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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

#141

Post by swampboy »

I enjoyed the article. It was a nice trip down memory lane. Regarding development tools, there were 2 commercial IDEs based on REXX: Watcom VX-REXX and VisPro REXX. I used Watcom's VX-REXX and it was a joy to use and allowed for incredibly fast and powerful application development. I heard the same about VisPro REXX. IBM's early set of tools C/2 and C Set++ were a bit painful to use. VisualAge C++ 3.0 was a decent toolset once you got over the weirdness of it. For a while, if you wanted to write C or C++ code using sockets you had to purchase IBM's TCP/IP SDK for $100.

The SIQ was a "synchronous" input queue and the problem has been understated in the article and comments. It was really bad. The base OS was incredibly stable, but the GUI shell, not so much due to the SIQ problem.

There were a number of Unix and Unix-like systems in addition to the ones already listed: Coherent, Interactive, and SCO are some that come to mind. They were pretty expensive IIRC, around $1000 to license.

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

#142

Post by Keyframe »

bnastic wrote: post #122
Keyframe wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Amiga 2000 (mostly) + NewTek Video Toaster[1] were the driving force behind the TV graphics back then. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Toaster

My earliest forays into CG were on amiga and earliest paid jobs were with video toaster / lightwave and softimage on SGIs. Great times. With tools we have today they seem so primitive in comparison.

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

#143

Post by pjmlp »

mnw21cam wrote: post #102
pjmlp wrote: post #64

Earlier 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?

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.

Ah, my circle of friends only had Amiga 500, 600 and 1200.

I don't remember if I ever saw a 1000.

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

#144

Post by pjmlp »

chiph wrote: post #120
pjmlp wrote: post #63

Earlier 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…

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?

That is why I always call it by the original name. :)

Yep that is also a nice feature.

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

#145

Post by pmelendez »

mariusmg wrote: post #106
InclinedPlane wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It is not a good language indeed. It doesn't allow you to express proper abstractions or anything particularly interesting.

But it did allow you to get things done very quickly, and that's why you see that was used a lot in several industries for small things that doesn't require to be maintained a lot and still do useful things.

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

#146

Post by angersock »

chiph wrote: post #120
pjmlp wrote: post #63

Earlier 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…

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?

Wait wait wait...so it effectively memory maps all the things?

Mainframe environments are weird.

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

#147

Post by wglb »

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…

You are correct, but I was referring to desktops, and the particular example is Coherent from Mark Williams Company which was demonstrated running on an IBM PC at the National Computer Conference show in Houston in 1983. Minix came in 1987, if I recall correctly.

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

#148

Post by protomyth »

baldfat wrote: post #124
protomyth wrote: post #50

I bought OS/2 for work to run on some DEC PC (not the damn Rainbow, the decent 486 DEC sold). The graphic card (S3) wasn't supported out of the box, so I called the IBM and got nowhere other than an acknowledgement it existed. I called DEC and they too believed it existed, so they (while I was still on the line) called their contact at IBM. After being transferred twice, we arrived at the person who could mail me the…

> not the damn Rainbow Hey I had a Rainbow! It was pretty amazing IF it had it's full potential it would have been the best computer until the Amiga came out. Rainbow: CPUs - Z80 (8 Bit) and a Intel 8080 OS - CP/M and MS-DOS Could be upgraded to 286 later. Would have been perfect BUT they didn't get things setup correctly and I was really stuck in Z80 CP/M land.

One man's innovation is another man's Frankenstein Monster.

It was actually an 8088 not an 8080.

Anyone who had to deal with people using those damn Rainbow floppy disk drives has my eternal sympathy. I really, really want to know what they were thinking on both the format and how you inserted those disks.

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

#149

Post by wglb »

rodgerd wrote: post #18
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

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.

I am wondering if the tagline got changed--it now says IBM doesn't make consumer, desktop operating systems anymore for a reason.

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

#150

Post by protomyth »

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…

I would love to see a kickstarted to buy OpenVMS from HP since they are retiring it. It was a quirky but solid OS with some great clustering and security.
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