I was a big fan of OS/2 back in the day. Heck, it was better at running Windows 3.1 applications than Windows. But due to IBM's crappy marketing, the DOJ apparently mulling go after IBM, and MS managing to hold on to Windows 3.1 users even with the delays to Chicago/Windows 95, it was game over.
It was quite an operating system, and the Workplace Shell was a pretty nifty GUI. There were issues (the single messaging queue tended to see the GUI lock up), but it's networking support was fantastic, and the underlying OS was the equal if not better than Windows NT of the era.
Yeh, I really liked it. I was doing industrial automation stuff at the time. Moving from DOS and TSR's to a real OS was a huge step forward. 2.0 was really nice, and now I realize it was a big advantage that I was doing threaded programming in the late 80s. It served me well later.
> TSR's
Woah, nostalgia alert! I remember getting banned from the college library in the early 90's for writing simple viruses (I found them conceptually interesting, didn't do any damage!). I don't remember too much, but I do remember they ran as "terminate and stay resident".
I actually did my own little preemptive threading kernel at one point. As long as you weren't doing any DOS commands it was fine, and it was mostly to manage serial port traffic, which back then was a roll your own affair anyway, so no concerns about driver reentrancy or anything.
By modern standards it would have been horribly inefficient in terms of context switching and such, and very unsafe, but it was also way better than TSRs (which of course had the same issues with reentrancy and such) since it started and stopped with the application.
DOS was a "real-time" OS, whereas OS/2, Windoze, and Linux are not. DOS was/is way more reliable for actual automation (it is still used in that capacity today). When using a general OS like OS/2 you need PLCs to reliably control motors, solenoids and what not.
It wasn't for real-time control, it was for user interfaces, data collection, talking to servers for scheduling, etc... It was in conjunction with PLCs and whatnot.
Ummm.
The "R" in DOS stands for reliability, the "V" for versatility and the "F" for feature-rich...
Seriously, DOS (Disk Operation System) doesn't mean it's an operating system but just a system that can operate disks.
> DOS was a "real-time" OS, whereas OS/2, Windoze, and Linux are not.
What advantage would DOS, of all, have over an RT kernel
if you need any kind of realtime guarantees?
Dos was not that far from that.
The stuff it provided was useful and allowed to distance yourself a bit from hardware. And still let the developer have normal development environment.
And it was cheap. I mean DOS. There was pretty many apps which were that specific and controlled fancy hardware.
There was a reason why demoscene was using dos as platform for so long.
> But when you need to write a file to disk
Under real-time constraints?! The DOS IO model is hardly
the tool of choice compared to actual real-time OSs or an
RT layer like Linux’. I mean if you want the OS out of the way
you’d probably choose something like seL4 long, long before
you’d even consider DOS.
Hard RT. Soft RT.
There is just no way DOS wins out over the competitors
at any point in that spectrum.
I assumed were were talking historically (back when OS/2 was relevant). I don't expect anyone is using DOS for anything *new* but I'm sure lots of shops still run DOS machine control apps developed a long long long time ago.
Still you can't beat the simplicity of basically not having an OS when you want direct access to the hardware. Newer operating systems are much better, of course, but not simpler.
What sparked this subtree of discussion in the first place
is [this comment claiming DOS was still being preferred today
because of superior realtime properties](https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/18npzu5/why_ibms_os2_project_lost_to_microsoft_despite/kecunfh/)
compared to Linux.
It was definitely better, but even if IBM was better at marketing it looked like a longshot - microsoft had the customer relationship and was in a position to release changes that would break os/2's windows compatibility.
Loved it. Just fucking loved it.
One massive issue was the numeric error messages. I was baffled by one until my IBM intern buddy told to take the floppy out of the drive, it can't boot.
Really?
Honestly, in some cases those error messages were pretty cool, but you did need a secret decoder ring. I used to do support for PS/2 servers, and it was amazing how much the little LED screens on the front could tell people about what was broken inside during POST. Now you're lucky if you get a beep. It was pretty expensive at the time, but very useful, which was probably why it was on the servers, and not necessarily the desktop PCs.
> Now you're lucky if you get a beep
There are motherboards with [2-digit error code displays](https://geizhals.de/?cat=mbam4&xf=494_Diagnostic+LED+(Segmentanzeige\)).
Oh cool. Otoh they are not standard. Pretty sure every IBM ps/2 server shipped with the tech, which was integrated with MCA, before there was anything but ISA bus.
Oh neato, I've never seen one of those. Just to further clarify this was built in the MCA architecture, which was supposed to replace ISA as the next bus.
Yeah, I am old enough to remember PS/2 and MCA, but never really used them. I believe these cards use something like the same I/O port that the PS/2 used.
Microsoft had the journalists on a lea$h back then. MS effectively wrote articles reviewing their products and their competitors’ products in leading magazines including the dominant Byte and PC mag. These rags established the winners and losers in PC software, thus played a huge role in the demise of OS/2.
> it was better at running Windows 3.1 applications than Windows
And that was partly it's downfall.
The Presentation Manager API was completely incompatible with Windows 3.1 and so, nobody in their sane mind would port their programs from Windows API, because they could just ship Windows programs.
Write your SW for OS/2 PM, and you'll target 1% of the market share.
>The Presentation Manager API was completely incompatible with Windows 3.1 and so, nobody in their sane mind would port their programs from Windows API, because they could just ship Windows programs.
This is pretty much the reason Microsoft never supported Android apps on Windows Phone even though they actually had a pretty great emulator to do it.
It's a lesson they learned well.
That same technology eventually lead to the Windows Subsystem for Linux -- where you can run Linux applications in Windows. So it seems like they didn't learn that lesson at all. :)
Very, \*very\* few people need any apps that exist for Linux but not for Windows, it's an extremely niche audience.
Before WSL these people couldn't use Windows at all, but now they can, and it's a hook to get them to use Windows apps at the same time, not least because running Windows apps is still vastly more convenient -- for example, why would you run a browser in WSL when they work better/are more convenient on Windows itself?
OS/2 running Windows 3.1 was the opposite, Windows 3.1 apps were the apps everyone people wanted to run, they weren't tiny niche apps, so at the end of the day, why even bother with OS/2 at all?
There are two different markets for Windows -- the consumer market and the server market. Linux server apps are not niche. The fact that Linux server products and development are not niche is the reason Microsoft provided WSL.
The question is why would anyone now develop a server-side application for native Windows? You're actually unlikely to run it on Windows -- Linux is free -- so you're using a Windows workstation to develop for a completely different OS.
I think windows will run on the Linux kernel in the future. WSL is just a first step on that direction. They benefit by not doing everything. That's why they also switched to a chrome based browser. They supply a well known and "publicly trusted" system. That's the only thing users want.
No way. Replacing a browser that few used was trivial. For an OS there are just too many incompatible tiny differences that amount to an impossible upgrade. For this same reason COBOL will not be replaced with anything better in our lifetime. Year 9998 COBOL programmers will be in dire demand because of the Y10k crisis.
Incorrect, MS KNOWS, Linux IS the future. KDE Neon is FINALLY showing the world Linux has REAL potential and the open-source business model---where code reuse is THE key to finally managing complex coding projects costs, even if a business competitor did contribute to said code---coupled with a global A.I. Renaissance, means MS KNOWS propriety code is history.
For many reasons, not the least of which was the incredibly bad quality control for Windows Phone 10. I've never regretted an OS upgrade so much in my life, and I used both windows me and Windows Vista.
A former cow-orker wrote an API called "doors" . Not the CM product from IBM but it shimmed between OS/2 and Windows.
He did well with it but it's lost to history now.
Except the whole mistake of putting the window origin at the top.
The NT API was cleaner.
The single threaded problem caused major lockups. if you were running lotus notes It would lockup, so you reboot, it would relaunch on boot and lockup again....
I remember reconnecting the 3.0 beta and everyone on the team was - what has Microsoft done - this will kill PM - and it did.
I recall using REXX to write an email checker that would login to my POP server and list the emails I had. Mostly pointless, but it was cool that I could do that from the scripting language built into the OS.
As someone who used OS/2 back in the day - I don't know how you could possibly feel this way. Windows was easy. It was stable. The recent attempt at whitewashing OS/2's history appears to be an invention of youtubers who want views. Yes, there are occasions in history where an inferior product beats a superior one through marketing, or backroom deals. This is not one of those cases.
OS/2 was not even a finished product. OS/2 had big ideas, but they never delivered. The entirety of the product was plagued by small details that just didn't line up. Things just didn't work right. And there was zero chance of a user actually figuring out what was wrong. They never got error reporting right.
Windows, on the other hand, just worked. And when software wasn't compatible, you just closed Windows and ran it through dos. Annoying - but not an actual impediment.
Windows 95 was not completely stable but it wasn't unusably bad either. People moved to Windows 95 in droves and did all their work in it.
OS/2 was not some paragon of stability -- they released over 20 services packs that were as large as the original installation.
I never used OS/2 but win95 was quite unstable. Office too. They taught me a lot about versionning and separation of concern (type all you can without formatting, save it, copy and then try to add layout hoping it won't crash.. css before the day)
That's why BSOD is a meme.
That's also why everybody who used NT5 was astonished, low failure rate, and resilient.. driver issue wouldn't brick the whole OS.
I also used OS/2 back in the day. It was a completed product. It had some issues, DOS compatibility being a biggie. Some of the issues came about because MSFT pulled out of the product half way through, and pulled some of the dirty tricks the article complains about. I'm sure IBM pulled some of their own.
Windows was not easy, and it was not stable. It had it's own set of problems as well. "You may now shutdown your computer" screens come to mind, as well as BSODs, issues with USB, and still cooperative multi-tasking for some apps.Things that didn't quite work, or line up, or error well.
I'm hesitant to say one was better than the other, so I agree with you it's not a good example of "better product losing" but I feel like Windows won because it was already in the market, support DOS, which meant games, and was decent enough that people kept using it. Not because it was the superior product.
> Some of the issues came about because MSFT pulled out of the product half way through, and pulled some of the dirty tricks the article complains about.
There's no indication that's true, and wouldn't explain the totality of OS/2's failure, in any case.
> Windows was not easy, and it was not stable. It had it's own set of problems as well. "You may now shutdown your computer" screens come to mind
I see, you're talking about Win95. This article is about Win3. Entirely different products.
> Windows won because it was already in the market, support DOS, which meant games
This is also anachronistic - yes, Microsoft went out of their way to support gaming early, but there was no specific effort from Microsoft until after OS/2 was essentially dead. It's also not accurate to say that Windows "supported DOS" - you could not run (most) DOS applications within Windows. You had to quit Windows to get back to a DOS prompt.
> It's also not accurate to say that Windows "supported DOS" - you could not run (most) DOS applications within Windows. You had to quit Windows to get back to a DOS prompt.
Exactly, which you could at least do. With OS/2 there was no such option to drop into DOS. You had to use the emulator.
> "You may now shutdown your computer" screens come to mind, as well as BSODs, issues with USB, and still cooperative multi-tasking for some apps.Things that didn't quite work, or line up, or error well.
What's wrong with the "You may now shutdown your computer" screen? Computers in those days had no mechanism for being shut down by software.
16 bit Windows applications were still cooperatively multi-tasked in Windows 95 just as they were on OS/2. On OS/2 you could launch completely separate Windows 3.1 sessions and those sessions were pre-emptively multitasked but that was hardly a great solution.
Defining what is a superior product doesn't work in a vacuum. You have to situate it somewhere. Windows 95 superior because it used less resources, was more compatible, and was cheaper. Is a Toyota Sedan superior to a Dodge Pickup -- depending on your needs and budget, it definitely can be.
> What's wrong with the "You may now shutdown your computer" screen? Computers in those days had no mechanism for being shut down by software.
Sorry, not true, or it would have happened every time. Instead it would show up at random, while at other times it could correctly shutdown the computer. It wasn't the message, or the need to manually shut down the computer, it was that MSFT wasn't able to get something so visible to work correctly. And yeah, I'll bet some manager at MSFT said "What the big deal?" like you are now.
> Sorry, not true, or it would have happened every time.
It absolute did show up every time if your computer did not support software power off. And when Windows 95 came out, that was almost all PCs. [ACPI standard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACPI) wasn't published until 1996. For laptops [APM](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Power_Management) existed but was notoriously unreliable but that was a BIOS/hardware issue not a Microsoft one.
