The OS/2 Thread - A better failure than failure

[Gargamel]

Let's talk about IBM's Operating System/2.

We can also talk about the line of computers it was originally intended to run on, known collectively as the Personal System/2.

My first experience with OS/2 was on a laptop I got from a yard sale for $5. It was a PS/2 L40SX sporting a 386SX at 16MHz, 16MB memory (actually 18MB), an 80MB hard drive, a grayscale VGA display, and OS/2 Warp 3. Very young me thought it was cool, but not terribly useful. I couldn't really figure out where to get software (didn't know about Hobbes at the time) and OS/2 ran like ass on this hardware anyway.

I ultimately dumped OS/2 in favor of Windows 95 which ran a bit better.

OS/2 had 16-bit and 32-bit versions in the early days. IBM insisted it be usable on 286 processors so it could run on most of the lower end PS/2 computers (and possibly the AT that came before). This was basically a waste because there was ultimately no way to effectively multitask DOS programs (the only programs anyone used) on the 286 due to it being buggy. There were at least 3 revisions of the 286. IBM had gotten OS/2 to the point where it could multitask kinda-sorta on one of those revisions by exploiting a hardware quirk that didn't work on the other ones. Eventually OS/2 would drop 286 support and be the 32-bit operating system it should have been from day one.

OS/2 was objectively a better operating system than the combination of DOS and Windows 3.x, if you had the hardware to run it properly. It encouraged the use of threads much the same way that the later BeOS did, so properly coded programs could run really smooth even with a high CPU load. That means your UI probably won't stutter while you're zipping some files or playing digital media. It also had a capable DOS virtual machine that could boot from floppy disks and also run it's own bundled copy of Windows 3.1. "A better DOS than DOS, and a better Windows than Windows" as they say.

The last major release of OS/2 was Warp 4 in 1996, after Windows 95 and close to the release of Windows NT 4.0. It was doomed to failure, not only due to IBM's extremely poor marketing, but also due to the fact that Windows 95 was good enough for most people and Windows NT had been gaining traction in the corporate world. It had an arguably better version of Solitaire, though.

Nowadays the modern OS/2 experience exists in the form of ArcaOS, a new version built on source code licensed from IBM. It exists primarily as a crutch for companies who still have infrastructure running on OS/2 programs, so that they can replace aging hardware with new systems that won't run Warp 4 while retaining software compatibility with their OS/2 programs. It's still a 32-bit operating system, but it's PAE enabled so all memory above 4GB can be used as a RAM disk. Which is more than you can say for the 32-bit client versions of Windows NT, which were deliberately gimped.

Speaking of Hobbes, it's going away soon.

 

[Scout Trooper]

Was OS/2 Warp the 32-bit version?

And yes, IBM did hobble OS/2 success, mostly by charging a premium for their hardware when there were tons of more affordable options and computers at that time were still typically between $1500 and $2500 for multimedia setups ($3000 - $5000 in today's dollars).

Compare that to a 1995 IBM PC 700 (Pentium 90) running $2974.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/how-the-ibm-pc-won-then-lost-the-personal-computer-market

Additionally, there weren't all the factors then that encouraged common file formats across operating systems so choosing OS/2 when you might be the only person in your school, work, or other social circle to do so was a huge commitment with relatively limited advantages.

 

[(not) y2k compliant]

Never used OS/2 back in the day, only much later after the fact in VMs. But I did have an odd piece of related media.
My family received a mailer of a floppy disk advertising OS/2 Warp 3. The disk contained a MS-DOS application that more or less was a slide show selling OS/2 to Windows users. Always found it odd seeing IBM making a desperation move mailing this out in a nation wide canvas marketing attempt to get some consumer market traction with OS/2. By 93', Windows clearly had won outright.

 

[Slav Power]

The last major release of OS/2 was Warp 4 in 1996, after Windows 95 and close to the release of Windows NT 4.0. It was doomed to failure, not only due to IBM's extremely poor marketing, but also due to the fact that Windows 95 was good enough for most people and Windows NT had been gaining traction in the corporate world. It had an arguably better version of Solitaire, though.

Lest we forget, Windows NT was essentially a fork of OS/2, and it ultimately dominated both the corporate and the consumer market. The latter of course only happened after Windows Me was such a disaster Microsoft finally decided to kill off Win9x for good and make the next consumer Windows based on NT. That would be Windows XP Home in 2001.

 

[The Backwards Man]

Never really tried IBM's OS/2, but I tried ArcaOS on an old Athlon XP system and it ran well enough.

 

[Mikoyan]

Was OS/2 Warp the 32-bit version?

