Thoughts on the occasion of the 25th Anniversary of IBM OS/2 | Hacker News Reader

Thoughts on the occasion of the 25th Anniversary of IBM OS/2

plus.google.com

40 pointsboopsie30 comments

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

You're correct that NT3.5 was out before Win95. That said, checking Wikipedia, OS/2 was out before either of them (April '87) whereas WinNT 3.5 was July '93 and Win95 was August '95.

Sidestepping chronology that is dating us massive, the productivity win of having minicomputer/workstation OS features available for microcomputers in both OS/2 and WinNT I just cannot overstate. Teh suck of rebooting a DOS machine multiple times a day just to do work is a memory best long forgotten.

Not to mention how Chicago (codename for Win95) was delayed and how MS was attacking OS/2 in the meantime (look up "Microsoft Munchkins" for one example). And it helped continue MS's legal troubles with Digital Research/Novell over DR-DOS. In contrast, OS/2 did not run on top of DOS at all, and DR-DOS 5.0 was released not long before Win3.0 was released. And MS released the OS/2 2.0 SDK to developers at the end of 1989. Yea, I am talking about the JDA break-up circa 1991. The MS-IBM JDA was not perfect, but the alternative MS chose was a lot worse and delayed native 32-bit programming by years (Intel released the 80386 in 1985!).

I do still have my t-shirt about the flight to Chicago being delayed...

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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>

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Deleted comment

I did, but I worked at IBM at the time.

Recall downloading the beta tests repeatedly, over a dozen 1.44Mb disk images, over the internal SNA network. Had to transfer them to my local mainframe, then down to my PC, then cut to a disk. Typically did that one night and the install the next night. Depending on how good or bad the beta was it would take a couple of hours, or all night (since I HAD to have a working system the next day). Was the first time the PC/OS2 folks allowed anyone outside of Boca to participate in the beta testing.

Coming from a Mac/XWindows background at the time, I didn't think OS/2 1.3 was all that special. 2.0 "felt" much better than either Win 3.1 or System 7 at the time. But it was so tied to IBM's PS/2 systems that even if you wanted to run it on your home system you were likely out of luck.

Compatibility improved over time, but not quickly enough to counter Windows. Plus the PC/PSG folks did anything and everything they could to require "most favored nation" status with OS/2, while at the same time courting Microsoft to ensure Windows '95 ran well out of the gate on the Aptivas, Thinkpads and whatever other brands I can't recall.

One of the potential advantages that OS/2 had, which IBM blew, was its TCP/IP stack was pretty good, much, much, much better than what was on Windows at the time ('92-94). Even then, IBM initially made it a separate package (I have no idea how much it cost) because as we all know, the future is LU6.2 networking over SNA.

IBM employee desktops were required to be OS/2 well into 1998-1999. But since IBM killed off WebExplorer, and Netscape Navigator for OS/2 was always just a little bit too off to be considered serious, many of us were using Windows '95 by late 1996 or early 1997. I finally made the switch over to Windows '95 permanently in mid-1998 when I realized I couldn't see the ibm.com homepage redesign we were launching.

OS/2 2.0 was not tied to PS/2 systems and clones was officially supported.

PS/2 was perceived to be an attempt to take control of the clone industry through licensing the Microchannel bus. (The original PC had much more liberal FRAND licensing.) So, IBM was seen to be the "bad guy" in a lot of technical circles. Even though OS/2 had little to do with this, IMO it was tainted by the branding association.

And while OS/2 2.0 supported clones, it didn't really recognize them. (e.g. the printer list was full of IBM models only).

Yea, this was one of the result of the JDA break-up. Traditionally MS licensed OS/2 1.x to OEMs just like DOS with each OEM version of OS/2 supporting the OEM's own systems. Only with 1.3 MS finally released a packaged product for OS/2, despite most systems being fully AT compatible from the beginning.

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

"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.

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

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com