The worst-selling Microsoft software product of all time: OS/2 for the Mach 20 | Hacker News Reader

The worst-selling Microsoft software product of all time: OS/2 for the Mach 20

devblogs.microsoft.com

103 pointskungfudoi36 comments

Oooh I remember having one of these (with OS/2, no less) back when I had a side-job as the Microsoft support rep for Texas A&M. I was tasked with getting it up and working so I could demo it to the department heads who were looking to upgrade lots of old IBM XT's.

While DOS with Windows 286 worked okay, OS/2 for Mach20 never would get past installation.

I finally told my boss that I was getting nowhere with OS/2. She contacted her boss and later relayed to me that OS/2 for Mach20 had been marked as a "non functional product" and would be going away.

The happy ending was that I kept the Mach20 board in my ancient PC and used it for my remaining programming classes. It ran Turbo Pascal and QuickC for DOS quite well.

So this makes you a candidate for the ultimate retro-computing challenge :

"¹ If you’re one of those retro-computing archivists, I guess this poses an extraordinary challenge even greater than possessing a Tandy Video Information System: Can you track down one of the three remaining copies of OS/2 for Mach 20?"

Coincidentally, I got a job at Tandy right out of college and I got to see the demise of the VIS firsthand.

There was a big warehouse in Fort Worth where un-sellable products ended up, so I definitely could've won that challenge. They had pallet-loads of brand-new VIS machines bundled with all 20-odd games for around $49.

> "non functional product"

More accounting fun! This time around revenue recognition. It used to be that you had to ship a physical item to a customer in order to recognize the revenue from the sale. So the place I worked at back then would send out first-draft manuals to customers who had ordered the not-quite-done software. When we finished it and it passed testing, we'd send them the actual diskettes and an updated manual.

I never heard of any complaints being lodged, so it must have been a standard industry practice of the time. Or the salespeople had already smoothed the waves with the customers.

I miss those days. I worked in the Compute department for the DOT and we were always getting proof of concept hardware and some of it ended up under my desk.

Boss has a Dec laptop that was _thin_ (Digital Hi Note?)

We had a Dec Alpha running an early version of Windows NT

I had a Dec PC that started out as a 486, then got a Pentium 120 upgrade daughter card. (possibly this one, though that looks like a Mid tower and the one I had was full-sized) http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/43316/Digital-Persona...

Nowadays...your expansion slots are used for your GPU and....well....maybe a better WiFi card?

We sold quite a bit of those Dec alphas with nt! (Source: I was a qa intern)

Were you on the phone with IBM troubleshooting their OS/2 port? I would think it was available.

The expansion boards mentioned (Microsoft Mach, Orchid Turbo) are members of a product category I've ever only seen in ads, never in real life. Probably because they only made sense, pricing-wise, for actual-IBM PCs, not for the clones that pretty much everyone was running (often at a much higher clock speeds than the 'real' PC/XT or even PC/AT, which in my neck of the woods was never that popular: the 386SX was the first must-have upgrade due to its insanely higher speed).

That OS/2 for such cards never sold well is not much of a surprise: OS/2 1.x was pretty much pointless anyway, and even the comparably-more-useful Windows 2.x releases were not exactly bestsellers.

I did some OS/2 1.x development on a PS/2 Model 80, a full-height tower that was as expensive as it was heavy. It had a real 80386, VGA, 2MB RAM, plus a whopping 120MB of disk space. The new proprietary MCA bus wouldn't fit any existing expansion cards, and a lot of existing (DOS/Windows) software wasn't available in the new-fangled 3.5" floppy format either.

Switching the thing on was the best part of the experience: the heavy-duty power switch made a very satisfying 'clunk' sound. The duration of the BIOS memory test and the OS/2 boot process were less fun, and software development was downright horrible: despite the US$ 5000 price tag, the OS/2 SDK was extremely limited and slow, and only used the 386 as a slightly faster 286 (whereas DOS-based tooling at the time would let you do some pretty interesting things already).

