Down the memory lane with OS/2 (2020)
jmmv.dev
jmmv.dev
Part 1 is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeaRlhz96mI Part 2 is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uwGTHZzzF4
Even before them, I actually used Microsoft OS/2 1.0 (yes, there was an edition packaged that way!). This was even before the "Presentation Manager" GUI was released. It was, from a user's perspective, just like an industrial-strength DOS.
Slightly later, running actual servers at IBM, OS/2 1.3 (iirc) was a godsend - it was the only OS we'd ever encountered that could reliable run for months at a time without reboot. I remember these tower cases loaded up with several 80MB hard drives for huge storage!
When OS/2 2 arrived, it really seemed to be a big step up over Windows, but IBM didn't know how to market it. There was a lot of innovation there, both in UX and in OS design. I recall the leaked internal "J'Accuse" email, where an employee pointed out how much the OS/2 team had done to make it such an excellent product, and that everyone in the company had done so much to support it.
IBM was really good at dropping the ball like this. Just as Windows has since come to be intertwined with BASIC (from early MS BASIC to Visual Basic to VBA), IBM had a thing for Rexx. Back in these days, few had yet thought about a VB-like tool to raise the level of abstraction for developers. Except for a small team in IBM. They built a tool referenced as, iirc, "Red October" that gave the rapid-prototyping capabilities of VB, but with Rexx, for OS/2. It didn't (yet) have the visual designer environment, but even at that early date it came baked-in with the ability to build remote client-server apps. I think that if IBM knew what to do with this, it could have pre-empted the success that Microsoft had with VB, and in that alternate universe, perhaps it could have led to IBM capturing the corporate desktop market rather than MS taking it.
The application that ran on these OS/2 boxes was a smalltalk GUI that basically sent commands back to a 3270 mainframe session. It was really a hilarious, basically non-productive application for the employees. Never underestimate how productive a bank teller who's been working for a few years can bang out keyboard combinations in a 3270 session vs now having to point and click to do basically the same thing.
Your post reminds me of the IBM ecosystem, from sales and tech support, Micro-channel token ring cards that were super expensive and had to "insert into the ring" to get network access, to watching the release of Win95, and even myself a hard core OS/2 zealot at the time could not deny that Win95 changed the world going forward.
I ended up going to work for IBM as a contractor doing level 2 support for the OS/2 TCP/IP stack, which was relatively new to the world in general, and so the small 3 person team that just did TCP/IP stack support were considered wizards and unique, given most of the OS/2 world ran on Netbios and even IPX for Netware integration.
It was a wild time of IBM software sales execs signing huge contracts, and deployments of overly complex environments that kept us on our toes.
I ended up pivoting to IBM's newly acquired Tivoli unit, and became a full time employee managing that beast of a enviromnent for "enterprise systems management" - then I got into all the CORBA and crazy frameworks there.
Fun times. Life is different now.
It drove my Dad nuts to constantly have it in the taskbar, so so bought me an older computer to run mine. I think I ran it under Windows 3.1 so I could log in without needing to take it offline. I ran it that way until the summer of 1999 when I went to college. (And by that time very few people called dial-ups.)
Anyone remember the old Stardock games for OS/2? Entrepreneur, Galactic Civilizations, and of course multiplayer Trials of Battle on LAN.
Had my first foray into scripting with REXX, and Gopher was still a thing. First time I wrote some HTML was also on OS/2. Fun times as a kid in my dad’s lab.
IBM had a weird obsession with the /2, apparently.
Nokia Data was the leading provider of workstations in Finland in 1989 with almost 20% share. Besides OS/2 they also had at least MS-DOS distributions to their name.
Unfortunately it was too little, too late. By the time NT 3.51 came along, the game was over.
I didn’t have any visibility into the industry at that time so I could be very mistaken.
OS/2 Lan Server was the direct competition to Windows NT. When NT 4.0 hit (with the hardware discovery and Win95 interface) that was it for Lan Server.
OS/2 Lan Server was a dream server OS for IBM environments. Those things could crank out File/Print and 3270 Gateway etc services for months without a reboot. They were great during the time, and could collect dust in the back of a branch back office for years, kind of like the AS/400s.
IIRC, OS/2's IP stack was a straight port of BSD UNIX, so it was pretty solid. I think NT's was as well, which killed off the last reason to stay on OS/2 for the org I was with at the time.
Anything else would slow to a crawl with the disk format.
(Also migrated to Warp, was pretty happy with that, too.)
My next computer was a Pentium MMX 166 with 16? 32? MB of RAM and the thing flew there.
It was already clear it was going to fail by the time we did, too.
As well, certain mainframes will only boot from OS/2... the service console, a PC, is what boots a mainframe.
It literally uses a parallel printer connection to a port on the mainframe to load the microcode and the 'nucleus' of the mainframe into the memory.
Once this is done the CPU is in an initial known condition and can boot up.