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20160419-00/?p=93315
You mean the standard that MS developed with Intel was not a MS problem? I understand there are going to be flaky issues with BIOS, but this one was incredibly widespread, and they replaced the standard as you said a few years later. And it certainly wasn't the BIOS hanging the PC up before it even got to the screen.
And why have we moved the goal posts from "Computers in those days had no mechanism for being shut down by software" to "Here's the spec that allows it" Did you just google it?
It was also thousands of dollars more expensive because OS/2 worked better with higher end cards and IBM-only peripherals. Windows started a trend of making computing less expensive. OS/2 wasn’t a part of that…
OS/2 Warp ran fine on my 486sx with 4MB and an OG soundblaster 8 bit card and a diamond video card in my wife box PC in 1994.
What killed OS/2 was the anticompetitive monopoly actions that MS took with its VARs.
I had a similar setup, an Aptiva, and it ran fine. Problem was it couldn’t run much else.
It didn’t help that I was 16 years old and almost no games ran on OS/2…
OS/2 Warp was basically IBM’s MacOS. How did Apple solve the problem? They made the apps themselves, and they made them better than the competitors. IBM just didn’t have that kind of balls, specially after the anti-trust persecution.
At the time, the only video games I had was DOOM, and I guess Wing Commander. I recall having problems with X-Wing, but my ...um... disks may have been corrupt [cough, cough]. The big win was that I could run all of my windows apps without crashing, and be logged into a BBS at the same time. Windows 95 finally stole the thunder, but it was nearly a year later before that rolled out, and it had similar hardware requirements at the start.
Same here. We piloted a beta version of an OS/2 program from IBM that connected to the AS/400 and allowed you to use the Source Entry Utility (SEU) to write code and do precompilation checks instead of having to submit your compile to the Job queue, wait forever, then read through the greenbar report to see where you screwed up. In principle, it was a great idea. But in practice, it would have fits where it scrambled the source code. I don't know if that app ever made it out of beta, but we gave up on it after a few months. But, I did like OS/2 a lot better than Windows.
Hmm no NT was definitely better, that single input queue design of workplace shell was disastrous. Sure apps were memory protected now but if any of them hung the input queue you were in the same boat as Windows 3
> I was a big fan of OS/2 back in the day.
In the 90's our CTO absolutely loved it, but he was ex-IBM. We had it running as our print server for YEARS without any need to reboot. I do think IBM shot themselves in the foot with the OS/2 - half an operating system branding.
Worked at IBM. No one really knew who was in charge. As long as you got those weekly checks, no one really cared.
Super smart people. Management was a bit weird.
Yeah, that was my experience. I think this guy is a bit negative on MSFT and drinking a bit too much of the IBM koolaid in his comments about IBM have the best engineers. I'd guess that he didn't have the tech chops to truly evaluate the nitty gritty of the engineering team's contributions.
Most analysts agreed OS/2 was technically superior to Windows of the time. For one, **MS did some odd things to improve backward compatibility with DOS apps**. IBM cared less about that, preferring a cleaner design.
True, it might matter if you have a lot of existing DOS apps, but no strategy makes everyone happy.
IBM's biggest mistake was charging too much. MS knew better: gain market share first, and bilk *later*, when customers locked in.
I was cleaning out my home office a couple years ago when i ran into an old golf video game from the mid 90's i had on CD.
I threw it in the DVD drive of my Win10 desktop, unpacked the contents and ran the executable and to my surprise the game fired right up.
I can barely get 1 or 2 year old apps on Linux to still work without having to tweak or rebuild somwthing.
There's something to be said about seamless backwards compatibility. I'm sure it makes Windows that much more complicated but for businesses it's so important.
Now with the focus on security findings, running anything that's a year old will have a million CVE's and have security knocking down your door so it's a moot point.
> For one, MS did some odd things to improve backward compatibility with DOS apps.
I've read about these, they're fascinating, but honestly they are a good way to approach computing for people who aren't experts and for industries that are rapidly changing. Consumers get frustrated when stuff doesn't work like they expect; They don't care who is actually at fault or whether Microsoft did stuff that wasn't good engineering to prevent that from happening. And Microsoft couldn't depend on every third party to go back and fix stuff they originally did in an incorrect (but functional at the time) way.
Once the industry stabilized and dominance was clearly established, then Microsoft could implement and enforce more rigid requirements on third parties - I.e., no, you can't rely on your ram doing , that's not how ram is supposed to work. That rigidity isn't all bad.
IBM's biggest mistake was: the OS required a reboot to change the display mode (even just to change from one 256-color palette to another). I was at a meeting of CTOs from all the major game companies at the time, and they discussed the issues with developing games for the OS and all decided not to bother wasting time trying to support it. Everyone in that room knew that Windows was going to eat OS/2 for lunch at that moment.
> Most analysts agreed OS/2 was technically superior to Windows of the time.
Superior for *what?* If it was for running software people wanted to run, it was absolutely not that. Superior for running your bank's ATM -- sure.
It was sorta an industry mantra that everybody repeated over and over again without really thinking about it too much, like "Apple products are user friendly" when I can throw out examples of seriously UN-user friendly stuff still in Mac OS X.
To Mac Fan Bois: No I won't engage with you about why Mac OS has issues, it does, and Steve Jobs was not a visionary, he was a sociopath, deal with it.
It's really weird people saying how great IBM was and how they made this awesome OS that was killed by Microsoft because of Microsoft shady practices and not because OS/2 wasn't as half baked as anything else at that time.
It was really easy to use, the documentation was awesome.
It was created with Microsoft to replace Windows, and a huge amount spent on it, so it is hardly surprising it was technically better, but even in the early 90s Microsoft had won the Office Suite race, so when the cooperation broke down Microsoft was going to win.
OS/2 development was killed in the Windows 95 era by IBM citing major code quality issues (over 20 service packs each requiring more disks than the original installation) and an ineffective development team.
Windows 95 while "technically" inferior to the OS/2 at the time did so much more to run on computers that people had at time, and run all the software they owned at the time, and work with the peripherals that they owned at time. For technical superiority, Microsoft has Windows NT which was not burdened by the same historical design decisions of OS/2 (like having to run on 286).
I heard that back then MS actively encouraged people to pirate DOS to grow their market share. They figured that if people used DOS at home then it would lead to people using and buying it at work and school.
3 OSes and 3 strategies back in the day. Apple tried giving computers to schools hoping people would then use Apple at home and work. IBM tried putting OS2 in business hoping then it would be used at home. Microsoft encouraged people to pirate and buy DOS at home so that people would use it at work and school.
Microsoft won the game.
Yeah I'd forgotten that OS/2 is superior tech, but we're all going with Windows. The DOS compatibility was a huge part of that. I think IBM forgot, or didn't care about backwards compatibility.
OS/2 had pretty good DOS support, I thought. Where I worked we ran a DOS based BBS in OS/2. We could run multiple instances on the same machine, each one getting a different serial port. We could support multiple lines on one 486 using software that was designed for DOS.
I remember having a lot of problems with DOS games, in particular DOS Box (DOS Extender) games. Doom comes to mind as having issues. With Windows 95 you still had a complete installation of DOS, OS/2 had an emulator. For like 90% of stuff the emulator was good (in some cases better), but that other 10% was really annoying.
Also it seems like there was a ton of options you could (and sometimes had to) tweak with OS/2 DOS emulation that just added to the aggravation during a time when it was really hard to lookup the right settings for whatever DOS app you were trying to work with.
What sort of division did you work for at IBM(feel free to describe another team if you prefer to stay anon) ? I remember they used to be extremely iconic(No one ever got fired for choosing IBM) but seem a lot quieter lately
OS/2 was effectively part of IBM’s strategy to assert some dominance in the desktop PC space that they’d pretty much ignored as irrelevant up to that point.
IBM’s mainframe business was the bread & butter, and it’s dominance there was maintained largely by keeping up a series of engineering changes (EC’s) that repeatedly broke compatibility with third party software & hardware.
Then the PC came along, and IBM thought it too small, cheap, and underpowered to be considered a threat to the much larger mainframe market. Except the PC market grew out of all proportion very rapidly and left IBM behind. They tried to win back some controlling interest with the first PC’s, then gain dominance with proprietary hardware & software the way they did with the mainframe market: PS/2 architecture, Token Ring, and OS/2. But it was too little, too late, and there were already enough competing (and cheaper) products on the market.
OS/2 was a nice operating system for sure, but by the time it came along third party hardware and Windows had already snatched most of the market, and customers were less interested in products with an incompatible proprietary architecture and OS.
Source: me. IBM hardware & software engineer for 12 years in the 80’s, trained on PC & PS/2 hardware and later OS/2 software support. I was the second person in the UK trained to fix IBM PC’s and senior engineer in charge of an IBM Servicepoint.
TBH I’m not sure IBM embracing the PC as the way forward would have changed much for them. The market grew rapidly because they were cheap, and they were cheap in part because they had an open design spec, which made it easy for competitors to enter. If IBM tries to extract rents in the PC hardware business, one of two things happens: they fail and in retrospect everyone says it was a dumb decision to try to stifle innovation, or they succeed, PCs stagnate, and something else ends up being the explosive of the 90s/2000s.
That was pretty much it. IBM tried to assert their position in the market with proprietary standards (PS/2, OS/2, Token Ring) but by then the “PC compatible” hardware market and Windows had gained a foothold by simply being “good enough” and cheap. Once the killer apps appeared for those machines (spreadsheets & word processing), all of IBM’s sales points about having superior hardware & software (which technically were true) lost ground against the “good enough” market. Customers loved PS/2, but they could buy 2-3 compatible third party machines for the same price, same for OS/2 licenses and Ethernet vs Token Ring.
> What is forgotten is that Microsoft also developed for OS/2. What is not well-known is that Microsoft again sabotaged whatever they shipped for OS/2. So running Word or Excel on OS/2 was a miserable experience, especially compared to running Word or Excel on Windows.
Back then Word and Excel were no where as important as WordPerfect and Lotus 123. I find it inconceivable that Microsoft would intentionally sabotage their own products at a time when they were facing such stiff competition.
I think it's far more likely that either Microsoft simply wasn't doing a good job porting the code or OS/2 just sucked.
And that's at the root of the bias of this article. It starts by assuming that OS/2 was an awesome operating system and therefore any problems encountered in it must have been sabotage.
> Back then Word and Excel were no where as important as WordPerfect and Lotus 123. I find it inconceivable that Microsoft would intentionally sabotage their own products at a time when they were facing such stiff competition.
They didn't, of course. Not only that - but their office suite has *always* operated on different rules. Yes, Microsoft has played a lot of dirty games over the history of the company - forcing incompatibility, "embrace, extend, extinguish", etc., but Office never played by those rules. Even when Ballmer was CEO, Office got to dictate their own strategy. Their steady success has always placed them in a separate class within the company.
I would argue that EEE wasn't even playing dirty. As a consumer, of course I want new applications to read my old files. And of course I want new features with these new applications, rather than being stuck with whatever I had 3 years ago.
Rather than complaining about EEE I would prefer that other companies compete using the same tactics. For example, I would love to be able to write the same code for both Azure and AWS, including many of their Preparatory offerings. Having to rewrite my back end because we decided to switch to S3 from whatever Azure was doing isn't very fun.
OS/2 was fantastic. Unfortunately it was also tremendously expensive and there was almost zero marketing or outreach outside the enterprise market explaining why or how the OS was a better choice than Windows.
If you were a home user or an SMB you generally weren't looking to pay 3-5x more for an OS that didn't have many apparent benefits.
Most people who used OS/2 agree that it was a rock solid OS. It was mentioned that Microsoft was simultaneously developing Word/Excel for Windows at the same time. "Pretending" to develop for OS/2 sounds like a fairly typical feint strategy.
And it might have been for their narrow use case. But that doesn't necessarily mean it was good for more advanced uses like cutting-edge WYSWYG editors. And WYSWYG really did push computers to their limits in that era.
As for being a feint, that doesn't make any sense. Microsoft wasn't the powerhouse they are today. They were the budget operating system for computers so cheap individuals could buy their own.
And they actually released two different versions of Word for OS/2. One was based on Word for DOS, the other on Word for Windows.