I started home computing in the late 70’s to early 80’s. Over the years I’ve found that when I get to the point that I need to upgrade one part of the computer, it’s almost never worth it. It’s usually time to upgrade the whole thing. When I would replace or upgrade a single part, it would extend me for maybe 6 months before I ran into another piece needing an upgrade.

These days, I tend to buy higher end computers and use them for a long time. For example, I just retired my 2013 Mac Pro this last week. It was running fine, but can’t update to the latest OS and some of my critical software needs the latest OS to run, or will shortly. If it weren’t for that, I probably would have waited another year or two to upgrade.

It took me too long to understand this, but I'll toss in one exception to your rule: storage (short term and long term). I've found that it's frequently useful and economical to upgrade long term storage; eg. the HDs/SSDs until recently were on a price curve such that you were better off postponing buying more until you needed it. And quite a few of my systems have gotten a RAM bump midlife (where prices had come down). Alas, as more as more systems now come with soldered down memory, I usually max it out for longevity.

That 2013 Mac Pro can actually keep on chugging with the latest OS care of OpenCore Legacy Patcher. Thankfully Apple doesn’t seem too inclined to force these into e-waste/retro computing.

You could get similar products for the non-PC compatible computers that were popular in the UK, especially during the late 80s/early 90s period when PC software was worth having but the hardware was still comparatively expensive.

- Amiga: http://amiga.resource.cx/exp/a2386sx - Atari ST: https://www.atarimagazines.com/startv4n12/pcditto2.html

- Acorn Archimedes: https://chrisacorns.computinghistory.org.uk/32bit_UpgradesA2...

- BBC Micro: https://chrisacorns.computinghistory.org.uk/Computers/Master...

I used Amiga and Archimedes PC cards in the 90s - couldn't tell you which ones - and have seen a BBC Master 512 in use. I admit I've never actually seen an ST hardware emulator though.

(I used the software-based pc ditto on an ST in the 90s, which did a decent job of being a IBM XT, albeit one running at about 1 MHz. But I'm sure it would have run very nicely on a Falcon or TT030.)

Probably after the era of PC/XT upgrades, the 386SLC had the clock speeds and on-die cache that made close to the DX.

I really enjoyed my time developing on OS/2 1.2 and later 1.3 with the IBM intern-developed VESA SVGA driver. It was multitasking that really worked. My first PC was a clone 386DX with socketed cache chips, 8MB RAM, and 11 MHz overclocked ISA bus to make the video updates faster.

My next PC was a PS/2 Model 77 running OS/2 (and later Win NT). It was so hard finding an MCA SoundBlaster-compatible card (by Piper Research) so I could play Doom.

Mac CPU upgrades were a big market, though. In the 68K era you had things like Daystar cards and the Radius Rocket, and Apple themselves made a PPC 601 card. Sonnet even made them for allegedly unupgradeable machines, like the 7200 G3 upgrade that took over a PCI slot. The extension shunted everything to the CPU on the card and disabled the 601 soldered to the board.

> OS/2 1.x was pretty much pointless anyway

It was the base for LAN Manager, IBM/Microsoft’s answer to Netware. Never anywhere near as popular as Netware, but some people used it.

OS/2 1.x Extended Edition also had some mainframe integration bits (Communications Manager). Useful stuff if you needed to talk to an IBM mainframe.

Wow, this reminds me how "stone knives and bearskins" the old days were. "The IBM PC came with five expansion slots, and they were in high demand. You needed one for the hard drive controller, one for the floppy drive controller, one for the video card, one for the printer parallel port, one for the mouse. Oh no, you ran out of slots, and you haven’t even gotten to installing a network card or expansion RAM yet!"

Uphill, in the snow, both ways, etc, etc.

Worse was Micro-channel PCs from IBM, you could not put a card in a slot unless you had a driver that supported that particular slot. You could have more slots than cards but found where you HAD to put one card would conflict with another card that needed the same slots.

It's amazing we didn't all end up alcoholics, really.

I wonder if, in the parallel universe where IBM implemented bus-mastering for MCA, they would still be in the PC market. Just about all the other PS/2 upgrades were adopted; VGA, PS/2 mouse/keyboard, 72-pin RAM.

