don't outsource for the sake of a few months, if things take time, then they take time.
Half an operating system: The triumph and tragedy of OS/2
91–100 of 191 posts
Re: Half an operating system: The triumph and tragedy of OS/2
#92Earlier 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…
> When there was an architecture change for the PowerPC, many installations only required a regeneration of the installed software.
Unfortunately it wasn't quite that clean in practice. Regen required TIMI to have access to the compilation templates for each program. These were intermediate compilation stages ( bytecode, I suppose ) that it could then translate to the new machine architecture.
However, these templates were often missing, deleted or out-of-sync. So we did an awful lot of recompiling from source, when we could find it...
Re: Half an operating system: The triumph and tragedy of OS/2
#93OS/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.
Oh, you made me remember again. I forgot that little detail of formatting. In those days formatting was a common practice, right now unless you want to do a wipeout clean install or prepare a new USB for other file system you don't need to format :).
Re: Half an operating system: The triumph and tragedy of OS/2
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was lucky enough to have a 486DX-50 (not a DX2-66)with 16 MB of RAM, so it ran perfectly for me. Even with what was bleeding edge hardware at the time, I still remember trying to finish writing my senior project using Corel Draw and Microsoft Word on Windows 3.11, and having my computer crash ever 30-45 mins, and my project partner eventually broke down and started crying because of how frustrating it was.
Yeah, mine was a Pentium 90! (I decided to scrimp on RAM and get the 90 in stead of the 66.) It was a huge jump from the 286 I had before. (Upgrading memory meant socketing rows of individual DIPs.)
Wow, I remember the Pentium 90s coming out and being amazed. I of course had rubbish old late 1980s British computers to use whilst everyone else was on 16 bit machines, but when the Pentium II came out, I finally got hold of a 486 DX2 66Mhz.
It is strange how you learn to "make do" with hardware and systems, and learn patience. I finally bought an Ivybridge i7 last year after "making do" with machines for a long time. I fondly remember spending hours and hours tinkering with slow systems, but being just as productive!
Re: Half an operating system: The triumph and tragedy of OS/2
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
The funny thing is, replace PC with tablet, replace mainframe with PC, replace Windows with Android and your story still holds true. History doesn't repeat itself. But it sure does rhyme.
This is very very true. I see the "multiple users" feature they introduced a few dot versions ago in Android and thought it was useful (perhaps?) but then they are implementing all of Linux's features on top of Linux.... makes me chuckle
Re: Half an operating system: The triumph and tragedy of OS/2
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ma…
Haha setting up X very true, really made me laugh thanks. And then the same pain with ndiswrapper because I bought cheap wifi cards that there were no drivers for....
And then folks complain today about the tiniest things!
Re: Half an operating system: The triumph and tragedy of OS/2
#97Up 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.
ATMs usually do not have a UPS.
Re: Half an operating system: The triumph and tragedy of OS/2
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
The funny thing is, replace PC with tablet, replace mainframe with PC, replace Windows with Android and your story still holds true. History doesn't repeat itself. But it sure does rhyme.
This is very very true. I see the "multiple users" feature they introduced a few dot versions ago in Android and thought it was useful (perhaps?) but then they are implementing all of Linux's features on top of Linux.... makes me chuckle
There is a good reason for this though - to some extent Android treats every "app" as a separate unix user running in it's own account space, as I understand it.
Re: Half an operating system: The triumph and tragedy of OS/2
#99Great 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…
> But in this business, being early is effectively the same thing as being wrong. The market doesn't give out points for foresight.
Unless you manage to survive and keep at it until the time turns out to be ripe. NeXT kinda-sorta did, 20 years down the road. It's an exception though, graveyards are full of great OS who didn't have the time to wait.
Re: Half an operating system: The triumph and tragedy of OS/2
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> When there was an architecture change for the PowerPC, many installations only required a regeneration of the installed software. Unfortunately it wasn't quite that clean in practice. Regen required TIMI to have access to the compilation templates for each program. These were intermediate compilation stages ( bytecode, I suppose ) that it could then translate to the new machine architecture. However, these template…
Thanks for the input.
I only did a bit of AS/400 administration back in 1994's Summer, just logged into the system and started the backup procedure.
I was actually doing Clipper development and the company where I had a Summer job used AS/400 systems for accounting.
Most of I know about OS/400 bytecode system was found looking for compiler technologies a couple of years later.