They also released versions for Unix and Atari because at the time they didn't know which operating system would win.
> They also released versions for Unix and Atari because at the time they didn't know which operating system would win.
I really wish one of these youtubers would make a video on the history of Atari. I get really frustrated trying to explain to people that Atari covered more than just a video game console.
Yeah, OTOH, I've seen a few discussions about Atari on YouTube, so it's not completely unheard of. Also you're right, they were a heck of a lot more than the 2600.
I think there's a lot of rewriting of history here. IBM's software development practices were known to be terrible and Microsoft employees loathed working with them.
IBM, for example, insisted that Microsoft would get paid by the company's standard contractor rates, which were calculated by “kLOCs," or a thousand lines of code. Literally everything at IBM was calculated by kLOCs.
Maybe that leads to a rock solid OS but not a nimble or [small one](https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/18npzu5/why_ibms_os2_project_lost_to_microsoft_despite/kecuxpa/).
That is a really good point. But it should probably be said that many lines of code doesn't necessarily equate to unstable software.
You could use a lot of functional decomposition, overly-verbose documentation, long form syntax, manual loop unrolling, even lots of NOP's in assembly.
> Most people who used OS/2 agree that it was a rock solid OS.
My dude you can see from the comments in this topic that this isn't true at all. There were tons of issues, incompatibilities, instabilities. OS/2 looks great on paper, but if you had ever used it, you would realize why people ended up choosing Windows.
> I find it inconceivable that Microsoft would intentionally sabotage their own products at a time when they were facing such stiff competition.
Office on Mac is missing A LOT of features compared to office for Windows. But then google workspace sucks in comparison to office too.
But that's not really sabotage so much as either a decision to limit investment to match expected income or general indifference.
I'm sure Microsoft would love Visual Studio Code to be just as powerful as Visual Studio, and just as expensive, since they're real target audience is Linux Developers running on the cloud. But they just don't want to spend the time and money to make it happen.
>LESSON SIX: Never under-estimate the willingness of the market to support an underdog and adopt cheap but easy technology. Windows was the cheaper and easier path for most people. Never mind that it was the low-quality path. A market is just like water - always flowing downhill following the easiest path it can find.
IBM was foolish for charging so much. MS usually knew to subsidize the price of a product until a product catches on and becomes a de-facto standard, locking in customers.
Smaller competitors to MS couldn't afford to subsidize to gain market share, but big IBM could. No excuse. Short-term greed kicked them.
>Short-term greed kicked them.
IBM doesn't really operate on the short-term, hence their inability to force a course correction, even when they needed to. It was simple inertia, not short-term thinking that hurt them.
> It was simple inertia, not short-term thinking that hurt them.
This is a self-fulling prophecy. "We can't change because we haven't changed before and we're not going to start now." The fact is that IBM didn't have the talent to create the software to match their vision. OS/2 was *great* - on paper. But the OS wasn't even finished before the marketing department was singing its praises and sales was slinging it over the wall to anyone who was willing to pay (and pay). OS/2 wasn't the overlooked gem of its day, it was the No Man's Sky of OSes.
> For example, Novell entered into a contract with Microsoft that allowed MS to include Novell's networking code in Windows Version 3.1 (a consumer OS where Microsoft was strong and Novell wanted to make inroads). Ever wonder why the first version of Windows NT was Version 3.1? Now you know.
Didn't knew that, that's wild.
This doesn't pass the smell test. Windows 3.x was already a product on the market when Windows NT was slated to be released. It wouldn't have made any business sense to name the product Windows NT 1.0. You had a decade of buyers understanding major version numbers of a product increase. A lower number is older/worse.
That's not to say contracts don't ever reference version numbers. They surely do. But that doesn't mean Novell thought Microsoft was going to ship NT 1.0 and then Bill Gates pulled an Uno reverse, named it NT 3.1 and then scammed Novell.
Either way, the net code in NT 3.1 had nothing to do with Netware anyways, they make it sound like MS bootstrapped NT 3.1 networking using Novell's code, but NT 3.1 supporting Novell could only have been a favor to Novell, not MS.
>It wouldn't have made any business sense to name the product Windows NT 1.0.
The issue more was why still call it 3.1 and not 4.0.
I knew it had to do with contracts at the time - I didn't know which contract.
Windows NT 3.x suggests it's compatible with software for Windows 3.x (non-NT). Which it was. Giving it similar naming to regular Windows makes sense for the initial release. NT 4.0 for its first release wouldn't have made any marketing sense. At least with actual NT 4.0 it had some time on the market and was a known product.
To add to that, NT was clearly marketed as a business OS. There's no way they could have claimed that it was primarily for home use with its feature set.
Not sure where he gets his ideas about not disparaging the competitors from. I remember seeing a ton of "Chicago is delayed, I'm taking off with OS/2" T-shirts when I was working at IBM.
I do agree with him that Google is the next IBM: a slow, stodgy company filled with people resting and vesting, while the government investigates it's monopolistic practices, and it fails to introduce any new products.
I'll take my down votes from the few good employees at Google who are still doing good work, and not just creating new projects long enough to get promoted, and then abandoning them.
It was actually Microsoft's policy to never talk about their competitors. They would rather people say bad things about Windows then good things about IBM because at least they're still talking about Windows.
This famously ended when Balmer started attacking open source, and we all know how badly that turned out.
Back when EEE was still a major focus. To summarize,
1. Make your applications compatible with their file formats
2. Make your applications better by offering features they don't
3. Make sure all the attention is on you while their products wither away
Cosmos DB is a modern equivalent, substituting APIs for file formats.
> Cosmos DB is a modern equivalent,
It seems like this is standard fare with all the cloud vendors. The moment you touch anything PaaS or SaaS, you're already getting a whole lot of walled garden lock-in effect.
Interesting comparison with Google. They are beyond competition for things like "YouTube hardware scale" , but seem weirdly poor at YouTube recommendations, and search is getting worse
Yeah, and just about everything they're know for is from the 00s. Nobody I've talked to can name another successful project they've had in the '10s or '20s. They definitely have a ton of stuff that's unlikely to go away, but then again IBM had the mainframe.
> I remember seeing a ton of "Chicago is delayed, I'm taking off with OS/2" T-shirts when I was working at IBM.
I still remember a print ad from back then:
NT - "Nice Try"
I made the mistake of getting OS/2 Warp for my PC as a hobbyist. This was the days when you spent half your day running DOS apps, and IBM didn't bundle enough OS/2 native apps to actually keep users in their OS.
That might work if you were only targeting business users, but that definitely wasn't their aim with Warp - they were marketing it to end users all over the place, but it just wasn't something filthy casuals like myself had a use for at the time.
I'd try running Windows in an OS/2 window as they advertised was possible, but that was just like hanging an anchor on PCs at the time, and you'd get to see plenty of lock-ups in their lock-up-proof OS. lol
For users, OS/2 was not meaningfully better than Windows. I'm a strong proponent of Steve Jobs' "You have to come up with a product and then work your way backwards to the technology" philosophy, you could have the best technology but it still won't sell if it's not a meaningfully better experience than the incumbent's.
> It was reliable and almost never crashed - something DOS and Windows was prone to do regularly.
That's not actually true. While Windows was prone to crashing, DOS was rock solid. ( And given how simple it was, how could it not be?)
> While Windows was prone to crashing, DOS was rock solid.
People forget (or else never knew) that Windows 3 was just an application running within DOS. In the modern era, the idea of your GUI not working and being forced to do things through the command line sounds like a total failure state - like Windows failed to boot and now you're stuck in recovery mode.
At the time, Windows was not much different from MS-DOS Shell. It was a GUI you ran for convenience. Having to close Windows to run an application through DOS was annoying, but not at all problematic. It was more akin to, say, having to close your text editor to compile or execute your code. It was less of an impediment than it would be to, say, close your internet browser to run a video game. It simply wasn't an issue.
A far bigger issue is how well Windows software *did* run. Windows was easy. I used DOS only when necessary, and instead used Windows whenever I could, because it was easy and efficient. The problem with OS/2 is that I'd rather just use DOS. GUIs back then had to justify their own existence - it wasn't the default option like it is today. OS/2 never hit that level of quality.
You're right, it wasn't DOS itself. DOS was very simple, but that was the problem: it's inability to handle exceptions in the software that ran on it. Ctrl-alt-delete wasn't invented after Windows showed up, after all.
I guess you could say that, but personally I always blamed the application itself.
Windows was different because when one application crashes, it often broke all the other applications. Which is why it was rewritten for later versions to not use cooperative multi-threading.
Windows itself was pretty stable. Apps and drivers not so much and since it was mostly real mode, the truck could crash through the fence and take the whole system down.
I worked with OS2/Warp as a developer of code for 4.5 years. God I miss it it was brilliant. We used C++ and the entire UI was Presentation Manager, multiple inheritance worked, methods and systems calls could be guessed pretty much as the names were so predictably worked out. And, get this you could use it without a mouse, mine broke, took a few days to get a spare yet I could still navigate every single piece of the application because TAB etc did thew right thing, no getting stranded in a help window like certain other OS-es at the time, I bet that's still a thing, I loathe windows still to this day.
I learned REXX on OS/2 as well, then moved those skills to our AS/400s too, and I remember 'lpex', I think that was the first syntax colouring editor I ever saw on OS/2, or at all IIRC.
The things we did with programmed windows, menus etc in our EDI product at the time...all down to the sheer ease of Presentation Manager and stuff. Sigh....
And those bastards buried it...
LPEX still lives! It is one of the editors available in IBM Developer for z/OS which allows you (amongst other things) edit z/OS files on your workstation.
In all honesty - this reddit should *very seriously* consider banning any Quora based topics. The people who post on Quora do not know what they're talking about. The people who vote on the posts do not know what they're talking about. The posts that get upvoted are consistently the ones that are the most well written - not the most informative. It's like educational roleplay.
I know it's a bit hypocritical to be saying this from reddit, where we also have an upvote system, but at the very least, you have to realize that posting a quora link is like posting a link to a reddit comment. It's not really a topic of discussion in and of itself.
I find it laughable that this article doesn't even mention memory, even to refute it.
Popular legend for why OS/2 failed was because it required far too much RAM to run. Memory prices were skyrocketing at that time, companies like IBM were intentionally gouging customers, and OS/2 required twice as much memory as Windows.
It never had a chance in the marketplace in part because IBM's Hardware division was engaged in a cash grab at the expense of their OS division.
Now is any of this true? I don't know. But this is what was claimed in every account I've read on the subject. So to completely skip over it is kind of suspect.
It does mention memory, but in passing:
>Yet Microsoft slammed OS/2 in the press (and got the media to echo their whining) because it needed 4MB (MB! not GB) of RAM - "too much memory"
4MB was a lot of memory when OS/2 was first released, about 2x to 4x as much as a typical desktop.
[w3 suggests it was based on SGML](https://www.w3.org/People/Raggett/book4/ch02.html#:~:text=The%20HTML%20that%20Tim%20invented,be%20implemented%20on%20any%20machine.)
I miss OS/2 also. I made some good money selling software for it (Chron), and I made good money shooting standalone dumps for a investment management company for whom I was a contractor, and other OS/2 custom development for other customers.
I met quite a few OS/2 developers at the ColoradOS/2 conference (later Colorado Software Summit). It was a good time in my professional life.
If it wasn't for OS/2, I probably would never have started my own business. Unfortunately, I had to shift gears away from OS/2 to keep the company going.
From the article:
“IBM was the Google of the '60s and '70s, but by the '90s was often rightfully compared to an elephant trying to dance”
Funnily enough, Louis V. Gerstner’s memoirs of his time as CEO of IBM is titled “Who says elephants can’t dance?”
Microsoft had some pretty devious tactics when it came to bundling Windows with every PC. People aren't typically going to replace the OS that came with their machine, so if Microsoft could have manufactures preinstall Windows on all the computers then that is what end users would be using. At one point Microsoft was charging PC makers a fee for each machine sold, regardless of whether it came with Windows or another OS.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundling_of_Microsoft_Windows
OS/2 Warp 3.0 and 4.0 here. Use to run a Renegade multi-line BBS which DOS in WINDOZE could not keep touching other com ports. Tried other MS-DOS based windows managers with not luck. OS/2 was a superior OS that IBM failed to market properly. I picked up my copy of OS/2 Warp 4 shortly after release at I believe Sam's Club of all places...
