Half an operating system: The triumph and tragedy of OS/2

IBM doesn't make operating systems anymore for a reason.

Read the whole story

 

[grimlog]

The low-end PS/2s were the most crippled. No Micro Channel, slow CPU speeds, and 256 colors only in very low resolution (as you can see from the text).

And a beautiful Model M keyboard! All hail the Model M!

If you dragged in a color from the color palette, the folder would now have that background color. You could do the same with wallpaper bitmaps. And fonts. In fact, you could do all three and quickly change any folder to a hideous combination, and each folder could be differently styled in this fashion.

I don't know about hideous. I'd love to be able to do this, with folders and each subfolder having their own different 'theme' for displaying objects - icons vs thumbnails, icon/thumbnail size, list view vs icon view, etc. I hate that this is still not (AFAIK) something that can be done on Windows.

 

[Teriyaki]

Oh man, such nostalgia.

I loved OS/2 since 2.0 and 2.1.

It was a really great OS while Windows at the time was a crashy unstable mess.

It had long file names, was rock solid, and the interface was a lot more logical than Windows. It was a better Windows until Win32 came out and lack of Win32 compatibility killed OS/2.

Too bad for no apps and no hardware drivers.

The good OSes always die young and appless. (RIP OS/2, BeOS, WebOS...)

 

[Darkness1231]

Nice read, thanks for that.

Couple of points for clarity. The PC was a quick move to market that was specifically Open in the beginning. That was because nobody had the capacity to manufacture all those funky serial port cards and the myriad of other items that extended the PC to be more than a terminal. In fact, nobody knew what was going to be needed or what the market would actually want.

When the PC/AT was released IBM was receiving ~90% of all 286 productions and many journalists were astounded that IBM displayed stacks of PC/AT ready to ship that, to their knowledge, were more than all the 286s that existed - in several different locations.

Personal anecdote, running a multi-tasking solutions was interesting on both systems. I built a small system that drove a specialized hardware card. We would fit several in the larger machine. Running on DOS it ran in X time but was unable to run two. Windows ran two in 2X time, OS/2 ran two in 1.06X and eventually NT ran in ~1.25X. In many of my cases OS/2 was a clear winner.

I have long thought that this legacy position in the mainframe business tainted the method for dealing with PCs. Trying to put the genie back in the bottle was vastly more difficult when the genie was released by IBM's PC division and the bottle was theoretically held by the mainframe group. Trying to close an open design was never going to work.

 

[umaxtu]

I have a Compaq Portable sitting in my room right now. It still works, but the hardcard died last year and I don't have the disks.

 

[ta.speot.is]

Am I missing something?

IBM doesn't make operating systems anymore for a reason.

http://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Z/OS

z/OS is a 64-bit operating system for mainframe computers, produced by IBM

...

Latest stable release Version 2.1 (V2R1) / September 30, 2013; 50 days ago

 

[Spudster]

For a decent amount of time, QEMM & DesqView was the best way to multitask DOS apps.

 

[Decade]

ta.speot.is[/url]":12h1m162]Am I missing something?

IBM doesn't make operating systems anymore for a reason.

Also, AIX is still being supported.

I guess Jeremy Reimer specializes in the "obscure and beautiful," not the obscure and ugly.

 

[OSX@Linux]

Wow, what a great read. Thanks for writing this article. I really enjoyed it.

This is a whole world completely foreign to me. All I've ever known is the Windows/MacOS battles, and I was only barely old enough to understand those. Since I was born the year OS/2 came out, I have absolutely no idea what I missed. I remember being envious of the MacOS computers at my elementary school while I was stuck on Windows 95 back at home. The history behind operating systems is so cool, but I'm sad that I only ever get to read about it.

 

[WaveRunner]

Revenge of the Nerds... where Larry Ellison predicted the cloud! Don't know why that statement always stuck with me as the most important piece of that entire 3 part documentary.

 

[joshv]

I remember counseling a friend to buy OS/2 Warp instead of Windows 95. Let's just say he's no longer a friend

Honestly though at the time, it really did seems like Warp would be the better OS.