And yes, IBM did hobble OS/2 success, mostly by charging a premium for their hardware when there were tons of more affordable options and computers at that time were still typically between $1500 and $2500 for multimedia setups ($3000 - $5000 in today's dollars).

Compare that to a 1995 IBM PC 700 (Pentium 90) running $2974.

View attachment 5781956

https://spectrum.ieee.org/how-the-ibm-pc-won-then-lost-the-personal-computer-market

Additionally, there weren't all the factors then that encouraged common file formats across operating systems so choosing OS/2 when you might be the only person in your school, work, or other social circle to do so was a huge commitment with relatively limited advantages.

No. 1.0-1.3 were 16-bit, 2.0 and up were 32. It never had (as OP vaguely implied) simultaneous 16 and 32 bit versions - though Windows did with NT and 3.1x.

Lest we forget, Windows NT was essentially a fork of OS/2, and it ultimately dominated both the corporate and the consumer market. The latter of course only happened after Windows Me was such a disaster Microsoft finally decided to kill off Win9x for good and make the next consumer Windows based on NT. That would be Windows XP Home in 2001.

So much of a fork that suuuuupposedly they had a boot error at the intro and it started throwing OS/2 SYS error messages, a source of some amount of consternation.

OS/2 was really something. It was my OS of choice for a fair bit of the 90s. The 2.0+ Workplace Shell was ahead of its time, and HPFS (compared to FAT) was incredible. The multitasking was also unlike almost anything else out there at the time, very very good. They never (truly) fixed the single input queue problem, but even that was a quibble. The problem of course was software and hardware support, then 95 took over despite it being kind of a hack.

I also have a soft spot for the Microchannel machines - before PCI came out they were really something special. But as people have said, the prices were nuts.

 

[Magicicada_septendecula]

I once installed Warp 4 on an old Thinkpad 380ED and rather liked it. It ran much quicker than the Windows 98 that I bought the old laptop with.

 

[Gargamel]

Lest we forget, Windows NT was essentially a fork of OS/2, and it ultimately dominated both the corporate and the consumer market. The latter of course only happened after Windows Me was such a disaster Microsoft finally decided to kill off Win9x for good and make the next consumer Windows based on NT. That would be Windows XP Home in 2001.

They also stole a bunch of VMS guys from Digital, who ended up writing substantial parts of NT. I think OS/2 was just a rough starting point. The two systems (OS/2 2.0 and NT 3.1) as released are quite different.

No. 1.0-1.3 were 16-bit, 2.0 and up were 32. It never had (as OP vaguely implied) simultaneous 16 and 32 bit versions - though Windows did with NT and 3.1x.

I wasn't quite sure if it was like the Windows 2.x situation, or if they changed completely from 16 to 32 bits in one major release.

I once installed Warp 4 on an old Thinkpad 380ED and rather liked it. It ran much quicker than the Windows 98 that I bought the old laptop with.

I'd imagine it runs much better on a Pentium than it did on my old 386. Even there it was usable though.

 

[Mikoyan]

I wasn't quite sure if it was like the Windows 2.x situation, or if they changed completely from 16 to 32 bits in one major release.

"Changed" is I guess the word to use but it seems odd. It was like Win16/Win32, the 32 bit system was a superset and 16 bit apps worked transparently.

I've always heard the 'VMS guys' story but I do wonder how much influence they had.... NT didn't feel very VMS'y. Rather than lightly modifying HPFS into NTFS you'd have thought they'd have made ground-up file versioning part of it sine that's (to me) a big part of the VMS Experience.

 

[Gargamel]

"Changed" is I guess the word to use but it seems odd. It was like Win16/Win32, the 32 bit system was a superset and 16 bit apps worked transparently.

"Changed" was a poor choice of words on my part.

I'm not sure I'd call Win32 a superset of Win16. A lot of stuff changed. 32-bit Windows doesn't actually run Win16 programs natively. They run in a DOS virtual machine similarly to how they do on OS/2, but much more transparently, with the 16-bit Windows environment stripped down to just the bare essentials (probably re-implemented) and completely hidden from view.

I've always heard the 'VMS guys' story but I do wonder how much influence they had.... NT didn't feel very VMS'y. Rather than lightly modifying HPFS into NTFS you'd have thought they'd have made ground-up file versioning part of it sine that's (to me) a big part of the VMS Experience.

NT doesn't seem anything like OS/2 to me. I don't know much about VMS's internals, but Microsoft did pay big money to get Dave Cutler on the team. That surely wasn't for nothing.

I do think with the performance of PCs of the era and the size of small computer hard drives, a versioning filesystem might have been a bit too much. NT when it released was already too much for the average computer in 1993. And they already had HPFS to to start with when they were developing NTFS, why throw it out?