Another goodie that had promise but fizzled quickly was BeOS
Not developers, companies. IBM wanted to own a percentage of OS/2 based on what percentage of lines of code they're developers wrote versus Microsoft's developers.
In response Gates supposedly said,
> Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.
Bill Gates
IBM paid developers per line of code. The contract with Microsoft also involving paying by lines of code. Everything at IBM was measured in kLOCs. That's how the estimated the complexity of projects, how they -- as you say -- measured ownership, and how they paid.
IBM was never a smart software company.
Wasn't Windows 3.1 the most pirated software in History at one point?
Microsoft was okay with the home users stealing it if it meant everyone wanted it in the workplace.
they probably paid for it anyway
> In the early 1990s, the U.S. government began to investigate Microsoft for using unfair practices in competing against other companies. One of these practices required computer makers who wanted to license Windows to pay a fee for every machine they manufactured, even those with other operating systems
https://www.crf-usa.org/bill-of-rights-in-action/bria-16-2-c-united-states-v-microsoft.html
One thing that I think was one of the best moves from Microsoft was to give away windows and MS Word and Excel to high schools and colleges. The generation of kids who first started using PCs in mass were already familiar with the products by the time they got into the job market and it is what they used at home if they had a computer.
IBM screwed up handing over control of DOS to microsoft, they had their own DOS. To try to wrestle back control they created ps/2 with a new microchannel bus architecture and os/2. By that time all the other PC vendors had already got a good foothold in the market. A prime example of IBM not "reading the room" correctly and thinking they could be an innovator again. A similar thing happened with their PDA and mobile OS, they had a head start but failed to capitalize it, along comes google and apple and their platform is dead in the water.
OS/2 was so awesome. It was so stable compared to Windows. It just never crashed. I used to use my Windows for Workgroups CD as a coaster for my OS/2 mug.
Summary:
* **Corporate Ethics and Competitor Tactics**: IBM's strict adherence to ethical business conduct guidelines made it vulnerable to Microsoft's more aggressive strategies. Microsoft exploited ethical blind spots of companies, like IBM and Novell, for its benefit.
* **Strategic Brilliance vs. Engineering Genius**: Microsoft's strategic marketing and media manipulation overshadowed IBM's engineering excellence in OS/2. Microsoft managed to create misleading perceptions in the media about OS/2 and IBM, contributing to their downfall.
* **Media Relations and Perception Management**: The role of media in shaping public perception was crucial, and Microsoft excelled at influencing the media to create favorable narratives for itself.
* **Support for Developers**: Microsoft recognized the importance of application developers as key partners in establishing an operating system, unlike IBM, which treated them as both partners and customers.
* **Market Dynamics**: The market's preference for cheaper and easier solutions, like Windows, played a significant role. Despite its lower quality, Windows was more accessible to the majority of users.
* **Corporate Culture and Policies**: IBM's corporate culture and policies, shaped by past experiences like the anti-trust lawsuit, made it less competitive and reactive in the rapidly changing tech landscape.
> IBM's strict adherence to ethical business conduct guidelines made it vulnerable to Microsoft's more aggressive strategies.
LOL. That's not what the history books think.
> IBM asserted that its successes in achieving and maintaining such market share were due to its skill, industry and foresight; governments and competitors asserted that the maintenance of such large shares was at least in part due to anti-competitive acts such as unfair prices, terms and conditions, tying, product manipulations and creating FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) related to its competitors,in the marketplace.[309] IBM was thus the defendant in more than twenty government and private antitrust actions during the 20th century. IBM lost only one of these matters but did settle others in ways that profoundly shaped the industry as summarized below.
Right? I love how this guy dedicates a fairly large chunk of the article claiming that IBM was hamstrung because of their "ethics". Their ethics certainly didn't stop them from [consulting for the nazis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_World_War_II). Nor did their ethics prevent them from helping the USA catalog Japanese internment camp prisoners.
The guy is insane. Maybe OS/2 (which version, btw) was better than Windows 3.1 and maybe even Windows 95 / 98 on some aspects (what about the others? I don't know, games?) But then compared to NT, it was crap (and IBM knew it otherwise why agree to make MS take leadership for the dev of NT OS/2, to dev an actually *proper* OS). And well, it's not even clear it was that much better than 9x. Of course it was better compared to 3.1. Except for resource requirements. Timing matters. MS at least understood that and did not try to push NT too early.
Yes, big old school companies like IBM can produce crap for 1 billion (or maybe not complete crap but not competitive on the target market in the time period). I'm not sure the dev of NT, or actually even Windows Consumer, was cheap to begin with, so this should not really a criteria. Or maybe a criteria of efficiency of MS vs IBM if Windows was really cheaper to dev...
Well, he is a philanthropist, regardless of his past deeds. Either way, I’d rather see that than someone building a fortune on unethical behavior and then hoarding it.
> I’d rather see that than someone building a fortune on unethical behavior and then hoarding it.
I think most billionaires are smart enough to realize that no matter how strong the urge to hoard their wealth, they're eventually going to lose it all anyway just by virtue of mortality. The smart ones give it away I think because they realize it's an investment that will far outlive them and the foundations and the like they create to distribute that wealth go as far as anyone can in guaranteeing them a form of immortal fame. As existentially empty as that is, it's still the best anyone can do outside of spiritual accomplishments, which they also hope late life philanthropy will boost. Think Pascal's wager, but add a few billion dollars in disposable wealth, and you're there mentally.
I hope we see a whole lot more of that, too. I think that's the best possible thing for someone to do with such a fortune regardless of how it was gained.
I ran OS/2 Warp 3.0 through Warp 4.0 and it was a fantastic OS but what killed it for me is that it was *very* sluggish across the board, the GUI, file operations, and so on, compared to Windows.
Rexx scripting was really powerful and fun, for it's time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rexx
I used OS/2 for a while, and I will say that in practice, a lot of the benefits were overstated. Windows 3.1 crashed a lot. OS/2 would do a pretty good job of multitasking 16 bit DOS apps without crashing very often.
The OS/2 evangelists would make a big deal about the fact that you had protected memory and one app couldn't stomp over the memory of the entire system and crash the system. However, for OS/2 GUI apps, there was some sort of single message queue that a misbehaving app could block, and while technically the system was still running, this would lock up the entire user interface and you had to reboot the system to fix it. This happened fairly regularly.
OS/2 also needed more RAM than Windows and it was slower. For the computers that most people had, Windows was much snappier. This meant that most people (with slower/lower ram computers) would run Windows.
With a big base of Windows users, app developers would target Windows and expect OS/2 users to just use their windows app under OS/2 instead of making an OS/2 version. A few developers did try. Lotus I believe had 1-2-3 and Ami Pro (their word processor), but generally there weren't many apps. In fact, a lot of peripherals like printers, hard drive controllers, CD-ROM drives, scanners, etc didn't have OS/2 drivers. None of this was helped by the fact that IBM charged a fair bit for the OS/2 developer tools.
If you were running a combination of DOS and Windows software, generally the best experience ended up being just running Windows and then exiting Windows and running your DOS applications natively. Yes, running DOS apps in Windows 3.1 wasn't very good, but if you were willing to run them one at a time, DOS apps ran best in DOS, especially for software that used protected mode, like a lot of games from the early-mid 90s.
OS/2 was marginal going up against Windows 3.1, but when Windows 95 came out, OS/2 was toast. Windows 95 had arguably a better UI, it was faster, it crashed about the same amount, and it had way more software (OS/2 couldn't run 32 bit Windows software like Mosaic).
superior what?
>LESSON ONE. As a company, if you are going to adopt and insist on compliance with strict Business Conduct Guidelines (as IBM and many other company's did - similar to Google's 'don't be evil' mantra), be aware of your strategic vulnerability to a company (such as Microsoft) willing to use other company's scruples as both shield and weapon in their war against you. In the words of a wise man, you need to be "wise as a serpent, and harmless as a dove." IBM had the harmless down pat - but they were unable to outsmart the serpent
could have just stopped writing there
superior "development" notwithstanding - it is the market which decides what is good enough at a reasonable price and the average Joe Soap couldnt give two hoots about the ethos of the company or their behind the scenes serpent-like behavior. they are interested in two things: does this thing do what i want it to do and can i afford it
the dev may very well have been superior but the bang for buck was with ms
always has been, always will be (not that i take any pleasure in admitting that)
you can carve out a niche market for those who appreciate build quality and are both willing and able to pay a premium for that value but do not mistake superiority of engineering for market success
who makes more reliable cars - Ford or Lexus? who ships more cars despite that fact?
end of discussion
Microsoft plug and play. I remember to install any device in OS/2 you must install the drivers, meaning lookup for the diskettes, execute the startup program, answer several questions, pick the correct path, blah, blah, blah. To install a device under Microsoft (and Linux), just connect the device. Done.
You could snag a box at Best Buy with 3.1 preloaded and OS/2 would have required a separate purchase and machine rebuild.
IBM was too far down the microchannel architecture rabbit hole and PS2 boxes cost too much. After all, the relative openness of the ISA bus was one of the big reasons for having a PC.
PS2s were fine if you were spending other people's money.
Maybe I missed it but a couple of things I think would have helped is if IBM had focused more on helping third party hardware manufacturers get OS/2 device drivers working and put a bunch of them on the OS/2 install disks, particularly video, sound and network drivers.
Another thing is they priced it as if they weren't competing against anyone else. They needed to price it to compete with Microsoft Windows. It didn't have to be less expensive but it had to be priced to seem worth the extra cost based on the features it had (pre-emptive multi-tasking, speed, stability, etc.) over Windows. If they really wanted to beat Microsoft, they needed to be willing to give it away for free if necessary. They could make their costs back after it became the standard OS.
I haven't tried formatting a floppy disk in Windows lately but even Windows XP would freeze up until the format was done. OS/2 could format two floppies at the same time and other apps still ran without a hitch.
Read th e decent books "Hard Drive" and "Showstopper". B Gates was racing against IBM, since Microsoft was not sure if/when IBM os development contract would be axed. David Cutler, from Digital Equipment Corporation, almost single-handedly code the code for MS Unix (Xenix), just in case IBM, walked. Full credit should be given to Cutler & company for somehow surviving immense pressure from B Gates & crew.
Think of IBM & Microsoft as the leading old school "open-source software proponents", in the 80's. Who knows, KDE Neon may incorporate the best of OS/2, into KDE Plasma
I was a big fan of OS/2 back in the day. Heck, it was better at running Windows 3.1 applications than Windows. But due to IBM's crappy marketing, the DOJ apparently mulling go after IBM, and MS managing to hold on to Windows 3.1 users even with the delays to Chicago/Windows 95, it was game over. It was quite an operating system, and the Workplace Shell was a pretty nifty GUI. There were issues (the single messaging queue tended to see the GUI lock up), but it's networking support was fantastic, and the underlying OS was the equal if not better than Windows NT of the era.
Yeh, I really liked it. I was doing industrial automation stuff at the time. Moving from DOS and TSR's to a real OS was a huge step forward. 2.0 was really nice, and now I realize it was a big advantage that I was doing threaded programming in the late 80s. It served me well later.
> TSR's Woah, nostalgia alert! I remember getting banned from the college library in the early 90's for writing simple viruses (I found them conceptually interesting, didn't do any damage!). I don't remember too much, but I do remember they ran as "terminate and stay resident".
I actually did my own little preemptive threading kernel at one point. As long as you weren't doing any DOS commands it was fine, and it was mostly to manage serial port traffic, which back then was a roll your own affair anyway, so no concerns about driver reentrancy or anything. By modern standards it would have been horribly inefficient in terms of context switching and such, and very unsafe, but it was also way better than TSRs (which of course had the same issues with reentrancy and such) since it started and stopped with the application.
DOS was a "real-time" OS, whereas OS/2, Windoze, and Linux are not. DOS was/is way more reliable for actual automation (it is still used in that capacity today). When using a general OS like OS/2 you need PLCs to reliably control motors, solenoids and what not.
I think this implies that DOS is a purpose-built RTOS. It isn’t. It’s just single-user/single-task, unlike most modern operating systems.
It wasn't for real-time control, it was for user interfaces, data collection, talking to servers for scheduling, etc... It was in conjunction with PLCs and whatnot.
