Half an operating system: The triumph and tragedy of OS/2 • Hacker News Board

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

#61

Post by InclinedPlane » Mon, Nov 25, 2013, 6:15 AM UTC

damian2000 wrote: post #2

Incredible that companies like Apple (Mac), Atari (ST) and Commodore (Amiga) weren't able to fully capitalise on their leading position in GUI based OSes of the time, which were miles ahead of both MS and IBM.

This is slightly counterfactual. The Mac today has a solid unix heart and runs on the best processors and technology out there, but that was not always so, and they were weakest precisely when PCs grew strongest.

The internals of pre OS X Mac OS are horrific and disturbing. They are in no way superior to the internals of Windows 95 and are at best only perceived superior due to a different user experience peppered with a healthy dose of self-delusion, certainly not through stability or performance. They are infantile compared to OS/2. Moreover, over the next few years after Windows 95 was released the PC improved greatly while the Mac mostly stagnated. Around the Power Mac era things were roughly even in terms of capabilities and performance though the Mac was significantly more expensive, by the Pentium and especially Pentium II era the PC began to become objectively more powerful than the Mac.

This put Apple into a freefall that they were only rescued from by the return of Steve Jobs who established style as a foundation the company rested on and pushed them into digital media and mobile devices, as well as forcing a hardware architecture migration (to the formerly hated x86 from the PowerPC architecture developed by a consortium of which Apple was a huge part of) and a complete OS rewrite (transforming Mac OS from an antiquated bucket of kludges into NeXTSTEP in Apple clothing).

At the time in question though Apple was pushing old, slow hardware at a price premium in a market that was rapidly passing them by.

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

#62

Post by InclinedPlane » Mon, Nov 25, 2013, 6:18 AM UTC

Stratoscope wrote: post #14

> 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.…

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

Very true, there isn't one. But there are several. None of them all that good though. Windows Workflow, System Center Runbooks, Biztalk, they've all made their mark. I've seen serious systems built using all of them, ultimately I have to wonder whether visual programming on that scale is even a good idea.

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

#63

Post by pjmlp » Mon, Nov 25, 2013, 6:34 AM UTC

rodgerd wrote: post #18

michaelhoffman wrote: post #3

> IBM licensed Commodore’s AREXX scripting language and included it with OS/2 2.0. I find this hard to believe, given that Rexx was developed by IBM. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rexx

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.

OS/400 is very interesting OS for those interested in OS architectures.

The complete userspace is bytecode based, regardless of the language.

Applications are compiled on installation phase, or when the generated code is deemed not to be valid any longer.

When there was an architecture change for the PowerPC, many installations only required a regeneration of the installed software.

A concept that Microsoft tried with Longhorn and Windows Phone 7. Or we could even say, the model Android almost has as well.

Native Oberon and Inferno also tried a similar approach, to certain extent.

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

#64

Post by pjmlp » Mon, Nov 25, 2013, 6:36 AM UTC

kenjackson wrote: post #29

sehugg wrote: post #19

OS/2 had many flaws but its multitasking was unseen on a PC at the time. I remember formatting a floppy while running two 16-bit Windows sessions (which were communicating with each other) and multiple DOS windows, thinking I was in the future. Even Windows 95 was limited by many system calls being funneled through single threaded BIOS or DOS 16-bit land.

Couldn't the Amiga already do all that multitasking on a 256KB machine, years before?

Yes, but it was 512 MB, not 256KB.

Plus it had a heterogeneous architecture, with dedicated chips for sound and graphics.

Just set the required data structures and let the chip do its work alone. Sounds familiar?

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

#65

Post by pjmlp » Mon, Nov 25, 2013, 6:40 AM UTC

mbennett wrote: post #46

>Finally, and most importantly for the future of the company, Bill Gates hired the architect of the industrial-strength minicomputer operating system VMS and put him in charge of the OS/2 3.0 NT group. Dave Cutler’s first directive was to throw away all the old OS/2 code and start from scratch. The company wanted to build a high-performance, fault-tolerant, platform-independent, and fully networkable operating system…

Yes, many like to bash Windows, but the NT family is actually a VMS at heart, spoiled by a not so good user land experience.

I once attend a session by him about the Windows kernel design, quite interesting.

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

#66

Post by pjmlp » Mon, Nov 25, 2013, 6:43 AM UTC

smacktoward wrote: post #16

lbarrow wrote: post #4

Great read. In the end, it seems like a classic failure to resolve the innovator's dilemma. IBM decided that the future of computing would revolve around mainframes because they liked mainframes , not because that's where the facts led them. And ultimately they paid the price for it.

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…

Like we native folks (mainframe) keep talking about those trying to stuff applications inside an application created for reading hypertext documents (pc).