 

[Rubberman]

Yeah. The joke was always OS/2 + PS/2 == half an operating system on half a computer! That said, OS/2 was a decent multi-tasking OS, and the PS/2 hardware design had some nice enhancements over the PC-AT. I am still using PS/2 keyboard and mouse interfaces today. That aside, the PC-AT keyboard was, in my opinion, the best keyboard EVER! I killed my last one by spilling a beer into its guts, but if that hadn't happened I'd still be using it today.

 

[Entegy]

Great write up Jeremy.

On the last page though, you might want to change "Windows Surface" on the last page to "Windows 8" or "Surface tablets" There is no Windows Surface. Windows is the software and Surface the hardware.

 

[grimlog]

joshv[/url]":39jmac1x]

Honestly though at the time, it really did seems like Warp would be the better OS.

Speaking of Warp and it's marketing, this article made me realize that the OS battles feel like musty history to me now, but memories of TNG/Voyager/DS9 still seem fresh, complete with dorm-room discussions of how crap Voyager was compared to TNG and how DS9 was a soap-opera. I wonder if I'm alone in feeling this way.

/end Star Trek aside

 

[westlake]

The MS-DOS PC was a viable commercial product with credible hardware and software support before the cloning of the IBM PC BIOS.

The port of business-oriented commercial software from the eight-bit world of CP/M was straight-forward and MS-DOS at retail list was 1/5 the price of C/PM-86.

The cloning of the PC BIOS sped things along, of course, but I don't think it changes the story very much.

 

[potato44819]

Ah, OS/2. How we miss thee. It amazed me how microsoft managed to take on multiple players at once; the OS space, the office suite space, etc.

Google is perhaps the company that will end up upsetting microsoft on this front; the web is where most of my heavy lifting gets done now; I keep windows 7 primarily for gaming now, and that is it.

 

[Hinton]

grimlog[/url]":39ftf69i]

I don't know about hideous. I'd love to be able to do this, with folders and each subfolder having their own different 'theme' for displaying objects - icons vs thumbnails, icon/thumbnail size, list view vs icon view, etc. I hate that this is still not (AFAIK) something that can be done on Windows.

You have been able to do this atleast since Windows 7 (I skipped Vista).

Just right click, and set how the folder show permanently be viewed.

 

[fluxtatic]

Hinton[/url]":2ih04l89]

grimlog[/url]":2ih04l89]

I don't know about hideous. I'd love to be able to do this, with folders and each subfolder having their own different 'theme' for displaying objects - icons vs thumbnails, icon/thumbnail size, list view vs icon view, etc. I hate that this is still not (AFAIK) something that can be done on Windows.

You have been able to do this atleast since Windows 7 (I skipped Vista).

Just right click, and set how the folder show permanently be viewed.

Actually, I'm pretty sure you could do this back to at least Win98.

 

[ta.speot.is]

grimlog[/url]":23tvg6ld]I don't know about hideous. I'd love to be able to do this, with folders and each subfolder having their own different 'theme' for displaying objects - icons vs thumbnails, icon/thumbnail size, list view vs icon view, etc. I hate that this is still not (AFAIK) something that can be done on Windows.

Does this article for Windows XP help?

If you change these view settings or customize a folder, Windows remembers your settings when you open the folder again. You can use the folder's View menu to change the view settings for the folder. You can use the Customize tab in the folder's Properties dialog box to modify the folder icon, picture, and template.

 

[BacMan]

This article brings back memories. As a gamer, until win95, I recall primarily using win 3.1, booting into dos with a floppy. GUIs were resource hogs.

 

[omf]

3rdalbum[/url]"7axsy8d]

WTF? The original Mac in 1984 had 128k of RAM. Even in 1985, having a GUI running in 500k did not require "crazy geniuses", just clever and frugal programming. And multitasking was possible on the 512k Mac, too.

I think it's fair to call the original Mac OS programmers "crazy geniuses".

 

[Bad Monkey!]

lol wut

 

[m.silkstone]

The 386 was Intel’s first truly modern CPU. Not only could it access a staggering 4GB of RAM in 32-bit protected mode . . .