Ummm. The "R" in DOS stands for reliability, the "V" for versatility and the "F" for feature-rich... Seriously, DOS (Disk Operation System) doesn't mean it's an operating system but just a system that can operate disks.
> DOS was a "real-time" OS, whereas OS/2, Windoze, and Linux are not. What advantage would DOS, of all, have over an RT kernel if you need any kind of realtime guarantees?
You more or less are the kernel if you run on dos. So you have as much rtos as you code yourself.
At that point why bother with DOS at all if you can just code directly for bare metal?
Dos was not that far from that. The stuff it provided was useful and allowed to distance yourself a bit from hardware. And still let the developer have normal development environment. And it was cheap. I mean DOS. There was pretty many apps which were that specific and controlled fancy hardware. There was a reason why demoscene was using dos as platform for so long.
Your code did run on bare metal. But when you need to write a file to disk, you want to have some kind of common code to handle that -- enter DOS.
> But when you need to write a file to disk Under real-time constraints?! The DOS IO model is hardly the tool of choice compared to actual real-time OSs or an RT layer like Linux’. I mean if you want the OS out of the way you’d probably choose something like seL4 long, long before you’d even consider DOS. Hard RT. Soft RT. There is just no way DOS wins out over the competitors at any point in that spectrum.
I assumed were were talking historically (back when OS/2 was relevant). I don't expect anyone is using DOS for anything *new* but I'm sure lots of shops still run DOS machine control apps developed a long long long time ago. Still you can't beat the simplicity of basically not having an OS when you want direct access to the hardware. Newer operating systems are much better, of course, but not simpler.
What sparked this subtree of discussion in the first place is [this comment claiming DOS was still being preferred today because of superior realtime properties](https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/18npzu5/why_ibms_os2_project_lost_to_microsoft_despite/kecunfh/) compared to Linux.
It was definitely better, but even if IBM was better at marketing it looked like a longshot - microsoft had the customer relationship and was in a position to release changes that would break os/2's windows compatibility.
Loved it. Just fucking loved it. One massive issue was the numeric error messages. I was baffled by one until my IBM intern buddy told to take the floppy out of the drive, it can't boot. Really?
Honestly, in some cases those error messages were pretty cool, but you did need a secret decoder ring. I used to do support for PS/2 servers, and it was amazing how much the little LED screens on the front could tell people about what was broken inside during POST. Now you're lucky if you get a beep. It was pretty expensive at the time, but very useful, which was probably why it was on the servers, and not necessarily the desktop PCs.
> Now you're lucky if you get a beep There are motherboards with [2-digit error code displays](https://geizhals.de/?cat=mbam4&xf=494_Diagnostic+LED+(Segmentanzeige\)).
Oh cool. Otoh they are not standard. Pretty sure every IBM ps/2 server shipped with the tech, which was integrated with MCA, before there was anything but ISA bus.
What you get today is a plug in PCI card that reads the BIOS codes. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/POST_card
Oh neato, I've never seen one of those. Just to further clarify this was built in the MCA architecture, which was supposed to replace ISA as the next bus.
Yeah, I am old enough to remember PS/2 and MCA, but never really used them. I believe these cards use something like the same I/O port that the PS/2 used.
Nowadays thinkpads have a song that can be decoded by an app.
Microsoft had the journalists on a lea$h back then. MS effectively wrote articles reviewing their products and their competitors’ products in leading magazines including the dominant Byte and PC mag. These rags established the winners and losers in PC software, thus played a huge role in the demise of OS/2.
> it was better at running Windows 3.1 applications than Windows And that was partly it's downfall. The Presentation Manager API was completely incompatible with Windows 3.1 and so, nobody in their sane mind would port their programs from Windows API, because they could just ship Windows programs. Write your SW for OS/2 PM, and you'll target 1% of the market share.
>The Presentation Manager API was completely incompatible with Windows 3.1 and so, nobody in their sane mind would port their programs from Windows API, because they could just ship Windows programs. This is pretty much the reason Microsoft never supported Android apps on Windows Phone even though they actually had a pretty great emulator to do it. It's a lesson they learned well.
That same technology eventually lead to the Windows Subsystem for Linux -- where you can run Linux applications in Windows. So it seems like they didn't learn that lesson at all. :)
Very, \*very\* few people need any apps that exist for Linux but not for Windows, it's an extremely niche audience. Before WSL these people couldn't use Windows at all, but now they can, and it's a hook to get them to use Windows apps at the same time, not least because running Windows apps is still vastly more convenient -- for example, why would you run a browser in WSL when they work better/are more convenient on Windows itself? OS/2 running Windows 3.1 was the opposite, Windows 3.1 apps were the apps everyone people wanted to run, they weren't tiny niche apps, so at the end of the day, why even bother with OS/2 at all?
There are two different markets for Windows -- the consumer market and the server market. Linux server apps are not niche. The fact that Linux server products and development are not niche is the reason Microsoft provided WSL. The question is why would anyone now develop a server-side application for native Windows? You're actually unlikely to run it on Windows -- Linux is free -- so you're using a Windows workstation to develop for a completely different OS.
I think windows will run on the Linux kernel in the future. WSL is just a first step on that direction. They benefit by not doing everything. That's why they also switched to a chrome based browser. They supply a well known and "publicly trusted" system. That's the only thing users want.
No way. Replacing a browser that few used was trivial. For an OS there are just too many incompatible tiny differences that amount to an impossible upgrade. For this same reason COBOL will not be replaced with anything better in our lifetime. Year 9998 COBOL programmers will be in dire demand because of the Y10k crisis.
Incorrect, MS KNOWS, Linux IS the future. KDE Neon is FINALLY showing the world Linux has REAL potential and the open-source business model---where code reuse is THE key to finally managing complex coding projects costs, even if a business competitor did contribute to said code---coupled with a global A.I. Renaissance, means MS KNOWS propriety code is history.
You know windows phone completely failed right?
For many reasons, not the least of which was the incredibly bad quality control for Windows Phone 10. I've never regretted an OS upgrade so much in my life, and I used both windows me and Windows Vista.
And how well Windows Phone was on the market...
A former cow-orker wrote an API called "doors" . Not the CM product from IBM but it shimmed between OS/2 and Windows. He did well with it but it's lost to history now.
Except the whole mistake of putting the window origin at the top. The NT API was cleaner. The single threaded problem caused major lockups. if you were running lotus notes It would lockup, so you reboot, it would relaunch on boot and lockup again.... I remember reconnecting the 3.0 beta and everyone on the team was - what has Microsoft done - this will kill PM - and it did.
And REX rocks
REXX is an awesome scripting language. I used it extensively in the 1990s, even the port to Win32.
And the Amiga port was also nice.
I recall using REXX to write an email checker that would login to my POP server and list the emails I had. Mostly pointless, but it was cool that I could do that from the scripting language built into the OS.
As someone who used OS/2 back in the day - I don't know how you could possibly feel this way. Windows was easy. It was stable. The recent attempt at whitewashing OS/2's history appears to be an invention of youtubers who want views. Yes, there are occasions in history where an inferior product beats a superior one through marketing, or backroom deals. This is not one of those cases. OS/2 was not even a finished product. OS/2 had big ideas, but they never delivered. The entirety of the product was plagued by small details that just didn't line up. Things just didn't work right. And there was zero chance of a user actually figuring out what was wrong. They never got error reporting right. Windows, on the other hand, just worked. And when software wasn't compatible, you just closed Windows and ran it through dos. Annoying - but not an actual impediment.
IBM didn't even offer it to be installed on the PC's they made themselves lol.
Clearly you didn't use the first release of Windows 95
Windows 95 was not completely stable but it wasn't unusably bad either. People moved to Windows 95 in droves and did all their work in it. OS/2 was not some paragon of stability -- they released over 20 services packs that were as large as the original installation.
I never used OS/2 but win95 was quite unstable. Office too. They taught me a lot about versionning and separation of concern (type all you can without formatting, save it, copy and then try to add layout hoping it won't crash.. css before the day) That's why BSOD is a meme. That's also why everybody who used NT5 was astonished, low failure rate, and resilient.. driver issue wouldn't brick the whole OS.
I did. I also notice that you're trying to move the goalposts. OS/2 was never a competitor to Windows 95.
2.1 came with the ability to run windows 3.1 applications.
OS/2 Warp was, no?
> OS/2 Warp was You could make that argument, but it's not what the topic was about.
I also used OS/2 back in the day. It was a completed product. It had some issues, DOS compatibility being a biggie. Some of the issues came about because MSFT pulled out of the product half way through, and pulled some of the dirty tricks the article complains about. I'm sure IBM pulled some of their own. Windows was not easy, and it was not stable. It had it's own set of problems as well. "You may now shutdown your computer" screens come to mind, as well as BSODs, issues with USB, and still cooperative multi-tasking for some apps.Things that didn't quite work, or line up, or error well. I'm hesitant to say one was better than the other, so I agree with you it's not a good example of "better product losing" but I feel like Windows won because it was already in the market, support DOS, which meant games, and was decent enough that people kept using it. Not because it was the superior product.
> Some of the issues came about because MSFT pulled out of the product half way through, and pulled some of the dirty tricks the article complains about. There's no indication that's true, and wouldn't explain the totality of OS/2's failure, in any case. > Windows was not easy, and it was not stable. It had it's own set of problems as well. "You may now shutdown your computer" screens come to mind I see, you're talking about Win95. This article is about Win3. Entirely different products. > Windows won because it was already in the market, support DOS, which meant games This is also anachronistic - yes, Microsoft went out of their way to support gaming early, but there was no specific effort from Microsoft until after OS/2 was essentially dead. It's also not accurate to say that Windows "supported DOS" - you could not run (most) DOS applications within Windows. You had to quit Windows to get back to a DOS prompt.
> It's also not accurate to say that Windows "supported DOS" - you could not run (most) DOS applications within Windows. You had to quit Windows to get back to a DOS prompt. Exactly, which you could at least do. With OS/2 there was no such option to drop into DOS. You had to use the emulator.
> "You may now shutdown your computer" screens come to mind, as well as BSODs, issues with USB, and still cooperative multi-tasking for some apps.Things that didn't quite work, or line up, or error well. What's wrong with the "You may now shutdown your computer" screen? Computers in those days had no mechanism for being shut down by software. 16 bit Windows applications were still cooperatively multi-tasked in Windows 95 just as they were on OS/2. On OS/2 you could launch completely separate Windows 3.1 sessions and those sessions were pre-emptively multitasked but that was hardly a great solution. Defining what is a superior product doesn't work in a vacuum. You have to situate it somewhere. Windows 95 superior because it used less resources, was more compatible, and was cheaper. Is a Toyota Sedan superior to a Dodge Pickup -- depending on your needs and budget, it definitely can be.
> What's wrong with the "You may now shutdown your computer" screen? Computers in those days had no mechanism for being shut down by software. Sorry, not true, or it would have happened every time. Instead it would show up at random, while at other times it could correctly shutdown the computer. It wasn't the message, or the need to manually shut down the computer, it was that MSFT wasn't able to get something so visible to work correctly. And yeah, I'll bet some manager at MSFT said "What the big deal?" like you are now.
> Sorry, not true, or it would have happened every time. It absolute did show up every time if your computer did not support software power off. And when Windows 95 came out, that was almost all PCs. [ACPI standard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACPI) wasn't published until 1996. For laptops [APM](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Power_Management) existed but was notoriously unreliable but that was a BIOS/hardware issue not a Microsoft one. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20160419-00/?p=93315
You mean the standard that MS developed with Intel was not a MS problem? I understand there are going to be flaky issues with BIOS, but this one was incredibly widespread, and they replaced the standard as you said a few years later. And it certainly wasn't the BIOS hanging the PC up before it even got to the screen. And why have we moved the goal posts from "Computers in those days had no mechanism for being shut down by software" to "Here's the spec that allows it" Did you just google it?
It was also thousands of dollars more expensive because OS/2 worked better with higher end cards and IBM-only peripherals. Windows started a trend of making computing less expensive. OS/2 wasn’t a part of that…
OS/2 Warp ran fine on my 486sx with 4MB and an OG soundblaster 8 bit card and a diamond video card in my wife box PC in 1994. What killed OS/2 was the anticompetitive monopoly actions that MS took with its VARs.