I had a 386 AboveBoard IIRC, plus an 8-in-1 for all my I/O needs, HD controller, CGA adapter and of course the all important 2400 v.42bis modem for getting onto bulletin boards. Good times (but not accurate, because no system clock)

That's V.22bis - V.42 would get you a nice 33600 which I was often having up and until 2007 or so.

I really liked OS/2 (warp). I often wonder what the computer landscape would look like these days if the likes of Commodore hadn’t completely messed up, or Windows never gained traction.

Operating Systems are in a really weird place right now. I find that macOS has regressed somewhat performance-wise (it was very impressive on my first mac, a powerbook), as has windows. I’ve just switched my PC to Arch, and I think the Linux desktop experience is more or less there these days. The only thing holding me back before was Windows-only games, but the recent Valve sponsored efforts have proved fruitful, and the likes of World Of Warcraft play just great under Proton.

It was very interesting for operating systems in the 1990s, and I think we’re looking at another great period in the 2020s.

I don't know about the greatness that's coming in the operating system space.

There seems to be a lot of focus on taking control from the consumer and into the hands of the manufacturer, similar to the model used by mobile phones already.

Usually there's ways around it like with Apple's system integrity protection and sealed system volume. But attestation is also becoming an ever bigger thing and I could see apps being blocked on those systems in the future.

OS/2 Warp was awesome. The SOM model and the deep object orientation of the desktop would hold up very well even today.

Sadly, OS/2 Warp was still 16 bit in important places and had a massive flaw in that it had a single I/O queue that could completely lock out the user ( no keyboard or mouse ) even if the OS was technically still running.

I think we are entering an era of several freely available and viable desktops. The pro and con though is they will all be the same from an application perspective since they will all be primarily running POSIX apps ( perhaps with Linux expressions ).

Also, while containers are amazing, they kind of tie us down to the Linux kernel ( at least for now ).

Page 32 of the linked Infoworld magazine shows an entire 286 computer with a faster clock speed retailing for about twice the cost of the Mach 20 board.

It was an interesting era, retail ads for everything from 10 mhz 8086 to 20 mhz 386 in the same issue.

Non-functional product. This brings back memories of repeatedly trying to get NeXTSTEP 3.3 that was in the office to run on x86 hardware. With help from others who loaned hardware and help put together a Digital Research PC with a Vesa-LocalBus video card and a SCSI card that worked with various incantations during the boot cycles. After many days and many PC's left apart around the office, it finally ran and it was all worth it to experience what seemed like the future. Interface Builder and the whole NSObject system was incredible.

I also remember there was some kind of upgrade from 286 to crappy 486SX. Or was it from 80386? I saw ads of it bundled together with Windows 95 ones.

Meanwhile if you installed Windows 95 on its minimum supported 80386/4M RAM system, you could literally die while waiting for it to boot. I've personally witnessed it once, luckily was very young and had some runway.

And then enjoy horribly distorted greyish 16-color palette.

I (vaguely) remember there being a bunch of these half-baked upgrade solutions, but are you thinking of the Cyrix 386 to 486 upgrade?

http://datasheets.chipdb.org/Cyrix/New%20Folder/faq386up.htm

There was Pentium OverDrive which could take you from 486 to Pentium.

I had an Overdrive that went from an original Pentium to the Pentium-MMX I think, while also doubling clock speed (75 MHz to 150!).

Even today, people are pulling out their old computer's CPU and plugging a frickin' Raspberry Pi into the socket to make it run more like a modern computer: https://amigastore.eu/853-pistorm.html

Tangentially related: My first use of FreeBSD was setting up a print server to allow an OS/2 computer running the software for a scanning tunneling microscope to output to an Apple LaserWriter.

I also inadvertently made a domain controller mirror with SAMBA when fooling around with that.

We once made the mistake of stepping through a program in Microsoft Programmer's Workbench debug mode. Caused a problem which could only be fixed by re-installing OS/2 (26 diskettes).

What about the Kin software which was canned along with the device after just a hundred or so sales?

Not Microsoft BOB? :)

Microsoft Bob sold around 58K units, or a whopping 500K% more than the subject of the article. Make of that what you will...

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