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

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

#111

Post by huxley »

ojbyrne wrote: post #77
wglb wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 - SC…

Xenix wasn't created by SCO, it was developed by Microsoft (initially for the PDP-11) and was based on licensed AT&T Bell Labs code (and some BSD).

SCO ported Xenix to a few processors for Microsoft starting with 8086/8088. It wasn't until 1987 that SCO ownership of Xenix.

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

#112

Post by gjm11 »

pjmlp wrote: post #65
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.

VMS + 1 = WNT, in the same way as IBM - 1 = HAL.

(So far as I know, both of these are just amusing coincidences.)

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

#113

Post by huxley »

dangoldin wrote: post #30

I remember my dad getting a promotional shirt for OS/2 with the caption "Flight 4.0 to Chicago has been delayed, I'm taking off with OS/2" The idea being that Windows 95 was internally called Windows 4.0 with the codename Chicago. I keep on searching for it but can't find it anywhere. And Bill Gates on OS/2 in 1987: "I believe OS/2 is destined to be the most important operating system, and possibly program, of all ti…

You can find many of Microsoft's codenames here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Microsoft_codenames#Win...

My favourite codename sniping had to do with Windows NT (codename Cairo) and NeXT. When announcing NeXTSTEP 4.0 (codename Mecca), Jobs quipped, "Why stop at Cairo when you can go all the way to Mecca?"

http://www.paullynch.org/NeXTSTEP/Expo.1994.htmld/

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

#114

Post by w0rd-driven »

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.…

Inadvertently, you could say I owe my entire programming career to you specifically. Yes I can expound upon VisualBasic's retarded conceptions but playing around and making "Forms" was how I got really interested in programming as a career choice. One could say DOS batch scripting had a hand before that but it wasn't until VB3 that I really pursued it in earnest. It wasn't until a CS 101 course teaching Pascal where every thing really gelled into a cohesive unit in my brain. I still can't deny the VB underpinning even if I laugh when I admit it. Had Ruby been around with my batch scripting background, things likely would've taken the same turn either way. Regardless of how you see it now, there's likely a lot more people like myself with a similar story.

Having said all that, what you describe would still be interesting today. I just don't know how feasible it would be to implement. I had a file manager/shell idea in the form of a game construct. Something like crates to open or destroy as a delete mechanism. It was never more than a fleeting concept but I find it interesting that I'm not the only one lamenting about what is now Explorer.exe.

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

#115

Post by cturner »

atombender wrote: post #58
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

They probably misread the Wikipedia on OS/2, which says: > In addition, IBM once made a deal with Commodore to license Amiga technology for OS/2 2.0 and above in exchange for the REXX scripting language. In other words, IBM licensed REXX to Amiga in return for something else (we don't know what). But who knows if this is true. Apparently IBM and Commodore already had an IP cross-licensing agreement at the time, and h…

    In other words, IBM licensed REXX to Amiga in return for
    something else (we don't know what).
I think it was for technology used in the workplace shell (WPS).

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

#116

Post by VLM »

wglb wrote: post #52
smacktoward wrote: post #16

Earlier 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…

Regarding vulnerabilities, which many think (wrongly) are not present in mainframes, because they are networked nearly as much, and have massively fewer programs running on them, don't show up as much. But they are there.

Somehow I'm not seeing the entire worlds financial system as being either un-networked or not an appealing target.

If you think skript kiddies on the other side of the planet are a difficult adversary, try inside jobs like corrupt fellow employees, now they're a worthy adversary.

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

#117

Post by tokenrove »

jjguy wrote: post #7

If you liked this article, you should read Show Stopper. It's out of print, but there are ample used copies via Amazon. http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0029356717/

It's not quite at the level of Soul of a New Machine, but I still think every programmer should read this book. A great story from the trenches. It gave me so much respect for Dave Cutler, and confirmed so many things I suspected about Microsoft at the time.

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

#118

Post by jzzskijj »

brk wrote: post #109
jzzskijj wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I was constantly listening to modules (first with DMP and later with Cubic Player) and DOS shelling from the player to do something else. That something else being editing ascii/ansi art or programming in Turbo Pascal. Because the module playing was done done in TSR, the players at the time could not switch to the next song in the playlist unless you returned to the player. When the music ended I had to quit the application I was working in and "exit" from DOS shell to give control back to player software. And then back to DOS shell and into the application.

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

#119

Post by chiph »

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.

One of the cool things about OS/2 is that it changed the sound the floppy drive made as it track-seeked. Rather than a chunk-chunk sound, it was more of a buzzing noise.

The small things one remembers...

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

#120

Post by chiph »

pjmlp wrote: post #63
rodgerd wrote: post #18

Earlier 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…

The thing I find interesting about OS/400 (or whatever it's name is this month) is the single-level store. When your program needs access to the contents of a file, it's just a memory offset. The OS relies on the swapping mechanism to bring those pages into available memory. Which, when you have flat 64 (one could argue 65) bit addressing … why not?
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