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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

#171

Post by djKianoosh »

dhughes wrote: post #22
damian2000 wrote: post #2

Incredible that companies like Apple (Mac), Atari (ST) and Commodore (Amiga) weren't able to fully capitalise on their leading position in GUI based OSes of the time, which were miles ahead of both MS and IBM.

One reason: stigma. All I recall from childhood/teen years is "IBM compatible PC" a mantra on every TV commercial IBM or others produced. A PC was for business and you were rich or a fool to spend thousands on something so useless to a regular Joe. Apple was even more expensive and even less common than a PC and even so Apple was quirky and drew pictures, ATARI and Commodore were for games. They were in totally diffe…

And Tandy? :)

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

#172

Post by nnq »

Why aren't the unix-family OSs of the era part of the story? Why didn't IBM even consider porting a unix-family OS to the PCs instead of paying an unproven company like Microsoft to write an OS?

(...all the events from this stretch of computing history seem so weird to me, like from a steampunk-like alternate reality movie. There's surely lots of context missing and stories that nobody will ever tell, since most of the decisions taken by all the key players seem so anti-business. Computers may have changed a lot from back then, but business is still business and all the decisions made seem either "irrational" or based on "hidden information" that is not part of the story.)

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

#173

Post by derleth »

> So the new System/360 mainframe line would run the also brand-new OS/360.

Bad example. Really bad example: Not even IBM could standardize on a single OS for the System/360.

The System/360 went through a few OS iterations before OS/360 came along: OS/360 was late, as recounted in The Mythical Man-Month, so DOS/360 came along, then BOS/360, then TOS/360, and even PCP, which didn't support multiprogramming. Other OSes were CP-67, which became VM, MFT, MVT, and still more OSes on top of that.

To this day, there are multiple OSes for the architecture descended from the System/360, including Linux.

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

#174

Post by derleth »

angersock wrote: post #146
chiph wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

AS/400 isn't mainframe. It's midrange; smaller than a mainframe, and not as flexible.

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

#175

Post by vesinisa »

nnq wrote: post #172

Why aren't the unix-family OSs of the era part of the story? Why didn't IBM even consider porting a unix-family OS to the PCs instead of paying an unproven company like Microsoft to write an OS? (...all the events from this stretch of computing history seem so weird to me, like from a steampunk-like alternate reality movie. There's surely lots of context missing and stories that nobody will ever tell, since most of t…

I guess because, as the article describes, IBM was all for protecting its workstation business as well as the lucrative mainframe business.

A workstation back then was defined as an expensive high-end computer that was designed to be used by only one user at a time (i.e. not a multi-user mainframe), yet was suitable for high-performance applications. They were intended mostly for corporations and academia where extra juice was needed and that could afford to buy workstations (think scientific computing, CAD and graphic design in the 1980s). IBM did at this time already manufacture workstations with UNIX as the operating system (see e.g. http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=867&st=1 ) But they were way too expensive for the home user. PC (personal computer) was the low-end product that you could afford with a normal salary.

I understand UNIX back then was a mainframe and workstation operating system. Licensing was expensive and the hardware requirements beyond that of a PC. Few people had access to UNIX, mostly at universities and at big corporations. These were the very reasons why GNU and Linux were born - to provide a mostly-compatible UNIX clone for the home users with an affordable IBM PC compatible.

So my theory is that IBM was protecting its mainframe business - it did not want to put the powerful UNIX to the PC because it wanted to sell more expensive special hardware to those who wanted UNIX. So it hired a maverick company (Microsoft) to write a low-end, feature-poor operating system for PC (DOS). It was (and continues to be) a business strategy to bundle better software with better hardware so that you can ask customers that want only the superior software for a higher price (still essentially the business model of a certain Cupertino, California based manufacturer)

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

#176

Post by nl »

ams6110 wrote: post #159
laureny wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Only Microsoft realised the hardware didn't matter, software was the main game. Yes. This was one of Bill Gates' many strokes of genius. After just one year of Traf'o'Data (Microsoft's precursor), Gates saw that the future was in software, not hardware, and he created Microsoft centered around this very vision (while Apple bet the farm on hardware).

Apple tried allowing cloners to copy the hardware and being software for a while, it nearly killed them. I don't recall if the clones were ever price-competitve with x86 clones though.

TO be fair, almost everything Apple did at that time "almost killed them".

The clones did expand the Mac market, but Apple was so incompetent at that point that it didn't know how to handle that.

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

#177

Post by wazoox »

protomyth wrote: post #150
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.

A friend of mine (who is a huge VMS fan) wrote this: http://www.freevms.net/

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

#178

Post by protomyth »

gaius wrote: post #155
protomyth wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

One thing VMS was not was quirky, DEC went to considerable effort to make everything consistent. If you didn't know a command you could guess it, and it would take the same switches as any other command. Contrast that with Unix whose commands really are quirky...

Given by background was UNIX, it certainly felt quirky, but it was very consistent. The "why the heck are there 4 of the same file" moment is a little odd. It was a good OS.

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

#179

Post by techsupporter »

mdip wrote: post #151

I worked at a large computer chain (R.I.P. Softwarehouse / CompUSA) from 1993 - 1996 and had been building clone computers for businesses from 1990-1993. I remember how this played out very well . At the time, IBM had sent in scores of company reps to train up our floor staff on the advantages of OS/2 over the always-soon-to-be-released Chicago. They did a good job getting all of us to "drink the Kool Aid". I receive…

> We closed up at 9:00 PM and re-opened at 12:00 midnight to a line of customers that went around the building --- A line of customers ... for an operating system.

I grew up in Dallas, SoftWarehouse (somebody else remembers that name, awesome)/CompUSA's original stomping grounds and this story kept coming back to me throughout the whole article. Windows 95 was considered revolutionary at the time, even to those of us lined up at the Lewisville, Texas store at 10:30PM to buy an operating system. (Incidentally, the first time I ever talked my dad into taking me to an overnight release of anything.) Windows 95 was the first operating system I ever saw non-technical people set out intentionally to buy and I spent months installing it for friends and family.

> We had theme music playing (start me up?) and some Microsoft video playing on our higher-end multi-media PCs.

Yep, it was "Start Me Up" by the Rolling Stones. If I remember correctly, the video was a demo reel of everything new in Windows 95 and was highlighted by the huge Start button popping in at the end of the video, then fading to black. It even had a snippet of the waving Windows 3.1 flag and the bear from the "Help / About" Easter Egg hidden in 3.1.

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