive. You had to build one from scratch if you wanted to
use OS/2. (The best place to start was by harvesting the motor from a larger
drive.) Thus, only the true tinkerers and hackers ever made it past "Step 1 -
Preparing Your System."

(Somebody went and edited the main article, thus rendering this thread moot.
Quite a shame, really. Typos can be fun. ;) )

~~~
ebbv
I remember my dad having a Zenith MinisPort with a 2" floppy drive. Even as a
kid I remember thinking "Ok these are just ridiculously small."

The OP is also the author of the article, so I'm not surprised he went and
fixed it. But I'm a little miffed he didn't even give me a thank you.

~~~
cydonian_monk
We stumbled upon either a 2" or 2.5" floppy early in my college career. None
of us had ever heard of such a beast - it was a bit like alien tech landing in
our laps. We figured it was "the future" and that smaller floppies would see
mass-adoption, as some sort of CD-killer.

Then our professor destroyed our dream world and said they'd died off in the
80s. (And then wisely predicted flash-like memory would kill off all of them.)

~~~
DanBC
There's a wide range of weird floppy sizes. Perhaps one of the best known was
sold for the Amstrad PCW - a popular word processing system. (This machine
kept CP/M alive during the 80s and into the early 90s.)

(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amstrad_PCW>).

There were others. Here's a 2" drive - yet another failed Sony media format.
(What's their ratio of successful : failed formats?)

(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Floppy>)

------
kfcm
The title is a bit misleading. OS/2 (especially Warp) wasn't a failure from a
technical standpoint. Rather, IBM treated it like a redheaded stepchild which
detracted from its core systems of mainframes and AS/400s, because--you know--
this pc on every desktop thing is just hype.

As an aside, this reminded me of an old Dilbert from that timeframe
(mid-1995):
[http://dilbert.com/dyn/str_strip/000000000/00000000/0000000/...](http://dilbert.com/dyn/str_strip/000000000/00000000/0000000/000000/20000/1000/000/21019/21019.strip.gif)

------
kenna
OS/2 is still in use in NYC's subway MetroCard system... shocking. The city is
probably being squeezed out of tons of money to maintain technology that is
ancient.

~~~
pm90
I don't find it all that surprising. A few large insurance companies still
have a lot of their (core) software written in COBOL and outsource its upkeep
to IT companies. It's a big expense, nobody likes it; but replacing it would
cost more.

------
eternalban
I learned multi-threaded programming on OS/2 (coming from VMS) and it was a
pleasant experience.

------
po84
Microsoft's OS/2 Crush Plan makes a good read today.

<http://techrights.org/wiki/index.php/OS/2_Crush_Plan>

------
yuhong
Also see <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3785819> . I posted a lot of
comments to it.