 

[Jump]

hey also stole a bunch of VMS guys from Digital, who ended up writing substantial parts of NT. I think OS/2 was just a rough starting point. The two systems (OS/2 2.0 and NT 3.1) as released are quite different.

I wouldn't say they where stolen. DEC handed them over to MS. Cutler was working on a whole new architecture called Prism and OS for it. DEC canceled it and laid off most of his team. And ya Cutler and his crew made VMS so its no surprise lots of VMS like stuff is in NT.

Windows NT's internal name supposedly was "OS/2 NT". NT was just a continuation of the OS/2 codebase by Cutler's team at MS.
I think it's more correct to say IBM's version of OS/2 2.0 is actually the fork. Windows NT is just rebranded MS OS/2.

Losing Cutler was just the beginning of DEC's very quick corporate suicide.

 

[Mikoyan]

Windows NT's internal name supposedly was "OS/2 NT". NT was just a continuation of the OS/2 codebase by Cutler's team at MS.
I think it's more correct to say IBM's version of OS/2 2.0 is actually the fork. Windows NT is just rebranded MS OS/2.

It's best to say it's fucking complicated especially since there was a whole other war (Windows vs. 'Hawthorne', etc etc) at the Presentation Manager level.

Which brings around another point, the thing I occasionally consider it sucky we lost was CUA and CUA-like things in today's programs. I don't think it would've lasted long, really but it was... For a while it was neat. A very consistent approach to GUI and CLI programs was a nice thing to have.

 

[SilentDuck]

Let's talk about IBM's Operating System/2.

We can also talk about the line of computers it was originally intended to run on, known collectively as the Personal System/2.

My first experience with OS/2 was on a laptop I got from a yard sale for $5. It was a PS/2 L40SX sporting a 386SX at 16MHz, 16MB memory (actually 18MB), an 80MB hard drive, a grayscale VGA display, and OS/2 Warp 3. Very young me thought it was cool, but not terribly useful. I couldn't really figure out where to get software (didn't know about Hobbes at the time) and OS/2 ran like ass on this hardware anyway.

Using OS/2 was considered very unusual in its time. You were an IBMer or related to one, basically no one else cared except for very eccentric or marketing-susceptible type people with money. I had a 1st gen Thinkpad 486 running OS/2 2.1 as my intro. I remember it working flawlessly without sytem lockups unless you tried to mess with multmedia.

Did not like Warp at all since it was basically a normie version for normies with more normie stuff. The 2.x branch was arcane and might as well have been wizardry in order to get it to do anything you would want to as a youngin who is up to no good. Many weekends and nights, get on the internet, check the Hobbes FTP, check with the groomers on the USENET newsgroups actively trying to groom me... run through primordial search engines and go through those 90s software libraries like TuCows just hoping to find something useful in working condition that does what it says. A lot of the great applications and utilities programs were of course, written by IBMers.

At the time it was pretty frustrating since you go to your friends house and its running win 3.1 or eventually 95 and everything just works especially multimedia. You watch computer chronicles and shit on TV and everything just works properly fine on the 1st try no screwing around or frustration. But, the discreet PCMCIA 14.4k on the ole Thinkpad more than made up for it as I rapidly accumulated my own collection of personal filth. Oh yes, the most invaluable shit I learned from OS/2 was the many 'internet' and UNIX centric programs especially your basic uuencode/decode. Everything common in unix land had support in OS/2 from authors or from IBM in some way.

I found an old thrift store beige box computer and bought it on a whim. Had the guts of an IBM pentium inside, and sure enough installed and runs OS/2 flawlessly without any of the standard insanity trying to install OS/2 on hardware that is not IBM. Was fun to revisist but wouldn't want to live there permanently again. I had a few PS/2 386 machines at the time but were practically unusable with OS/2 even with a microchannel upgrade RAM card.

 

[Gargamel]

Which brings around another point, the thing I occasionally consider it sucky we lost was CUA and CUA-like things in today's programs. I don't think it would've lasted long, really but it was... For a while it was neat. A very consistent approach to GUI and CLI programs was a nice thing to have.

I really hate how we're moving away from consistent keyboard commands, and in some cases severely limiting the ability to control programs without using the mouse.

You can no longer close the current tab in Firefox by pressing CTRL-F4. You can't open the Downloads dialog with CTRL-J, it focues the address bar instead. But ALT-D and CTRL-L also both do that, and at least one of them is the correct way to do it already. CTRL-F5 was the standard way to force reload a page, but that doesn't do anything now.

