Also see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3785819 . I posted a lot of comments to it.
25 years of OS/2: the legendary failure that refuses to die.
51–60 of 62 posts
Re: 25 years of OS/2: the legendary failure that refuses to die.
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
Readability didn't work for me on this page anyway. Very frustrating that content producers do this and provide no way to view the whole article in a single click.
As far as first world problems go, this one is really annoying. Especially if you send an article to the Kindle and don't notice that you only got a part of it. After a few times, I learnt to view and check first but it really kills the flow.
I have to admit... I did have a "First world problem" meme image in my head as I posted this and thought it might not be an appropriate complaint to raise on HN.
Re: 25 years of OS/2: the legendary failure that refuses to die.
#53I really liked OS/2. I could run several varieties of DOS under it and early Windows - very flexible when I needed to develop using several operating systems. The real reason OS/2 was not widely adopted? Maybe this: the first time OS/2 was booted after an install, the bootup time took a very, very long time. I was once in a computer store and some guy was practically screaming at the sales people. He had bought OS/2,…
Huh, funny. I always think it's interesting how boot times have increased over the years regardless of Moore's law. My Apple ][ took about 6 seconds to boot, yet a modern PC or Mac takes much longer (and even longer to shutdown, usually)
My Sinclair ZX Spectrum clone, on an 8 bit CPU at 3.5 MHz, 64 kB total memory, used to "boot" in a second or so.
Re: 25 years of OS/2: the legendary failure that refuses to die.
#54OS/2 Warp has a nice system. Too bad IBM refused to support it. They had a golden opportunity, when it was clear that PCs would be transitioning from 16-bit operating systems to 32-bit operating systems. Microsoft had WinNT for 32-bit, Win3.x for 16-bit. WinNT didn't do a good job at the time running people's existing 16-bit Win3.x applications, so migrating to NT was a tough sell. This put MS in a hard place, becaus…
Didn't Microsoft win by putting itself into position to preinstall its OS on new computers?
Re: 25 years of OS/2: the legendary failure that refuses to die.
#55A few years back (around 2008, maybe) I stumbled upon an ATM that had failed to boot all the way and was pretty surprised that it was running OS/2 (and a Rexx script). This was for Brazil's largest bank (Banco do Brasil). Since then I think they've moved to Linux.
But most ATMs move to Windows XP, strangely enough.
To watch them boot, you only need a power failure. Strangely enough, ATM is often not even plugged in UPS.
Re: 25 years of OS/2: the legendary failure that refuses to die.
#56OS/2 Warp has a nice system. Too bad IBM refused to support it. They had a golden opportunity, when it was clear that PCs would be transitioning from 16-bit operating systems to 32-bit operating systems. Microsoft had WinNT for 32-bit, Win3.x for 16-bit. WinNT didn't do a good job at the time running people's existing 16-bit Win3.x applications, so migrating to NT was a tough sell. This put MS in a hard place, becaus…
Related to points 2 and 3, Microsoft didn't just make it easier to get the Windows tools, they made a tool that made it easy to write Windows programs: Visual Basic. Everyone loves to hate VB, but it was a huge factor in enabling line of business developers -- people who just need to bash out CRUD apps as quickly as possible, people who don't need the fine control of C/C++, people who want to knock together a bunch of forms rather than mastering the vast Windows or Presentation Manager APIs -- to create applications on Windows. And of course VB was also adopted by hobbyists and people creating simple utility programs, again ensuring that those programs would be available on Windows but not OS/2.
Re: 25 years of OS/2: the legendary failure that refuses to die.
#57Microsoft's OS/2 Crush Plan makes a good read today.
Re: 25 years of OS/2: the legendary failure that refuses to die.
#58I realize this is off topic, so please forgive the following rant. I'm not sure if it's out of principle or just stubbornness, but it's gotten to the point where every time I read an article that is paginated (most likely only because whoever runs the website wants more page views), I refuse to continue to the next page and end up reading only a fraction of the article. My attitude towards pagination wasn't always th…
Reading the newspaper must be no fun for you then.
Re: 25 years of OS/2: the legendary failure that refuses to die.
#59Wow, this brings back memories. I was a total OS/2-Head until about 1993 or 1994 when I got both an Yggdrasil Linux CD for my 486, and, a NeXTCube; and from there, ended up a Unix fan. The problem with installation, was that all development was done on PS/2s. The developers never did much testing on non-MCA (MicroChannel Architecture, a pre-PCI intelligent bus design) hardware. That is why, for instance, when install…
OS/2 was actually quite good on underpowered hardware if you stuck to console apps running fullscreen. I started with OS/2 2.1 on a 40Mhz 386 with just 8Mb RAM, connecting to BBSes and reading FidoNet with a newsreader called Blue Wave and programming with the Boxer editor. OS/2 Warp was the first shrinkwrapped software I bought, still on floppy disks; I was quite proud of that as a 14 year old, as piracy was rampant in Brazil at the time.
I remember OS/2 was quite popular with both BBS operators and BBS users around here, as it was the easiest way to multitask on a PC in the early 90s. It had a quite vibrant shareware/freeware scene. You did have to be picky about hardware, though, but even here it was easy to find video cards, sound cards and modems that ran just fine.
Re: 25 years of OS/2: the legendary failure that refuses to die.
#60A few years back (around 2008, maybe) I stumbled upon an ATM that had failed to boot all the way and was pretty surprised that it was running OS/2 (and a Rexx script). This was for Brazil's largest bank (Banco do Brasil). Since then I think they've moved to Linux.
About six years ago, I was in a council bus terminal and the system running the timetable monitors had crashed. It was showing a Commodore64 prompt.