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

I remember an internal training class at a large consulting firm in the mid 90s that was using OS/2. I thought, "This is an awful sign. Are we doing this just to get some business with IBM?" They were a big user of Lotus Notes 2. You never know...

> Long before operating systems got exciting names based on giant cats and towns in California named after dogs, most of their names were pretty boring.

Ah, yes. Mavericks, California. It's a great little offshore town, just off Pillar Point. I love that town.

Kidding aside, this is a great article.

Related to this story, the Windows 3.0 visual shell was originally not supposed to be Program Manager and File Manager. It was going to be a program called Ruby that I worked on with Alan Cooper and our team.

Ruby was a shell construction kit with a visual editor to lay out forms and components, which we called gizmos. You would drag arrows between gizmos to connect events fired by one gizmo to actions taken on another.

The shell was extensible, with an API for creating gizmos. A really weak area was the command language for the actions to be taken on an event. It was about on the level of batch files if that. But we hoped the API would allow for better command languages to be added along with more gizmos.

BTW, this project was where the phrase "fire an event" came from. I was looking for a name for process of one gizmo sending a message to another. I knew that SQL had triggers, but for some reason I didn't like that name. I got frustrated one night and started firing rubber bands at my screen to help me think. It was a habit I had back then, probably more practical on a tough glass CRT than it is today.

After firing a few rubber bands, I knew what to call it.

(As one might guess, I've always been curious to know if the phrase "fire an event" was used before that. I wasn't aware of it, but who knows.)

Anyway, Ruby didn't become the Windows 3.0 shell after all. The went with ProgMan and FileMan instead. To give Ruby a better command language, they adapted Basic and the result was Visual Basic. Gizmos were renamed "controls" (sigh), and my Gizmo API became the notorious VBX interface (sorry about that).

And we still don't have a programmable visual shell in Windows.

I think it's a bit more complicated than that.

Put yourself in the shoes of someone who'd grown up on mainframes. The systems you're used to are fabulously expensive, sure, but their operating systems have sophisticated architectures that allow them to easily juggle multiple users running multiple programs while maintaining the security of the system overall. They are the completest expression ever realized of forty years of progress in the field of information technology.

Then, one day, someone drops a PC in your lap. You are horrified. It's a single-user, single-tasking system with absolutely nothing stopping the user from trashing everything by running the wrong program.

To you, this new... thing, whatever it is, is barely worth the name "computer." It feels more like a toy -- like something you would give to a child to play with. Certainly nobody would ever run critical systems on it, you think.

And here's the thing. You're absolutely right! All your concerns are one hundred percent valid. But it turns out that nobody cares; the PC is much, much cheaper, and it lets everyone have their own dedicated hardware right on their desk running any software they care to install, instead of time-sharing a mainframe and begging for permission each time they want to try a new program. Or, put more bluntly, it lets them escape from having to deal with the corporate IT priesthood (i.e. you) anymore.

The market speaks! You are derided as a pointy-headed nerd and swept into the dustbin of history.

Now fast forward ten or fifteen years. People start taking all those PCs they bought and hooking them together into networks... and suddenly all those things you were worried about back in the day come roaring back to bite them. Users discover that their machine stops talking to the network when they click and hold the mouse button, because the OS can't walk and chew gum at the same time. And the complete lack of security makes their machines super easy to compromise.

The PC vendors panic. They scramble to rewrite their old systems into systems that can live comfortably on a network. And when they're done, they roll out systems that look an awful lot like what you were insisting the baseline for a "real computer" was fifteen years ago. The world cheers and lines up to buy back all the sophistication they had happily thrown away before.

In other words, it's not so much that the IBMers were wrong, it's that they were early. When OS/2 arrived, the world didn't understand yet why it needed something like OS/2. And by the time it did, OS/2 didn't exist anymore. But in this business, being early is effectively the same thing as being wrong. The market doesn't give out points for foresight.

Indeed. And IBM do, in fact, still make other OSes, contrary to the subhead of the story: zVM/CMS, zOS (MVS), AIX, and whatever they're calling AS/400 these days.

To add to what nl said: Not only were MS-DOS compatible PCs cheaper, but also MS-DOS apps had a significant install base by the time OS/2 came out. The concerns of running legacy software on the then new 286 and the "just over the horizon" 386 CPUs was heavily weighted. Also, GUIs on all platforms then took up enough system resources (memory and CPU) that made enough folks pause in thinking that they could get better performance/cost running console-based apps.