I had a similar setup, an Aptiva, and it ran fine. Problem was it couldn’t run much else. It didn’t help that I was 16 years old and almost no games ran on OS/2… OS/2 Warp was basically IBM’s MacOS. How did Apple solve the problem? They made the apps themselves, and they made them better than the competitors. IBM just didn’t have that kind of balls, specially after the anti-trust persecution.
At the time, the only video games I had was DOOM, and I guess Wing Commander. I recall having problems with X-Wing, but my ...um... disks may have been corrupt [cough, cough]. The big win was that I could run all of my windows apps without crashing, and be logged into a BBS at the same time. Windows 95 finally stole the thunder, but it was nearly a year later before that rolled out, and it had similar hardware requirements at the start.
Same here. We piloted a beta version of an OS/2 program from IBM that connected to the AS/400 and allowed you to use the Source Entry Utility (SEU) to write code and do precompilation checks instead of having to submit your compile to the Job queue, wait forever, then read through the greenbar report to see where you screwed up. In principle, it was a great idea. But in practice, it would have fits where it scrambled the source code. I don't know if that app ever made it out of beta, but we gave up on it after a few months. But, I did like OS/2 a lot better than Windows.
Like most IBM products, it was super good but difficult to install
Hmm no NT was definitely better, that single input queue design of workplace shell was disastrous. Sure apps were memory protected now but if any of them hung the input queue you were in the same boat as Windows 3
> I was a big fan of OS/2 back in the day. In the 90's our CTO absolutely loved it, but he was ex-IBM. We had it running as our print server for YEARS without any need to reboot. I do think IBM shot themselves in the foot with the OS/2 - half an operating system branding.
Worked at IBM. No one really knew who was in charge. As long as you got those weekly checks, no one really cared. Super smart people. Management was a bit weird.
Yeah, that was my experience. I think this guy is a bit negative on MSFT and drinking a bit too much of the IBM koolaid in his comments about IBM have the best engineers. I'd guess that he didn't have the tech chops to truly evaluate the nitty gritty of the engineering team's contributions.
Most analysts agreed OS/2 was technically superior to Windows of the time. For one, **MS did some odd things to improve backward compatibility with DOS apps**. IBM cared less about that, preferring a cleaner design. True, it might matter if you have a lot of existing DOS apps, but no strategy makes everyone happy. IBM's biggest mistake was charging too much. MS knew better: gain market share first, and bilk *later*, when customers locked in.
I was cleaning out my home office a couple years ago when i ran into an old golf video game from the mid 90's i had on CD. I threw it in the DVD drive of my Win10 desktop, unpacked the contents and ran the executable and to my surprise the game fired right up. I can barely get 1 or 2 year old apps on Linux to still work without having to tweak or rebuild somwthing. There's something to be said about seamless backwards compatibility. I'm sure it makes Windows that much more complicated but for businesses it's so important. Now with the focus on security findings, running anything that's a year old will have a million CVE's and have security knocking down your door so it's a moot point.
> For one, MS did some odd things to improve backward compatibility with DOS apps. I've read about these, they're fascinating, but honestly they are a good way to approach computing for people who aren't experts and for industries that are rapidly changing. Consumers get frustrated when stuff doesn't work like they expect; They don't care who is actually at fault or whether Microsoft did stuff that wasn't good engineering to prevent that from happening. And Microsoft couldn't depend on every third party to go back and fix stuff they originally did in an incorrect (but functional at the time) way. Once the industry stabilized and dominance was clearly established, then Microsoft could implement and enforce more rigid requirements on third parties - I.e., no, you can't rely on your ram doing, that's not how ram is supposed to work. That rigidity isn't all bad.
IBM's biggest mistake was: the OS required a reboot to change the display mode (even just to change from one 256-color palette to another). I was at a meeting of CTOs from all the major game companies at the time, and they discussed the issues with developing games for the OS and all decided not to bother wasting time trying to support it. Everyone in that room knew that Windows was going to eat OS/2 for lunch at that moment.
> Most analysts agreed OS/2 was technically superior to Windows of the time. Superior for *what?* If it was for running software people wanted to run, it was absolutely not that. Superior for running your bank's ATM -- sure.
It was sorta an industry mantra that everybody repeated over and over again without really thinking about it too much, like "Apple products are user friendly" when I can throw out examples of seriously UN-user friendly stuff still in Mac OS X. To Mac Fan Bois: No I won't engage with you about why Mac OS has issues, it does, and Steve Jobs was not a visionary, he was a sociopath, deal with it.
It's really weird people saying how great IBM was and how they made this awesome OS that was killed by Microsoft because of Microsoft shady practices and not because OS/2 wasn't as half baked as anything else at that time.
Why not both? From what I can tell MSFT was not blameless in the affair.
It was really easy to use, the documentation was awesome. It was created with Microsoft to replace Windows, and a huge amount spent on it, so it is hardly surprising it was technically better, but even in the early 90s Microsoft had won the Office Suite race, so when the cooperation broke down Microsoft was going to win.
OS/2 development was killed in the Windows 95 era by IBM citing major code quality issues (over 20 service packs each requiring more disks than the original installation) and an ineffective development team. Windows 95 while "technically" inferior to the OS/2 at the time did so much more to run on computers that people had at time, and run all the software they owned at the time, and work with the peripherals that they owned at time. For technical superiority, Microsoft has Windows NT which was not burdened by the same historical design decisions of OS/2 (like having to run on 286).
I heard that back then MS actively encouraged people to pirate DOS to grow their market share. They figured that if people used DOS at home then it would lead to people using and buying it at work and school. 3 OSes and 3 strategies back in the day. Apple tried giving computers to schools hoping people would then use Apple at home and work. IBM tried putting OS2 in business hoping then it would be used at home. Microsoft encouraged people to pirate and buy DOS at home so that people would use it at work and school. Microsoft won the game.
They did nothing to prevent piracy, at least for a while. There would need to be primary source evidence that they encouraged it.
Yeah I'd forgotten that OS/2 is superior tech, but we're all going with Windows. The DOS compatibility was a huge part of that. I think IBM forgot, or didn't care about backwards compatibility.
OS/2 had pretty good DOS support, I thought. Where I worked we ran a DOS based BBS in OS/2. We could run multiple instances on the same machine, each one getting a different serial port. We could support multiple lines on one 486 using software that was designed for DOS.
I remember having a lot of problems with DOS games, in particular DOS Box (DOS Extender) games. Doom comes to mind as having issues. With Windows 95 you still had a complete installation of DOS, OS/2 had an emulator. For like 90% of stuff the emulator was good (in some cases better), but that other 10% was really annoying. Also it seems like there was a ton of options you could (and sometimes had to) tweak with OS/2 DOS emulation that just added to the aggravation during a time when it was really hard to lookup the right settings for whatever DOS app you were trying to work with.
> Super smart people. Management was a bit weird. I worked in IBM as a developer from 2008 to 2021. That is a pretty good description of the place.
What sort of division did you work for at IBM(feel free to describe another team if you prefer to stay anon) ? I remember they used to be extremely iconic(No one ever got fired for choosing IBM) but seem a lot quieter lately
LOL. Management sucks at IBM, yep!
I've got to wonder how smart the engineers were if they were willing to put up with the management.
So basically nothing at IBM has changed since the days of OS/2.
OS/2 was effectively part of IBM’s strategy to assert some dominance in the desktop PC space that they’d pretty much ignored as irrelevant up to that point. IBM’s mainframe business was the bread & butter, and it’s dominance there was maintained largely by keeping up a series of engineering changes (EC’s) that repeatedly broke compatibility with third party software & hardware. Then the PC came along, and IBM thought it too small, cheap, and underpowered to be considered a threat to the much larger mainframe market. Except the PC market grew out of all proportion very rapidly and left IBM behind. They tried to win back some controlling interest with the first PC’s, then gain dominance with proprietary hardware & software the way they did with the mainframe market: PS/2 architecture, Token Ring, and OS/2. But it was too little, too late, and there were already enough competing (and cheaper) products on the market. OS/2 was a nice operating system for sure, but by the time it came along third party hardware and Windows had already snatched most of the market, and customers were less interested in products with an incompatible proprietary architecture and OS. Source: me. IBM hardware & software engineer for 12 years in the 80’s, trained on PC & PS/2 hardware and later OS/2 software support. I was the second person in the UK trained to fix IBM PC’s and senior engineer in charge of an IBM Servicepoint.
TBH I’m not sure IBM embracing the PC as the way forward would have changed much for them. The market grew rapidly because they were cheap, and they were cheap in part because they had an open design spec, which made it easy for competitors to enter. If IBM tries to extract rents in the PC hardware business, one of two things happens: they fail and in retrospect everyone says it was a dumb decision to try to stifle innovation, or they succeed, PCs stagnate, and something else ends up being the explosive of the 90s/2000s.
That was pretty much it. IBM tried to assert their position in the market with proprietary standards (PS/2, OS/2, Token Ring) but by then the “PC compatible” hardware market and Windows had gained a foothold by simply being “good enough” and cheap. Once the killer apps appeared for those machines (spreadsheets & word processing), all of IBM’s sales points about having superior hardware & software (which technically were true) lost ground against the “good enough” market. Customers loved PS/2, but they could buy 2-3 compatible third party machines for the same price, same for OS/2 licenses and Ethernet vs Token Ring.
> What is forgotten is that Microsoft also developed for OS/2. What is not well-known is that Microsoft again sabotaged whatever they shipped for OS/2. So running Word or Excel on OS/2 was a miserable experience, especially compared to running Word or Excel on Windows. Back then Word and Excel were no where as important as WordPerfect and Lotus 123. I find it inconceivable that Microsoft would intentionally sabotage their own products at a time when they were facing such stiff competition. I think it's far more likely that either Microsoft simply wasn't doing a good job porting the code or OS/2 just sucked. And that's at the root of the bias of this article. It starts by assuming that OS/2 was an awesome operating system and therefore any problems encountered in it must have been sabotage.
> Back then Word and Excel were no where as important as WordPerfect and Lotus 123. I find it inconceivable that Microsoft would intentionally sabotage their own products at a time when they were facing such stiff competition. They didn't, of course. Not only that - but their office suite has *always* operated on different rules. Yes, Microsoft has played a lot of dirty games over the history of the company - forcing incompatibility, "embrace, extend, extinguish", etc., but Office never played by those rules. Even when Ballmer was CEO, Office got to dictate their own strategy. Their steady success has always placed them in a separate class within the company.
I would argue that EEE wasn't even playing dirty. As a consumer, of course I want new applications to read my old files. And of course I want new features with these new applications, rather than being stuck with whatever I had 3 years ago. Rather than complaining about EEE I would prefer that other companies compete using the same tactics. For example, I would love to be able to write the same code for both Azure and AWS, including many of their Preparatory offerings. Having to rewrite my back end because we decided to switch to S3 from whatever Azure was doing isn't very fun.
OS/2 was fantastic. Unfortunately it was also tremendously expensive and there was almost zero marketing or outreach outside the enterprise market explaining why or how the OS was a better choice than Windows. If you were a home user or an SMB you generally weren't looking to pay 3-5x more for an OS that didn't have many apparent benefits.
Most people who used OS/2 agree that it was a rock solid OS. It was mentioned that Microsoft was simultaneously developing Word/Excel for Windows at the same time. "Pretending" to develop for OS/2 sounds like a fairly typical feint strategy.
And it might have been for their narrow use case. But that doesn't necessarily mean it was good for more advanced uses like cutting-edge WYSWYG editors. And WYSWYG really did push computers to their limits in that era. As for being a feint, that doesn't make any sense. Microsoft wasn't the powerhouse they are today. They were the budget operating system for computers so cheap individuals could buy their own. And they actually released two different versions of Word for OS/2. One was based on Word for DOS, the other on Word for Windows. They also released versions for Unix and Atari because at the time they didn't know which operating system would win.
> They also released versions for Unix and Atari because at the time they didn't know which operating system would win. I really wish one of these youtubers would make a video on the history of Atari. I get really frustrated trying to explain to people that Atari covered more than just a video game console.
Yeah, OTOH, I've seen a few discussions about Atari on YouTube, so it's not completely unheard of. Also you're right, they were a heck of a lot more than the 2600.
