Preview edition of Microsoft OS/2 2.0 sold on eBay | Hacker News Reader

Preview edition of Microsoft OS/2 2.0 sold on eBay

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You haven't lived until you've installed OS/2 from 26 floppies, and then realized the 24th floppy was bad.

Fun times.

The Windows 95 floppy install was so bad it was worth borrowing a CD-ROM drive from another computer to run the install from instead.

I remember doing some weird share thing in MSDOS with a serial cable to accomplish this -- one machine had the CDROM drive...

Yeah, I remember the Window 95 beta with a tons of floppy disks

That is only the base OS, then proceed to install one of the Visual Age products, and other productivity software. :)

Hence why I duplicated all my floppies and would only install from those copies.

Someone just bought a version of OS/2 2.0 from Microsoft, not IBM, on eBay...

No, they bought an SDK for it.

It's an SDK release that also contains the operating system which never shipped.

Looking at the eBay photos, the whole thing is 26 floppies.

I wrote this story. Clearly I needed to make that part a lot more obvious. :-(

There used to be a guy around here who had an incredible fixation on this. I tend to believe him that Microsoft OS/2 2.0 probably did ship to some limited extent through OEMs.

However, MS and IBM were already getting "divorced", and this may have been a token part of the settlement. A year later, MS shipped Windows NT.

Windows NT didn't ship until July 1993, a full three years after Windows 3.0.

The OS/2 interregnum was quite long. All those years Microsoft was still selling their 16-bit OS/2 1.3 because their server software (including SQL Server) ran on that platform.

Apologies for lack of background info leading to confusion.

Microsoft and IBM had a joint development agreement for many years. When they "divorced" in 1992, they both retained rights to DOS 5, Windows 3.0, and OS/2 2.0.

Microsoft had NT, which was a multiuser system, unlike OS/2. Plus it had an OS/2 1.3 layer, specifically so you could migrate SQL Server. So after the divorce, MS obviously didn't promote OS/2, because they had a better thing coming.

FWIW WinNT was based on OS/2.

There were 3 editions of OS/2 planned:

OS/2 1.x, 16-bit, for the 80286

OS/2 2.x, 32-bit, for the 80386

OS/2 3.x, portable, for RISC and other CPU families

When MS and IBM split, IBM kept 2.x and Microsoft got 3.x.

It hired Dave Cutler and his team from DEC and gave them OS/2 3.x to complete. It was built on the Intel i860 RISC CPU, codenamed N-Ten. So this version was codenamed OS/2 NT.

Windows 3 was a big hit and Windows 3.1 even bigger, so OS/2 NT was renamed Windows NT.

Much of the world still runs it.

NT had an OS/2 personality but Cutler's team didn't "complete" OS/2. They built a new OS from scratch, with some inspiration from the work they had done at DEC before coming to MS.

My recollection from interview was ... he didn't like it (OS/2), and built their own OS arch from scratch but with some OS/2 back-compat to fulfill contractual obligations.

Correct, the NT kernel etc has nothing to do with OS/2. But they raided OS/2 for parts: LAN Manager was ported over ("Windows networking"), OS/2 1.3 personality, I think NTFS may have been based on HPFS, etc.

Apparently heavily based on VMS[0] and MICA[1] from DEC. I believe DEC sued because of this Microsoft, but they settled out of court.

[0] https://www.itprotoday.com/windows-client/windows-nt-and-vms...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEC_MICA

The joke/story is that if you increment each letter in "VMS" by one, you get WNT.

That's not where the name comes from, but it's kind of funny.

There’s a fantastic interview on YouTube with Dave Cutler. It’s 3 hours long but there are a few 10 minute highlight clips on the same channel.

https://youtu.be/xi1Lq79mLeE?si=Pqvm2XYwrYxNLutR

I had a copy of MS OS/2! It was a part of their email gateway product as it ran on OS/2 at the time. I got a NFR copy when my company was a partner I could get MS software for cheap.

Was it OS/2 2.0? If so, rare. But MS OS/2 1.3 LAN Manger was pretty widely distributed.

I wonder if the floppies still work.

I have to admit, that I was surprised when they all came back good! We already had the SDK on 3 1/2" disks, so we could compare the contents. Oddly enough all the executables, libraries and headders are a match but the helpfiles have a different CRC, despite being the same timestamp, and size.

I've installed it on 86box, and then converted the boot disk from 5 1/2" to 3 1/2" inch so I could install it on VMware and my IBM PS/2 model 80. That's another surprise I thought for sure the PS/2 drivers would be missing from the 5 1/4" disk version, but they were there!

On VMware the AT version of the PS/2 mouse driver locks the system up, but I copied the one from 6.123 and it works fine. Although there is no MS-DOS sessions working.

Also as a follow up on my 'dont waste money on a math co-processor' if you have the 'passthrough math' on 86box the dos sessions misbehave big time. Using the softfloat option for more accuate floats results in working MS-DOS. - Turns out OS/2 betas really did rely on a FPU!

You'd be surprised! Cleared my childhood house recently and got a box of floppies. Only 3 out of about a hundred were unreadeable! Had much worse results with my old CDs. Go figure...

If they've been stored correctly they should do. The things that kill floppies are magnets (obviously) and damp/mold.

Even when floppies were the primary removable storage, they'd randomly go bad.

It's the full OS + SDK and the networking bits & kernel debugger as well!

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