Is that right? 4GB of ram!?

 

[Hinton]

This brings back bad memories for me.

This is about when television commercials became legal in Denmark, and there would be advertisements about how you could multitask in OS/2 Warp, along with the slogan, "sådan er det når du warper" [that's how its like when you're warping].


Pity the internet wasn't as common back then, or there wouldn't have been any Windows or OS/2, it would have been Amiga OS. Still, even with the limited information available, I am still dumbfounded today why people actually purchased PCs. They weren't even cheaper than Amigas, and didn't in any meaning full way have better software either.

 

[omf]

OSX@Linux[/url]":e4v1lvzh]The history behind operating systems is so cool, but I'm sad that I only ever get to read about it.

I was in my teens and early twenties during this era, so I remember it all well. I think those of us who were around and paying attention to all this have a different perspective on the current battles in the mobile OS space than younger people. For one thing, I see Microsoft trying to tie everything back to Windows on the desktop as a rehash of IBM trying to tie everything back to their mainframes and just shake my head...

 

[Hinton]

3rdalbum[/url]":9pp5lq9h]

The trouble was that GUIs took a while to develop, and they took up more resources than their non-GUI counterparts. In a world where most 286 clones came with only 1MB RAM standard, this was going to pose a problem. Some GUIs, like the Workbench that ran on the highly advanced Amiga OS, could squeeze into a small amount of RAM, but AmigaOS was designed by a tiny group of crazy geniuses.

WTF? The original Mac in 1984 had 128k of RAM. Even in 1985, having a GUI running in 500k did not require "crazy geniuses", just clever and frugal programming. And multitasking was possible on the 512k Mac, too.

Weren't Macs just taskswapping?

edit:

AFAIK OSX was the first Apple OS that could preemptively multitask.

 

[Daros]

I had OS/2 Warp as a teenager since my dad was a life-long, dedicated IBM engineer* and actually really enjoyed using it. Especially once he installed Object Desktop, it became a really awesome operating system.

* how dedicated? My first computer that was "mine" was a PCjr, and my second was included a Cyrix 6x86 CPU. Yea...

 

[ronaldst]

Testing. Well I can't seem to be able to post from my smartphone.

I used OS/2 until Windows 2000 came out. It was distressing to see Warp 4 coming without Font Smoothing. OS/2 had adobe font oobx from version 1_3. The other depressing thing was the new incredibly fugly UI.

I still compare new OSes and new concepts to OS/2 all the time.

 

[3rdalbum]

m.silkstone[/url]":18waimyb]The 386 was Intel’s first truly modern CPU. Not only could it access a staggering 4GB of RAM in 32-bit protected mode . . .

Is that right? 4GB of ram!?

32-bit addressing equals 4GiB of addressable RAM.

 

[MonkeyPaw]

m.silkstone[/url]":28vvvsp1]The 386 was Intel’s first truly modern CPU. Not only could it access a staggering 4GB of RAM in 32-bit protected mode . . .

Is that right? 4GB of ram!?

Yes, that's why we just transitioned to 64bit, as we started smacking into that limit. Back then, 4GB of RAM was pretty much inconceivable, as you were pretty well off running 4MB. I think my first PC, a 386SX2, had 2MB.

I still can't here the Rolling Stones' "Start me up" song without flashing back to the Windows 95 commercials and my first year of college. Good times.

 

[joshv]

3rdalbum[/url]":nkbklchl]

m.silkstone[/url]":nkbklchl]The 386 was Intel’s first truly modern CPU. Not only could it access a staggering 4GB of RAM in 32-bit protected mode . . .

Is that right? 4GB of ram!?

32-bit addressing equals 4GiB of addressable RAM.

I wonder if there ever was a 386 with 4GB of RAM installed.

 

[dmsilev]

Hinton[/url]":v3g1p3x4]

3rdalbum[/url]":v3g1p3x4]

The trouble was that GUIs took a while to develop, and they took up more resources than their non-GUI counterparts. In a world where most 286 clones came with only 1MB RAM standard, this was going to pose a problem. Some GUIs, like the Workbench that ran on the highly advanced Amiga OS, could squeeze into a small amount of RAM, but AmigaOS was designed by a tiny group of crazy geniuses.