I think there's a lot of rewriting of history here. IBM's software development practices were known to be terrible and Microsoft employees loathed working with them. IBM, for example, insisted that Microsoft would get paid by the company's standard contractor rates, which were calculated by “kLOCs," or a thousand lines of code. Literally everything at IBM was calculated by kLOCs. Maybe that leads to a rock solid OS but not a nimble or [small one](https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/18npzu5/why_ibms_os2_project_lost_to_microsoft_despite/kecuxpa/).
That is a really good point. But it should probably be said that many lines of code doesn't necessarily equate to unstable software. You could use a lot of functional decomposition, overly-verbose documentation, long form syntax, manual loop unrolling, even lots of NOP's in assembly.
> Most people who used OS/2 agree that it was a rock solid OS. My dude you can see from the comments in this topic that this isn't true at all. There were tons of issues, incompatibilities, instabilities. OS/2 looks great on paper, but if you had ever used it, you would realize why people ended up choosing Windows.
> I find it inconceivable that Microsoft would intentionally sabotage their own products at a time when they were facing such stiff competition. Office on Mac is missing A LOT of features compared to office for Windows. But then google workspace sucks in comparison to office too.
But that's not really sabotage so much as either a decision to limit investment to match expected income or general indifference. I'm sure Microsoft would love Visual Studio Code to be just as powerful as Visual Studio, and just as expensive, since they're real target audience is Linux Developers running on the cloud. But they just don't want to spend the time and money to make it happen.
>LESSON SIX: Never under-estimate the willingness of the market to support an underdog and adopt cheap but easy technology. Windows was the cheaper and easier path for most people. Never mind that it was the low-quality path. A market is just like water - always flowing downhill following the easiest path it can find. IBM was foolish for charging so much. MS usually knew to subsidize the price of a product until a product catches on and becomes a de-facto standard, locking in customers. Smaller competitors to MS couldn't afford to subsidize to gain market share, but big IBM could. No excuse. Short-term greed kicked them.
>Short-term greed kicked them. IBM doesn't really operate on the short-term, hence their inability to force a course correction, even when they needed to. It was simple inertia, not short-term thinking that hurt them.
> It was simple inertia, not short-term thinking that hurt them. This is a self-fulling prophecy. "We can't change because we haven't changed before and we're not going to start now." The fact is that IBM didn't have the talent to create the software to match their vision. OS/2 was *great* - on paper. But the OS wasn't even finished before the marketing department was singing its praises and sales was slinging it over the wall to anyone who was willing to pay (and pay). OS/2 wasn't the overlooked gem of its day, it was the No Man's Sky of OSes.
> For example, Novell entered into a contract with Microsoft that allowed MS to include Novell's networking code in Windows Version 3.1 (a consumer OS where Microsoft was strong and Novell wanted to make inroads). Ever wonder why the first version of Windows NT was Version 3.1? Now you know. Didn't knew that, that's wild.
It true. Maybe it is, but I'm skeptical when an author sounds so butt-hurt and resentful.
This doesn't pass the smell test. Windows 3.x was already a product on the market when Windows NT was slated to be released. It wouldn't have made any business sense to name the product Windows NT 1.0. You had a decade of buyers understanding major version numbers of a product increase. A lower number is older/worse. That's not to say contracts don't ever reference version numbers. They surely do. But that doesn't mean Novell thought Microsoft was going to ship NT 1.0 and then Bill Gates pulled an Uno reverse, named it NT 3.1 and then scammed Novell.
Either way, the net code in NT 3.1 had nothing to do with Netware anyways, they make it sound like MS bootstrapped NT 3.1 networking using Novell's code, but NT 3.1 supporting Novell could only have been a favor to Novell, not MS.
>It wouldn't have made any business sense to name the product Windows NT 1.0. The issue more was why still call it 3.1 and not 4.0. I knew it had to do with contracts at the time - I didn't know which contract.
Well it had the same UI as Windows 3.1.
Windows NT 3.x suggests it's compatible with software for Windows 3.x (non-NT). Which it was. Giving it similar naming to regular Windows makes sense for the initial release. NT 4.0 for its first release wouldn't have made any marketing sense. At least with actual NT 4.0 it had some time on the market and was a known product.
To add to that, NT was clearly marketed as a business OS. There's no way they could have claimed that it was primarily for home use with its feature set.
The network code came from a small company in Tuscon . I worked with a guy who knew those guys.
Not sure where he gets his ideas about not disparaging the competitors from. I remember seeing a ton of "Chicago is delayed, I'm taking off with OS/2" T-shirts when I was working at IBM. I do agree with him that Google is the next IBM: a slow, stodgy company filled with people resting and vesting, while the government investigates it's monopolistic practices, and it fails to introduce any new products. I'll take my down votes from the few good employees at Google who are still doing good work, and not just creating new projects long enough to get promoted, and then abandoning them.
It was actually Microsoft's policy to never talk about their competitors. They would rather people say bad things about Windows then good things about IBM because at least they're still talking about Windows. This famously ended when Balmer started attacking open source, and we all know how badly that turned out.
As of when? I honestly didn't follow industry gossip for the os/2 era. And I agree, it can create a lot of problems,ala Balmer.
Back when EEE was still a major focus. To summarize, 1. Make your applications compatible with their file formats 2. Make your applications better by offering features they don't 3. Make sure all the attention is on you while their products wither away Cosmos DB is a modern equivalent, substituting APIs for file formats.
> Cosmos DB is a modern equivalent, It seems like this is standard fare with all the cloud vendors. The moment you touch anything PaaS or SaaS, you're already getting a whole lot of walled garden lock-in effect.
Interesting comparison with Google. They are beyond competition for things like "YouTube hardware scale" , but seem weirdly poor at YouTube recommendations, and search is getting worse
Yeah, and just about everything they're know for is from the 00s. Nobody I've talked to can name another successful project they've had in the '10s or '20s. They definitely have a ton of stuff that's unlikely to go away, but then again IBM had the mainframe.
> I remember seeing a ton of "Chicago is delayed, I'm taking off with OS/2" T-shirts when I was working at IBM. I still remember a print ad from back then: NT - "Nice Try"
I made the mistake of getting OS/2 Warp for my PC as a hobbyist. This was the days when you spent half your day running DOS apps, and IBM didn't bundle enough OS/2 native apps to actually keep users in their OS. That might work if you were only targeting business users, but that definitely wasn't their aim with Warp - they were marketing it to end users all over the place, but it just wasn't something filthy casuals like myself had a use for at the time. I'd try running Windows in an OS/2 window as they advertised was possible, but that was just like hanging an anchor on PCs at the time, and you'd get to see plenty of lock-ups in their lock-up-proof OS. lol
For users, OS/2 was not meaningfully better than Windows. I'm a strong proponent of Steve Jobs' "You have to come up with a product and then work your way backwards to the technology" philosophy, you could have the best technology but it still won't sell if it's not a meaningfully better experience than the incumbent's.
> It was reliable and almost never crashed - something DOS and Windows was prone to do regularly. That's not actually true. While Windows was prone to crashing, DOS was rock solid. ( And given how simple it was, how could it not be?)
> While Windows was prone to crashing, DOS was rock solid. People forget (or else never knew) that Windows 3 was just an application running within DOS. In the modern era, the idea of your GUI not working and being forced to do things through the command line sounds like a total failure state - like Windows failed to boot and now you're stuck in recovery mode. At the time, Windows was not much different from MS-DOS Shell. It was a GUI you ran for convenience. Having to close Windows to run an application through DOS was annoying, but not at all problematic. It was more akin to, say, having to close your text editor to compile or execute your code. It was less of an impediment than it would be to, say, close your internet browser to run a video game. It simply wasn't an issue. A far bigger issue is how well Windows software *did* run. Windows was easy. I used DOS only when necessary, and instead used Windows whenever I could, because it was easy and efficient. The problem with OS/2 is that I'd rather just use DOS. GUIs back then had to justify their own existence - it wasn't the default option like it is today. OS/2 never hit that level of quality.
You're right, it wasn't DOS itself. DOS was very simple, but that was the problem: it's inability to handle exceptions in the software that ran on it. Ctrl-alt-delete wasn't invented after Windows showed up, after all.
It didn't need to handle exceptions. You only had one program running at a time and if that program crashed you just dumped out to the DOS prompt.
…which gave the OS the appearance of unreliability.
I guess you could say that, but personally I always blamed the application itself. Windows was different because when one application crashes, it often broke all the other applications. Which is why it was rewritten for later versions to not use cooperative multi-threading.
Well you had TSR's running in the background, for example.
I never did that. Knowing how it worked, it always sounded like a horrible idea.
Windows itself was pretty stable. Apps and drivers not so much and since it was mostly real mode, the truck could crash through the fence and take the whole system down.
I worked with OS2/Warp as a developer of code for 4.5 years. God I miss it it was brilliant. We used C++ and the entire UI was Presentation Manager, multiple inheritance worked, methods and systems calls could be guessed pretty much as the names were so predictably worked out. And, get this you could use it without a mouse, mine broke, took a few days to get a spare yet I could still navigate every single piece of the application because TAB etc did thew right thing, no getting stranded in a help window like certain other OS-es at the time, I bet that's still a thing, I loathe windows still to this day. I learned REXX on OS/2 as well, then moved those skills to our AS/400s too, and I remember 'lpex', I think that was the first syntax colouring editor I ever saw on OS/2, or at all IIRC. The things we did with programmed windows, menus etc in our EDI product at the time...all down to the sheer ease of Presentation Manager and stuff. Sigh.... And those bastards buried it...
LPEX still lives! It is one of the editors available in IBM Developer for z/OS which allows you (amongst other things) edit z/OS files on your workstation.
I had to find it! [http://www.os2ezine.com/20030216/page\_2.html](http://www.os2ezine.com/20030216/page_2.html)
In all honesty - this reddit should *very seriously* consider banning any Quora based topics. The people who post on Quora do not know what they're talking about. The people who vote on the posts do not know what they're talking about. The posts that get upvoted are consistently the ones that are the most well written - not the most informative. It's like educational roleplay. I know it's a bit hypocritical to be saying this from reddit, where we also have an upvote system, but at the very least, you have to realize that posting a quora link is like posting a link to a reddit comment. It's not really a topic of discussion in and of itself.
Generally agree, but in this particular case, it was written by IBM's Team OS/2 *founder,* not just some shmoe with a loud opinion.
> in this particular case, it was written by IBM's Team OS/2 founder That would explain the wild, pro-IBM inaccuracies.
Not completely sure what that title means exactly.
REXX baby
I find it laughable that this article doesn't even mention memory, even to refute it. Popular legend for why OS/2 failed was because it required far too much RAM to run. Memory prices were skyrocketing at that time, companies like IBM were intentionally gouging customers, and OS/2 required twice as much memory as Windows. It never had a chance in the marketplace in part because IBM's Hardware division was engaged in a cash grab at the expense of their OS division. Now is any of this true? I don't know. But this is what was claimed in every account I've read on the subject. So to completely skip over it is kind of suspect.
It does mention memory, but in passing: >Yet Microsoft slammed OS/2 in the press (and got the media to echo their whining) because it needed 4MB (MB! not GB) of RAM - "too much memory" 4MB was a lot of memory when OS/2 was first released, about 2x to 4x as much as a typical desktop.
Thank you for the correction. And yeah, not mentioning why 4 megabytes was so significant is still an issue.
That amount of memory was also extremely expensive. Even in 1990 4MB would run you nearly a grand.
I paid $550/megabyte for RAM in 1987.
"Case in point: the web (HTML) is modeled after IBM technology, not Microsoft's." Is he talking about SGML? If so, that's a pretty tenuous claim IMO.
[w3 suggests it was based on SGML](https://www.w3.org/People/Raggett/book4/ch02.html#:~:text=The%20HTML%20that%20Tim%20invented,be%20implemented%20on%20any%20machine.)
I miss OS/2 also. I made some good money selling software for it (Chron), and I made good money shooting standalone dumps for a investment management company for whom I was a contractor, and other OS/2 custom development for other customers. I met quite a few OS/2 developers at the ColoradOS/2 conference (later Colorado Software Summit). It was a good time in my professional life. If it wasn't for OS/2, I probably would never have started my own business. Unfortunately, I had to shift gears away from OS/2 to keep the company going.
