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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

#131

Post by kabdib »

nl wrote: post #72
kabdib wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 deskto…

I worked on the OS for the Atari ST. It sure wasn't ahead of its time. We looked at the Mac and felt jealous; that was some real engineering, while we had a bunch of crap from Digital Research (and a lot of it was unadulterated junk).

I never used things like MiNT, but those weren't supported by Atari anyway.

Atari just didn't have the resources to sink into an OS that could compete. They knew how to make cheap hardware, but after a while the PC ate their lunch. Nobody wanted to do biz with the Tramiels, so games were pretty much off the table.

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

#132

Post by mschaef »

72deluxe wrote: post #94
jonah wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tim…

There are times when you need to have high CPU performance, but the reality is that all semi-current machines are amazingly fast and capable of productive work.

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

#133

Post by pjmlp »

gjm11 wrote: post #112
pjmlp wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

I once went through the VMS documentation, and could at least find some of the design ideas that I knew from Windows NT.

I think it is good that the industry enjoys different types of OS architectures and designs.

Just because UNIX managed to spread as it did, doesn't mean it is the be all of OS design. After all, its creators tried to fix UNIX, just the industry did not adopted it.

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

#134

Post by mschaef »

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/

"FoxTales" by Kerry Nietz is also a good read. Kerry talks about his experiences joining FoxPro development as a freshout college grad. I never cared all that much for FoxPro/xbase, but the book is a good read.

http://www.amazon.com/FoxTales-Behind-Scenes-Fox-Software/dp...

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

#135

Post by peatmoss »

InclinedPlane wrote: post #70
npsimons wrote: post #67

Earlier 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…

Remember setting up X11 and needing to manually set signal timings for your monitor? Good times.

That experience ranked up there with writing my own PPP init scripts and endless hours tweaking my fvwmrc. I didn't play video games during that period, because I was quite seriously having more fun learning every nook and cranny of any unix or unix-like system I could get my hands on.

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

#136

Post by gmuslera »

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…

In the very beginning of the 90's programmed a BBS and had it running under Desqview. In 1994 had to build a data bank accessible by modem, and based on my bbs to build it, but used OS/2 as multitasker, which made a big difference in stability.

In 1996 had to put access to that data via internet, and used the same OS/2 box for both modem access and an internet server with most of the usual services (mail/web/dns/proxy).

It was very reliable (really don't remember reboots, maybe it was mostly for upgrades), impressed me when i realized that i created a 16mb vector in that 16mb server with everything running normally, and loved WPS (not sure which today's desktop had so good integration with fs) and rexx (parsing without regexes was good, but later learnt how limited i was).

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

#137

Post by peteri »

steven2012 wrote: post #36

I actually bought a copy of OS/2 Warp when it came out because I was interested in its preemptive multi-tasking, and it was a decent operating system for what it's worth. I was definitely more stable than Window 3.11, but its real problem was compatibility. Back in the early 90s, everything was about getting compatibility, and while OS/2 had good compatibility, didn't have perfect compatibility. As well, I worked at…

I remember buying a copy of OS/2 Warp from Grey Matter in the UK for £5 as a promotional version (required a version of windows to upgrade from IIRC)

Sadly the big problem was that it swapped like mad in 4MB which Windows 95 didn't. Doesn't sound like a big problem today but the extra memory would have been expensive at the time. In particular 4MB was a popular option on 386/486 machines arranged as 4 x 1MB which often filled all the SIMM slots on the motherboard so upgrading to 8MB meant buying 4 x 2MB SIMMs which doubled the memory cost.

For most of us at the time 4MB was a good usable amount of memory with EMM386 but the upgrade past that didn't give much extra functionality.

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

#138

Post by mschaef »

I have fond memories of OS/2 from the summer of 1995. At the time, I was a undergraduate at the University of Texas at Austin, and IBM needed summer intern testers for a product they were calling "OS/2 Lan Server Enterprise". OS/2 LSE was IBM's effort to re-platform OS/2 LAN Server on top of OS/2 DCE (in development on the lab next door to LSE). The general idea was to provide a way to scale up OS/2 so that it would interoperate with other DCE-based systems (mainly RS/6000 AIX, IIRC).

Anyway, the machine IBM gave me to use was a PS/2 Model 80. This was a 1988-era machine that had been brought to the semi-modern era with 20MB of RAM memory installed via several MCA expansion cards. Against my best expectations, the machine ran well, despite the fact that its CPU was at least 10% the speed of the then-state of the art.

From what I remember, the OS/2 LSE product itself was fairly solid. However, the biggest memory I have from that summer was the afternoon we spent playing around with the Microsoft Windows 95 beta disk we received for compatability testing. Towards the end of the afternoon, we tried to DriveSpace (compress) the disk. We got bored during the wait for the compress, so we pulled the power on the machine thinking that would be the end of it. However, once we powered the machine back up to install OS/2, Windows 95 just resumed compressing away like nothing happened. A few weeks later, a friend and I went to CompUSA for the Windows95 launch. Even at midnight, there was a line out the door, winding past the Windows 95 boxes, then the Plus Pack, then Office 95, and then memory upgrades... Didn't hear much about OS/2 after that...

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

#139

Post by bergie »

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.

Not exactly desktop-focused, but I'm working on something in this space: http://noflojs.org/

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

#140

Post by michaelwww »

yuhong wrote: post #39

The sad thing is that I have never seen an article on the entire MS OS/2 2.0 fiasco that is what I call complete and detailed and many omitting for example the unethical attacks MS did against OS/2 such as "Microsoft Munchkins". I try with my own blog article, but I admit it is not very good either.

Wikipedia has some interesting things to say about it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_OS/2

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