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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

#181

Post by jdcarter »

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…

I bought my first PC from that Softwarehouse in the late 80's. Man, I so loved that store.

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

#182

Post by Someone »

protomyth wrote: post #148
baldfat wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Had to look up what that was about. According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_100#Floppy_disk_drives, they could do away with one drive motor, with only a 'minor' disadvantage: "Of note was the single motor used to drive both disk drives via a common spindle, which were arranged one on top of the other. That meant that one disk went underneath the first but inserted upside-down."

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

#183

Post by dmethvin »

npsimons wrote: post #170
melling wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Letwin turned out to be right. I can't find the Usenet thread. It was from the early 1990's.

Was he though? This is someone speaking from the outside, with fuzzy memories of release dates, but I'm pretty sure Windows (excepting NT) didn't have preemptive multitasking until 2000, and I think OS/2 was out before NT. I still have fond memories from the late 90's of a friend who adminned Windows and had a CD for when someone would set the password on the screensaver on the Windows boxes: the CD had an autorun th…

Win95 had preemptive multitasking. Win 3.1 had cooperative multitasking. The "multiuser" aspect of Win95 wasn't secure at all, it was more for letting multiple users have separated settings (e.g., browser bookmarks). However, even that often failed because software would assume a single user and store all the settings in a common location. Since there was no real security in FAT32 filesystems that was pretty easy to do.

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

#184

Post by rodgerd »

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?

"Everything's a file!"

"No, everything's memory!"

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

#185

Post by _sh »

tokenrove wrote: post #117
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.

Yeah? My reading of that book was that there was such an inhuman marriage/life destroying crunch getting NT out the door that nobody covered themselves in glory, much less showed themselves worthy of respect.

And it explained to me, in clear terms, why Windows was such a buggy pile of shit. It was created of its culture.

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

#186

Post by rodgerd »

wglb wrote: post #149
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.

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

Originally it stated "IBM don't make operating systems for a reason". It's hard to have full confidence in the rest of the article when that's what it leads with.

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

#187

Post by fulafel »

pjmlp wrote: post #169
angersock wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait wait wait...so it effectively memory maps all the things? Mainframe environments are weird.

And OS/400 files are libraries that you need to open, as another example of strangeness. Or the OS/360 which uses virtualization for all OSs, like Hyper V does on Windows. The first OS to boot from the hypervisor has master rights, but all OSs are virtualized.

> Or the OS/360 which uses virtualization for all OSs, like Hyper V does on Windows

No, the hypervisor was called VM. According to WP it most frequently ran CMS guests, which was a light weight single-app OS. But could also run OS/360 guests (which predated VM).

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

#188

Post by npsimons »

dmethvin wrote: post #183
npsimons wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was he though? This is someone speaking from the outside, with fuzzy memories of release dates, but I'm pretty sure Windows (excepting NT) didn't have preemptive multitasking until 2000, and I think OS/2 was out before NT. I still have fond memories from the late 90's of a friend who adminned Windows and had a CD for when someone would set the password on the screensaver on the Windows boxes: the CD had an autorun th…

Win95 had preemptive multitasking. Win 3.1 had cooperative multitasking. The "multiuser" aspect of Win95 wasn't secure at all, it was more for letting multiple users have separated settings (e.g., browser bookmarks). However, even that often failed because software would assume a single user and store all the settings in a common location. Since there was no real security in FAT32 filesystems that was pretty easy to…

I may be splitting hairs at this point, but I think we're both partly right; according to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preemption_%28computing%29), Windows 95, 98 and ME had preemptive multitasking for 32 bit programs, but not 16 bit (which would have been the majority at the time of release of Win95). My confusion may come from remembering running multiple DOS and Windows programs at the same time in OS/2 with nary a hiccup and being able to tweak settings (such as RAM allotments).

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

#189

Post by 72deluxe »

XorNot wrote: post #98
72deluxe wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is very very true. I see the "multiple users" feature they introduced a few dot versions ago in Android and thought it was useful (perhaps?) but then they are implementing all of Linux's features on top of Linux.... makes me chuckle

There is a good reason for this though - to some extent Android treats every "app" as a separate unix user running in it's own account space, as I understand it.

Ah yes, it does. So I suppose it is good that Android is implementing this on top of it, but it still seems like massive effort to duplicate lower level features due to lack of foresight during initial Android system design.

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

#190

Post by dalke »

Stratoscope wrote: post #164
dalke wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A books.google.com search found "fire an event" in the 1979 "La Conception des systèmes répartis" (p.115) at http://books.google.com/books?id=1VogAQAAIAAJ&q=%22fire+an+e... . The quote snippet is: "Control refers to any set of rules describing conditions under which processes may fire an event or switch to a new state." Other sources confirm that there is a 1979 book with that title. (Google Books sometimes has a dra…

Cool! That is very interesting, thank you for that research. I guess I can't really claim to be the true originator of that term then. But it still makes a good story...

Yes, it does!

BTW, here are a couple of rule-base references of firing an event, in:

1) http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.81.... -- "An event can fire, i.e. it is active, ..." -- Representing procedural knowledge in expert systems: An application to process control (1985).

2) http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.12.... -- "The object manager identifies fireable events, and fires the rules of each of the participants of the event." -- Using Objects to Implement Office Procedures (1983).

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