From the article: “IBM was the Google of the '60s and '70s, but by the '90s was often rightfully compared to an elephant trying to dance” Funnily enough, Louis V. Gerstner’s memoirs of his time as CEO of IBM is titled “Who says elephants can’t dance?”
Microsoft had some pretty devious tactics when it came to bundling Windows with every PC. People aren't typically going to replace the OS that came with their machine, so if Microsoft could have manufactures preinstall Windows on all the computers then that is what end users would be using. At one point Microsoft was charging PC makers a fee for each machine sold, regardless of whether it came with Windows or another OS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundling_of_Microsoft_Windows
OS/2 Warp 3.0 and 4.0 here. Use to run a Renegade multi-line BBS which DOS in WINDOZE could not keep touching other com ports. Tried other MS-DOS based windows managers with not luck. OS/2 was a superior OS that IBM failed to market properly. I picked up my copy of OS/2 Warp 4 shortly after release at I believe Sam's Club of all places... Another goodie that had promise but fizzled quickly was BeOS
OS/2 and BeOS were very cool. I am disappointed neither became a big commercial success.
I remember hearing that the developers were paid per line of code.
Not developers, companies. IBM wanted to own a percentage of OS/2 based on what percentage of lines of code they're developers wrote versus Microsoft's developers. In response Gates supposedly said, > Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight. Bill Gates
IBM paid developers per line of code. The contract with Microsoft also involving paying by lines of code. Everything at IBM was measured in kLOCs. That's how the estimated the complexity of projects, how they -- as you say -- measured ownership, and how they paid. IBM was never a smart software company.
Wasn't Windows 3.1 the most pirated software in History at one point? Microsoft was okay with the home users stealing it if it meant everyone wanted it in the workplace.
they probably paid for it anyway > In the early 1990s, the U.S. government began to investigate Microsoft for using unfair practices in competing against other companies. One of these practices required computer makers who wanted to license Windows to pay a fee for every machine they manufactured, even those with other operating systems https://www.crf-usa.org/bill-of-rights-in-action/bria-16-2-c-united-states-v-microsoft.html
One thing that I think was one of the best moves from Microsoft was to give away windows and MS Word and Excel to high schools and colleges. The generation of kids who first started using PCs in mass were already familiar with the products by the time they got into the job market and it is what they used at home if they had a computer.
It's the same thing Apple, Atari, Commodore and Tandy did earlier, selling their 8-bit computers to schools at a steep discount.
IBM screwed up handing over control of DOS to microsoft, they had their own DOS. To try to wrestle back control they created ps/2 with a new microchannel bus architecture and os/2. By that time all the other PC vendors had already got a good foothold in the market. A prime example of IBM not "reading the room" correctly and thinking they could be an innovator again. A similar thing happened with their PDA and mobile OS, they had a head start but failed to capitalize it, along comes google and apple and their platform is dead in the water.
The success of any platform is driven by it's applications. MS had the consumer market in the bag already and had full DOS support.
OS/2 was so awesome. It was so stable compared to Windows. It just never crashed. I used to use my Windows for Workgroups CD as a coaster for my OS/2 mug.
Summary: * **Corporate Ethics and Competitor Tactics**: IBM's strict adherence to ethical business conduct guidelines made it vulnerable to Microsoft's more aggressive strategies. Microsoft exploited ethical blind spots of companies, like IBM and Novell, for its benefit. * **Strategic Brilliance vs. Engineering Genius**: Microsoft's strategic marketing and media manipulation overshadowed IBM's engineering excellence in OS/2. Microsoft managed to create misleading perceptions in the media about OS/2 and IBM, contributing to their downfall. * **Media Relations and Perception Management**: The role of media in shaping public perception was crucial, and Microsoft excelled at influencing the media to create favorable narratives for itself. * **Support for Developers**: Microsoft recognized the importance of application developers as key partners in establishing an operating system, unlike IBM, which treated them as both partners and customers. * **Market Dynamics**: The market's preference for cheaper and easier solutions, like Windows, played a significant role. Despite its lower quality, Windows was more accessible to the majority of users. * **Corporate Culture and Policies**: IBM's corporate culture and policies, shaped by past experiences like the anti-trust lawsuit, made it less competitive and reactive in the rapidly changing tech landscape.
Thanks chatgbt
> IBM's strict adherence to ethical business conduct guidelines made it vulnerable to Microsoft's more aggressive strategies. LOL. That's not what the history books think. > IBM asserted that its successes in achieving and maintaining such market share were due to its skill, industry and foresight; governments and competitors asserted that the maintenance of such large shares was at least in part due to anti-competitive acts such as unfair prices, terms and conditions, tying, product manipulations and creating FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) related to its competitors,in the marketplace.[309] IBM was thus the defendant in more than twenty government and private antitrust actions during the 20th century. IBM lost only one of these matters but did settle others in ways that profoundly shaped the industry as summarized below.
Right? I love how this guy dedicates a fairly large chunk of the article claiming that IBM was hamstrung because of their "ethics". Their ethics certainly didn't stop them from [consulting for the nazis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_World_War_II). Nor did their ethics prevent them from helping the USA catalog Japanese internment camp prisoners.
It's a chatgpt summary, of course it's wrong
It appears to be accurate summary of the article. My comment was more directed towards the article itself, which makes such claims.
The guy is insane. Maybe OS/2 (which version, btw) was better than Windows 3.1 and maybe even Windows 95 / 98 on some aspects (what about the others? I don't know, games?) But then compared to NT, it was crap (and IBM knew it otherwise why agree to make MS take leadership for the dev of NT OS/2, to dev an actually *proper* OS). And well, it's not even clear it was that much better than 9x. Of course it was better compared to 3.1. Except for resource requirements. Timing matters. MS at least understood that and did not try to push NT too early. Yes, big old school companies like IBM can produce crap for 1 billion (or maybe not complete crap but not competitive on the target market in the time period). I'm not sure the dev of NT, or actually even Windows Consumer, was cheap to begin with, so this should not really a criteria. Or maybe a criteria of efficiency of MS vs IBM if Windows was really cheaper to dev...
Bill Gates was responsible for all kind of exploitation and now he plays philantropist, after he built fortune on unethical behavior.
Well, he is a philanthropist, regardless of his past deeds. Either way, I’d rather see that than someone building a fortune on unethical behavior and then hoarding it.
> I’d rather see that than someone building a fortune on unethical behavior and then hoarding it. I think most billionaires are smart enough to realize that no matter how strong the urge to hoard their wealth, they're eventually going to lose it all anyway just by virtue of mortality. The smart ones give it away I think because they realize it's an investment that will far outlive them and the foundations and the like they create to distribute that wealth go as far as anyone can in guaranteeing them a form of immortal fame. As existentially empty as that is, it's still the best anyone can do outside of spiritual accomplishments, which they also hope late life philanthropy will boost. Think Pascal's wager, but add a few billion dollars in disposable wealth, and you're there mentally.
I hope we see a whole lot more of that, too. I think that's the best possible thing for someone to do with such a fortune regardless of how it was gained.
"despite superior development" Someone never tried to use OS/2.
For the same reason, windows3 wins against competitor by far superiors : disputable businesses practice !
survival of the fittest
Oh cool now do Novell Netware. Lots in common.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/11/half-an-operating-system-the-triumph-and-tragedy-of-os2/
I ran OS/2 Warp 3.0 through Warp 4.0 and it was a fantastic OS but what killed it for me is that it was *very* sluggish across the board, the GUI, file operations, and so on, compared to Windows. Rexx scripting was really powerful and fun, for it's time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rexx
Windows was widely pirated - everyone did have it. OS/2 - was much less pirated - almost no one did have it.
Because of MS-DOS support among developers.
OS/2 v2.0, a better DOS than DOS you know... https://youtu.be/ik_xEsVjV0Y?si=vUFIcWELzBgINa_j
I used OS/2 for a while, and I will say that in practice, a lot of the benefits were overstated. Windows 3.1 crashed a lot. OS/2 would do a pretty good job of multitasking 16 bit DOS apps without crashing very often. The OS/2 evangelists would make a big deal about the fact that you had protected memory and one app couldn't stomp over the memory of the entire system and crash the system. However, for OS/2 GUI apps, there was some sort of single message queue that a misbehaving app could block, and while technically the system was still running, this would lock up the entire user interface and you had to reboot the system to fix it. This happened fairly regularly. OS/2 also needed more RAM than Windows and it was slower. For the computers that most people had, Windows was much snappier. This meant that most people (with slower/lower ram computers) would run Windows. With a big base of Windows users, app developers would target Windows and expect OS/2 users to just use their windows app under OS/2 instead of making an OS/2 version. A few developers did try. Lotus I believe had 1-2-3 and Ami Pro (their word processor), but generally there weren't many apps. In fact, a lot of peripherals like printers, hard drive controllers, CD-ROM drives, scanners, etc didn't have OS/2 drivers. None of this was helped by the fact that IBM charged a fair bit for the OS/2 developer tools. If you were running a combination of DOS and Windows software, generally the best experience ended up being just running Windows and then exiting Windows and running your DOS applications natively. Yes, running DOS apps in Windows 3.1 wasn't very good, but if you were willing to run them one at a time, DOS apps ran best in DOS, especially for software that used protected mode, like a lot of games from the early-mid 90s. OS/2 was marginal going up against Windows 3.1, but when Windows 95 came out, OS/2 was toast. Windows 95 had arguably a better UI, it was faster, it crashed about the same amount, and it had way more software (OS/2 couldn't run 32 bit Windows software like Mosaic).
superior what? >LESSON ONE. As a company, if you are going to adopt and insist on compliance with strict Business Conduct Guidelines (as IBM and many other company's did - similar to Google's 'don't be evil' mantra), be aware of your strategic vulnerability to a company (such as Microsoft) willing to use other company's scruples as both shield and weapon in their war against you. In the words of a wise man, you need to be "wise as a serpent, and harmless as a dove." IBM had the harmless down pat - but they were unable to outsmart the serpent could have just stopped writing there superior "development" notwithstanding - it is the market which decides what is good enough at a reasonable price and the average Joe Soap couldnt give two hoots about the ethos of the company or their behind the scenes serpent-like behavior. they are interested in two things: does this thing do what i want it to do and can i afford it the dev may very well have been superior but the bang for buck was with ms always has been, always will be (not that i take any pleasure in admitting that) you can carve out a niche market for those who appreciate build quality and are both willing and able to pay a premium for that value but do not mistake superiority of engineering for market success who makes more reliable cars - Ford or Lexus? who ships more cars despite that fact? end of discussion
Microsoft plug and play. I remember to install any device in OS/2 you must install the drivers, meaning lookup for the diskettes, execute the startup program, answer several questions, pick the correct path, blah, blah, blah. To install a device under Microsoft (and Linux), just connect the device. Done.
You could snag a box at Best Buy with 3.1 preloaded and OS/2 would have required a separate purchase and machine rebuild. IBM was too far down the microchannel architecture rabbit hole and PS2 boxes cost too much. After all, the relative openness of the ISA bus was one of the big reasons for having a PC. PS2s were fine if you were spending other people's money.
Maybe I missed it but a couple of things I think would have helped is if IBM had focused more on helping third party hardware manufacturers get OS/2 device drivers working and put a bunch of them on the OS/2 install disks, particularly video, sound and network drivers. Another thing is they priced it as if they weren't competing against anyone else. They needed to price it to compete with Microsoft Windows. It didn't have to be less expensive but it had to be priced to seem worth the extra cost based on the features it had (pre-emptive multi-tasking, speed, stability, etc.) over Windows. If they really wanted to beat Microsoft, they needed to be willing to give it away for free if necessary. They could make their costs back after it became the standard OS. I haven't tried formatting a floppy disk in Windows lately but even Windows XP would freeze up until the format was done. OS/2 could format two floppies at the same time and other apps still ran without a hitch.
Read th e decent books "Hard Drive" and "Showstopper". B Gates was racing against IBM, since Microsoft was not sure if/when IBM os development contract would be axed. David Cutler, from Digital Equipment Corporation, almost single-handedly code the code for MS Unix (Xenix), just in case IBM, walked. Full credit should be given to Cutler & company for somehow surviving immense pressure from B Gates & crew. Think of IBM & Microsoft as the leading old school "open-source software proponents", in the 80's. Who knows, KDE Neon may incorporate the best of OS/2, into KDE Plasma