WTF? The original Mac in 1984 had 128k of RAM. Even in 1985, having a GUI running in 500k did not require "crazy geniuses", just clever and frugal programming. And multitasking was possible on the 512k Mac, too.

Weren't Macs just taskswapping?

edit:

AFAIK OSX was the first Apple OS that could preemptively multitask.

Yes and no, several versions of MacOS had cooperative multitasking. Going back to System 7 at least, and maybe 6. It was real multitasking in the sense that the computer could be running multiple applications simultaneously and wasn't just keeping them in memory and swapping back and forth. But, the cooperative nature meant that it only worked well when all of the applications played nice and yielded back control of the CPU after their timeslice was up. All you needed was one badly-behaving application and the whole system would freeze up.

OSX and the introduction of a preemptive multitasking system was a big step up, but you could multitask in Classic.

 

[Scannall]

Hinton[/url]":2f4q67va]

3rdalbum[/url]":2f4q67va]

The trouble was that GUIs took a while to develop, and they took up more resources than their non-GUI counterparts. In a world where most 286 clones came with only 1MB RAM standard, this was going to pose a problem. Some GUIs, like the Workbench that ran on the highly advanced Amiga OS, could squeeze into a small amount of RAM, but AmigaOS was designed by a tiny group of crazy geniuses.

WTF? The original Mac in 1984 had 128k of RAM. Even in 1985, having a GUI running in 500k did not require "crazy geniuses", just clever and frugal programming. And multitasking was possible on the 512k Mac, too.

Weren't Macs just taskswapping?

edit:

AFAIK OSX was the first Apple OS that could preemptively multitask.

Pre-OS X they used a cooperative multitasking model, that worked pretty well. Though preemptive is better.

 

[Scannall]

omf[/url]":276575zs]

3rdalbum[/url]":276575zs]

WTF? The original Mac in 1984 had 128k of RAM. Even in 1985, having a GUI running in 500k did not require "crazy geniuses", just clever and frugal programming. And multitasking was possible on the 512k Mac, too.

I think it's fair to call the original Mac OS programmers "crazy geniuses".

Very much so.

http://www.folklore.org/index.py

 

[LJByrne]

Just one update, the Mac in 1984 was the first mainstream "PC" to use the 3.5 inch floppy disk drives. There were other but not well known personal computers before that using the 3.5 inch drive.

You could say the PS/2 was the first PC which ran Windows or DOS to use the 3.5 inch floppy disk drive.

 

[3rdalbum]

Hinton[/url]":2og9u40h]

3rdalbum[/url]":2og9u40h]

The trouble was that GUIs took a while to develop, and they took up more resources than their non-GUI counterparts. In a world where most 286 clones came with only 1MB RAM standard, this was going to pose a problem. Some GUIs, like the Workbench that ran on the highly advanced Amiga OS, could squeeze into a small amount of RAM, but AmigaOS was designed by a tiny group of crazy geniuses.

WTF? The original Mac in 1984 had 128k of RAM. Even in 1985, having a GUI running in 500k did not require "crazy geniuses", just clever and frugal programming. And multitasking was possible on the 512k Mac, too.

Weren't Macs just taskswapping?

I beg your pardon - yes, in 1985 they were doing that. Still, the RAM requirements are very similar to otger forms of multitasking, so my point mainly stands. Also, the original 128k Macs had Desk Accessories, which used a rudimentary form of cooperative multitasking.

AFAIK OSX was the first Apple OS that could preemptively multitask.

First MacOS, but A/UX in 1988 was the first Apple preemptive multitasking OS.

I hear a rumour that preemptive multitasking was developed for Mac OS 9, but purposely killed to give an extra reason for users to upgrade to OS X when it came out.

 

[StickyPad]

Don't forget what Windows 3.1.1 brought to the market place. A "minor update with bug fixes and printer drivers" (microsoft reported) broke windows from running in OS/2. For no good reason. I think this scared a lot of people as MS intended.