Hah, I was thinking to Ask HN these days about the availability of exotic jobs, including OS/2 (or eComStation) programming jobs. I also wouldn't mind to take Motif jobs. Feel free to contact me if you have any ;)
Half an operating system: The triumph and tragedy of OS/2
71–80 of 191 posts
Re: Half an operating system: The triumph and tragedy of OS/2
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those of us around then know exactly why this was: PC Clones were too cheap and got better too quickly for other platforms to compete. Back then we all thought "computers" was a hardware game. Only Microsoft realised the hardware didn't matter, software was the main game. And yes, I realise we have swung back to the "integrated hardware/software platform" thing being important again. Picking winning strategies in pla…
Also, Atari didn't get marketing (Jack Tramiel was very reluctant to spend money there). Atari really didn't get systems software, either, and never hired to the extent needed to make a good impact there. The world was basically safe from Atari being anything other than a low-end consumer computer company. And the thing that probably saved Apple in the late 80s was the desktop publishing business.
Also, Atari didn't get marketing (Jack Tramiel was very reluctant to spend money there).
I know that is the conventional story (and pretty similar for the Amiga). I'm not convinced.
I think that both the Amiga & the Atari ST were too far ahead of their time. They were multimedia workstations, without anywhere to play that multimedia (except on other Ataris and Amigas).
Like you said, the Mac managed to hit the desktop publishing wave, which was exactly right for the the paper-centric late 80's and early 90's.
Re: Half an operating system: The triumph and tragedy of OS/2
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 wit…
Android with ART sounds very much like that. They compile the bytecode to native code at installation or major arch change.
Re: Half an operating system: The triumph and tragedy of OS/2
#74Hah, I was thinking to Ask HN these days about the availability of exotic jobs, including OS/2 (or eComStation) programming jobs. I also wouldn't mind to take Motif jobs. Feel free to contact me if you have any ;)
Motif was recently GPLed, as it happened.
Re: Half an operating system: The triumph and tragedy of OS/2
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
256KB Rom, 512KB Ram. This was a time when harddrives was at ~ 40 MB, 512MB ram was unheard of.
Re: Half an operating system: The triumph and tragedy of OS/2
#76When OS/2 Warp came out, I remember it being insanely cheap ($20?), so in a what-the-hell mood I bought it. Took it home and tried to install it. It was a hopeless mess of disks, both optical and floppy, and I never got it to run. One of my cow-orkers at Apple had worked on the OS/2 Presentation Manager at IBM. I tried talking with her about it, but she said the experience had been "absolutely awful" and she didn't w…
I have OS/2 Warp 3 and 4, both boxes at home. They both worked on my computer at the time and run my tiny BBS and allowed me to work on the computer flawlessly. This was much better than my peers who had to dedicate a computer to this. But then I had a loaner modem and a shared voice/BBS line and they had a private line for the BBS too.
It worked nicely and the install wasn't bad, it was quite a few disks but than Windows didn't fare much better in that regard. It was also a mess of many floppy disks to perform an install.
I remember fondly the Team OS/2 meetings where we could geek out our love for OS/2 and mourn the inefficiency of IBM marketing to push it.
And then I found Linux.
Re: Half an operating system: The triumph and tragedy of OS/2
#77OS/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.
No there were some unix-like systems running at that time, three or four years before OS/2.
"Some" is an understatement and "unix-like" is kind of funny. There were several strains of unix available when OS/2 was released in 1985.
System V: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_5
BSD: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD
SunOS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SunOS
Xenix: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix (which was created by the eventually infamous Santa Cruz Operation - SCO - and licensed by Microsoft)
Also VMS qualifies as a fully memory-protected, preemptive OS: The real innovation that Windows and OS/2 did was to take fully preemptive OSes and put them in marginal hardware (at the time) like PCs.
Re: Half an operating system: The triumph and tragedy of OS/2
#78Up until March of last year a lot of ATMs in the US were still running OS/2 . . . I "upgraded" a lot of them to Windows XP. Yuck. When I would take the OS/2 system offline and replace it with a Windows cage the payment network would sometimes tell me the uptime on the deprecated machines . . . one network operator claimed 8 years of uptime at one particular machine. I have no way of confirming that, but I definitely…
When you think of it, 8 years of uptime isn't special for a machine running on a UPS and not needing a reboot for software updates. There simply isn't a reason for a well-built operating system running on solid hardware to crash.
Re: Half an operating system: The triumph and tragedy of OS/2
#79OS/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.
It almost seems too early to reminisce about this stuff. My first computers were a TRS-80 clone and a Commodore 64, but this is the era in which I really started to get into computers: the Solaris and NeXT ads in Byte and PC Magazine, with impressive looking screenshots of a busy computer; the Mac IIfx briefly taking the clock speed crown at a whopping 40 MHz; wondering if I'd take an Amiga or a Mac to college, then settling on a 486SX from Gateway.
In college I really wanted to like OS/2 2.0 (and later 2.1), but driver problems with the Diamond video card were a constant problem. (If only we'd sprung for the ATI Graphics Ultra Pro!) I had a copy of DeScribe; later sold it to someone through the ISCA BBS.
My impression at the time was that Microsoft executed so much better than its competitors, offsetting its weaker Office products with a better UI, which in turn gave you a reason to run Windows. I later attributed its success much more to its ruthless business practices.
This article brings the focus on the strategic vision: betting big on clones; belatedly embracing the Internet; hammering away at PDAs and tablets, yet losing big to the iPod, iPhone, et al. Sometimes we predict the future, and sometimes we make it.
Re: Half an operating system: The triumph and tragedy of OS/2
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
256KB Rom, 512KB Ram. This was a time when harddrives was at ~ 40 MB, 512MB ram was unheard of.
Yes 512 KB sorry, I wanted to "fix" your 256 remark, ended up mistyping MB instead of KB. My first computer used tapes.
You also needed to load the Workbench and related libraries from floppy, so ROM firmware alone wasn't enough.