Using OS/2 was considered very unusual in its time. You were an IBMer or related to one, basically no one else cared except for very eccentric or marketing-susceptible type people with money. I had a 1st gen Thinkpad 486 running OS/2 2.1 as my intro. I remember it working flawlessly without sytem lockups unless you tried to mess with multmedia.

At the time it was pretty frustrating since you go to your friends house and its running win 3.1 or eventually 95 and everything just works

So sorta like owning a Mac, but worse?

Did not like Warp at all since it was basically a normie version for normies with more normie stuff. The 2.x branch was arcane and might as well have been wizardry in order to get it to do anything you would want to as a youngin who is up to no good. Many

2.x, 3.x, and 4.x all seemed pretty arcane to me. 2.x went way overboard with the object orientation. Pretty cool for the time. The launchpad in Warp 3 was pretty cool, and the taskbar with the system menu button in Warp 4 was a pretty nice improvement. I didn't notice any improvements in the software and driver installation procedures though.

I never did like the tabbed dialogs with the tabs on the side. I much prefer the way MS implemented them in Windows with the tabs on the top, and overflows handled by simply adding another row of tabs.

I had a few PS/2 386 machines at the time but were practically unusable with OS/2 even with a microchannel upgrade RAM card.

Warp 3 ran slow but usable on my 386SX. Everything was slow on that computer. I may or may not have broken the OS/2 install at some point. OS/2 is easy to break if you don't know exactly what you're doing, and you also need to know OS/2 very well in order to fix a broken system. I want to say this was roughly 2002 or so. There wasn't anyone really using OS/2 by that point.

Windows 95 was also slow on that machine, especially since I DriveSpace'd the 80MB hard drive.

 

[Enig]

I spent years mocking OS/2 as an injoke and I will never stop, the only time it was remotely sane was when Microsoft was fronting most of it and the aftermath of that shows why IBM receded hard the past 30 to 40 years because only Thicc Blue could manage to fumble basic shit like "actually get people to make software" and "remember to ship the demo version with working graphics drivers".

 

[Mikoyan]

So sorta like owning a Mac, but worse?

Kinda! Mac people could subsume into the Mac Cult. And moreover... Mac always had Office. that was huge when throwing around resumes was pretty much .doc only. (Having said that, there was a really good indie word processor for mid-late phase OS/2...)

If you were doing some multimedia stuff, it wasn't no good. Games, almost forget it other than what Stardock was putting out. But that's why you had Boot Manager and a DOS partition if you were into that.

But for me it was solid and the multitasking was very very good. (and for certain api-heavy Windows apps it really was a better Windows than Windows because it was faster.)

 

[SilentDuck]

So sorta like owning a Mac, but worse?

No, OS/2 did not manage to shatter that ceiling of faggotry it was more like peerless corporate autism and a c-suite mentality from the 1950s when IBM's business was at it's zenith and they just invented hard drives. Bill Gates was just an awkward, yet to be born bisexual trust fund kid and a complete faggot. No fear of anything or anyone "we are computers".

2.x, 3.x, and 4.x all seemed pretty arcane to me. 2.x went way overboard with the object orientation. Pretty cool for the time. The launchpad in Warp 3 was pretty cool, and the taskbar with the system menu button in Warp 4 was a pretty nice improvement. I didn't notice any improvements in the software and driver installation procedures though.

I never did like the tabbed dialogs with the tabs on the side. I much prefer the way MS implemented them in Windows with the tabs on the top, and overflows handled by simply adding another row of tabs.

I didn't think Warp 3 was ready for release at it's time. Pretty unstable on the internet and sure enough Warp 4 became necessity. And by then way more PC features were needed to keep up with Windows and no one in their right mind was about to develop anything. Really it was still generally inadequate for a home PC to be running. Fine for some PS/2 486 'ironhorse' in a bank basement somewhere until the year 2038 doing some strange yet important task but no one is gonna run this shit at home when they are just trying to look up Julie Asthon's tits.

Very powerful OS that no one wanted and did not meet any conceivable home user's needs unless they were autistic and masochistic.

 

[Scout Trooper]

No, OS/2 did not manage to shatter that ceiling of faggotry it was more like peerless corporate autism and a c-suite mentality from the 1950s when IBM's business was at it's zenith and they just invented hard drives. Bill Gates was just an awkward, yet to be born bisexual trust fund kid and a complete faggot. No fear of anything or anyone "we are computers".

 

[Anti Snigger]

I really both empathize with and despise IBM for their battle with Microsoft.

 

[i440BX]

Never tried OS/2. I might try it now on 86BOX. I think someone must tell me how are drivers installed on that OS?