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

arstechnica.com

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

#101

Post by mnw21cam »

megablast wrote: post #47
kenjackson wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I don't think the Amiga had real multi-tasking, from what I understand. I may be wrong.

Yes, the Amiga had proper honest multitasking. A normal boot of an Amiga system would typically result in over twenty processes running in the background. In fact, its particular style of multitasking (static absolute priorities) was well-suited to real-time operation. Back in the days when CD writers could create coasters from buffer under-runs, I had more success writing CDs using my 25MHz Amiga than my 400MHz PC. Also, it was a microkernel system with things like device drivers and filesystems as separate processes, which had some fairly nifty consequences. For instance, it took Linux ages to lose its single kernel spinlock, which was a problem because of the huge amount of stuff done in kernel space. The thing the Amiga didn't have (mostly because of lack of hardware capability) was memory protection.

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

#102

Post by mnw21cam »

pjmlp wrote: post #64
kenjackson wrote: post #29

Earlier 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?

The Amiga 1000 first came out with 256KB of RAM. It didn't have much space left after the OS had booted up though. It was the Amiga 500 that came out a little later that had 512KB.

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

#104

Post by Keyframe »

_delirium wrote: post #81
nl wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 deskto…

Yeah, the Amiga seems like it completely dominated the multimedia niche, but the multimedia niche of the time essentially consisted of the demoscene. Which was great, except that the demoscene was not that large.

Huh, Amiga (1000 onwards) was big in video. Especially smaller TV stations that couldn't afford SGIs. Amiga (and SGIs) were light years ahead of Macs in graphics. People often forget this fact.

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

#105

Post by jzzskijj »

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.

Many of the people I knew in the beginning of 1990's ended up running either DESQview or OS/2. And that was because they were running either one node bulletin board system on their only desktop computer or they had a multi node BBS on their dedicated BBS computer.

Around that time I had updated from 1200 bps to 2400 bps to 14400 bps modem. Mostly the multitasking was running smooth enough to provide reasonably speedy BBS experience even for the 14k4 caller. The multitasking mostly was visible when the system was building and compressing the QWK archive for offine message reading (Blue Wave FTW).

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

#106

Post by mariusmg »

InclinedPlane wrote: post #62
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.

No, it's not. Visual is basically bad for anything but toys.

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

#107

Post by taspeotis »

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 original tagline was "IBM doesn't make operating systems anymore for a reason" which could have been debunked by knowing anything about IBM's product line or about 5 seconds of Googling.

Disclaimer: I'm an Ars subscriber and <3 Ars but when my bullshit detector is already off the charts before the article begins ... it makes me wonder how good the article is.

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

#108

Post by huxley »

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?

Sinclair QDOS which ran on the Sinclair QL did preemptive multitasking on a 128KB machine (buggy as heck when it came out but it did precede the Amiga by almost a year and half).

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

#109

Post by brk »

jzzskijj wrote: post #105
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.

Many of the people I knew in the beginning of 1990's ended up running either DESQview or OS/2. And that was because they were running either one node bulletin board system on their only desktop computer or they had a multi node BBS on their dedicated BBS computer. Around that time I had updated from 1200 bps to 2400 bps to 14400 bps modem. Mostly the multitasking was running smooth enough to provide reasonably speedy…

I remember running DESQView '386 for exactly that purpose. A TAG BBS on one session, and then whatever else in another session.

It was reasonably amazing at the time to be able to run more than one thing concurrently on your PC.

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

#110

Post by bowlofpetunias »

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.

That's basically why we tried OS/2 at my workplace at the time: to compile and continue working at the same time.

However, we very soon switched to simply having two PC's on our desktops.

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