Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by tracker1 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

tracker1

They hamstrung and killed OS/2 similarly.

View on HN

Yup. I'll be covering OS/2 when I look at operating systems in this period.

The level of foot-shooting by IBM on that one was ridiculous.

Could IBM have succeeded given Microsoft’s betrayal? Or did Microsoft just give up on IBM ever delivering something?

They had different goals. But it's not clear that Microsoft's goals--a largely hardware-independent OS--ever made sense for IBM. As it turned out, a more proprietary PC architecture didn't really make sense for IBM either but that was sort of beside the point.

Arguably they could have avoided Microsoft "betrayal" as well. Ultimately, Windows 3.0 was a skunkworks project of single engineer against the corporate decisions of Microsoft, and only when it was quite closer to complete did it start getting management buy-in.

Pretty sure for a long time it was "cloaked" as stop-gap solution, a continuation of the lesser-known "windows runtime embedded in application" option that some software shipped with.

I was working at IBM in Boca Raton in 1990-91 when OS/2 was being developed. Wandering the hallways one afternoon, I passed by the OS/2 team where I overheard one engineer explaining to another engineer, "See, when you drag a file to the trash can, it should be a Move operation, not a Copy." I thought, OMG, this project is hosed. This was just a few months before it was supposed to be released.

The first release of OS/2 was a complete disaster. IBM was inundated with calls from customers who were having issues. They pulled every single person on the site into service as customer reps, without any training in OS/2! I was working on a UNIX project at the time and I was an Apple person - I had no clue how to help people with OS/2 or PCs but my manager did not like it when I tried to explain that. So I probably am listed somewhere as the worst OS/2 customer support person ever.

Wandering the hallways one afternoon, I passed by the OS/2 team where I overheard one engineer explaining to another engineer, "See, when you drag a file to the trash can, it should be a Move operation, not a Copy."

But you didn't hear the other engineer respond, "No, no, you don't understand. This is an advanced prototype using functional programming. Moving the document to the trash would have side effects. Creating a copy and placing that in the trash can, however..."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com