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

#67

Post by npsimons » Mon, Nov 25, 2013, 6:44 AM UTC

InclinedPlane wrote: post #61

damian2000 wrote: post #2

Incredible that companies like Apple (Mac), Atari (ST) and Commodore (Amiga) weren't able to fully capitalise on their leading position in GUI based OSes of the time, which were miles ahead of both MS and IBM.

This is slightly counterfactual. The Mac today has a solid unix heart and runs on the best processors and technology out there, but that was not always so, and they were weakest precisely when PCs grew strongest. The internals of pre OS X Mac OS are horrific and disturbing. They are in no way superior to the internals of Windows 95 and are at best only perceived superior due to a different user experience peppered wi…

Very spot on! Not many seem to remember, but OS/2 truly was technically superior to just about everything else out there in consumer computer land, excepting maybe things like 386BSD (which many of us didn't know about at the time, and probably would have peed our pants at setting up X ;). OS/2 had pre-emptive multitasking and memory protection; Apple and Microsoft didn't even come close in their offerings. Say what you will about how IBM fumbled the marketing, licensing, etc, or how the upstarts(!) won against the Evil Empire, but OS/2 was the better operating system, and Microsoft honed it's FUD by attacking IBM and OS/2, whilst offering a truly awful alternative.

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

#68

Post by Jeremy_Reimer » Mon, Nov 25, 2013, 6:44 AM UTC

wglb wrote: post #55

galonk wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ars Technica isn't exactly big on fact checking. These days most of their short articles are rewritten press releases, and most of their long articles are personal opinion/recollection written as if it was reportage.

While they may got the part about the history of AREXX wrong, most of the article is spot on.

The AREXX error was my mistake. I just read the technology transfer part backwards when I was researching. I've already fixed it in the article and updated it.

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

#69

Post by pjmlp » Mon, Nov 25, 2013, 6:48 AM UTC

smacktoward wrote: post #37

dhughes wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One reason: stigma. All I recall from childhood/teen years is "IBM compatible PC" a mantra on every TV commercial IBM or others produced. A PC was for business and you were rich or a fool to spend thousands on something so useless to a regular Joe. Apple was even more expensive and even less common than a PC and even so Apple was quirky and drew pictures, ATARI and Commodore were for games. They were in totally diffe…

I dunno about that. At least where I grew up, if your family had a Mac or an Amiga, it was like you had domesticated a unicorn. Everybody wanted to see it, play with it. It marked you out as a member of a family possessed of either great sophistication or enormous wealth, either of which translates easily to status. If there was any stigma, it was for being on the opposite end of the spectrum -- having a computer who…

Yeah.

I was the only one, among my circle of friends owning computers, that had a PC instead of an Amiga.

My dad thought the Amiga were only good for playing games, for anyone serious about computers, PC was the way to go.

So I was left reading 68000 Assembly manuals, some Amiga reference books, and playing with them on computer parties we used to organize.

In any case, the only way to buy any of them in my home country was on credit.

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

#70

Post by InclinedPlane » Mon, Nov 25, 2013, 7:17 AM UTC

npsimons wrote: post #67

InclinedPlane wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is slightly counterfactual. The Mac today has a solid unix heart and runs on the best processors and technology out there, but that was not always so, and they were weakest precisely when PCs grew strongest. The internals of pre OS X Mac OS are horrific and disturbing. They are in no way superior to the internals of Windows 95 and are at best only perceived superior due to a different user experience peppered wi…

Very spot on! Not many seem to remember, but OS/2 truly was technically superior to just about everything else out there in consumer computer land, excepting maybe things like 386BSD (which many of us didn't know about at the time, and probably would have peed our pants at setting up X ;). OS/2 had pre-emptive multitasking and memory protection; Apple and Microsoft didn't even come close in their offerings. Say what…

Oh god. I remember setting up X back in the dark days of the early linux era. Peeing ones pants would have been preferable, it's astounding how far we've come.

As for Windows vs. OS/2 it's at best complicated. It's a bit like a micro-cosm of the PC vs mainframe debate. The raison d'etre of Windows 95 was backward compatability with a low memory footprint.

That may seem like a small thing, or at best not a thing to make so many enormous compromises over, but back then it was everything. The problem with doing multi-tasking "right" was that it imposed a ~4mb RAM requirement per 16-bit application being run at the same time. That is nothing today but back then 4mb was the minimum requirement for installing Windows 95, and it represented a cost of around $100 in 1995. Owning a computer powerful enough to run even a handful of 16-bit apps while running OS/2 or NT was simply above the economic means of a lot of people. And by the time technology caught up and RAM became cheap enough to make proper multi-tasking cost effective there was too much Windows 9x network effect for competitors to make much headway.