25 years of OS/2: the legendary failure that refuses to die.
techland.time.com
25 years of OS/2: the legendary failure that refuses to die.
1–10 of 62 posts
Re: 25 years of OS/2: the legendary failure that refuses to die.
#21.44" huh? Not 3.5" 1.44MB maybe?
Re: 25 years of OS/2: the legendary failure that refuses to die.
#3I spent a little bit of time trying to become an OS/2 fanboy. Remember that this was before Windows NT (and Linux was a gleam in Linus's eye) so a PC that could walk and chew gum at the same time seemed like a miraculous feat for anyone used to DOS. It was a pretty sweet development platform for the time, since you could run multiple DOS and Windows 3.x sessions -- I even set up two Windows sessions to communicate over null modem to test a game.
However, there were defects both large and small that didn't seem to get resolved -- from missing files on the custom Windows installation to filesystem corruption when the swap file filled up (this last one was the final straw for me).
Still it's interesting to think how its shared DNA is in Windows today, just as NeXTStep is in Apple's products. In fact many APIs between Win32 and OS/2 are similar (I once made some OS/2 API bindings for Borland Pascal).
Re: 25 years of OS/2: the legendary failure that refuses to die.
#41.44" huh? Not 3.5" 1.44MB maybe?
This is why it never saw mass adoption. Strange, tiny, proprietary distribution method that nobody could use because no companies bothered to make a 1.44" floppy drive. You had to build one from scratch if you wanted to use OS/2. (The best place to start was by harvesting the motor from a larger drive.) Thus, only the true tinkerers and hackers ever made it past "Step 1 - Preparing Your System."
(Somebody went and edited the main article, thus rendering this thread moot. Quite a shame, really. Typos can be fun. ;) )
Re: 25 years of OS/2: the legendary failure that refuses to die.
#5I spent a little bit of time trying to become an OS/2 fanboy. Remember that this was before Windows NT (and Linux was a gleam in Linus's eye) so a PC that could walk and chew gum at the same time seemed like a miraculous feat for anyone used to DOS. It was a pretty sweet development platform for the time, since you could run multiple DOS and Windows 3.x sessions -- I even set up two Windows sessions to communicate ov…
What version?
Re: 25 years of OS/2: the legendary failure that refuses to die.
#61.44" huh? Not 3.5" 1.44MB maybe?
This is why it never saw mass adoption. Strange, tiny, proprietary distribution method that nobody could use because no companies bothered to make a 1.44" floppy drive. You had to build one from scratch if you wanted to use OS/2. (The best place to start was by harvesting the motor from a larger drive.) Thus, only the true tinkerers and hackers ever made it past "Step 1 - Preparing Your System." (Somebody went and ed…
I remember my dad having a Zenith MinisPort with a 2" floppy drive. Even as a kid I remember thinking "Ok these are just ridiculously small."
The OP is also the author of the article, so I'm not surprised he went and fixed it. But I'm a little miffed he didn't even give me a thank you.
Re: 25 years of OS/2: the legendary failure that refuses to die.
#7I learned multi-threaded programming on OS/2 (coming from VMS) and it was a pleasant experience.
Re: 25 years of OS/2: the legendary failure that refuses to die.
#8I really liked OS/2. I could run several varieties of DOS under it and early Windows - very flexible when I needed to develop using several operating systems.
The real reason OS/2 was not widely adopted? Maybe this: the first time OS/2 was booted after an install, the bootup time took a very, very long time. I was once in a computer store and some guy was practically screaming at the sales people. He had bought OS/2, installed it, and the next time he used it hit the one time only long bootup time. He was ranting how he immediately took it off and reinstalled Windows. There must have been at least 10 other customers who heard this.
I wonder how often this scenario happened.
Re: 25 years of OS/2: the legendary failure that refuses to die.
#9My first computer had OS/2 Warp 4 installed and I loved it. I remember checking out the first SuSE Linux release at that time and I was puzzled how primitive it looked compared to what I was used to from OS/2. A few years later, I switched from OS/2 to Linux and have been using it ever since.
Re: 25 years of OS/2: the legendary failure that refuses to die.
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is why it never saw mass adoption. Strange, tiny, proprietary distribution method that nobody could use because no companies bothered to make a 1.44" floppy drive. You had to build one from scratch if you wanted to use OS/2. (The best place to start was by harvesting the motor from a larger drive.) Thus, only the true tinkerers and hackers ever made it past "Step 1 - Preparing Your System." (Somebody went and ed…
I remember my dad having a Zenith MinisPort with a 2" floppy drive. Even as a kid I remember thinking "Ok these are just ridiculously small." The OP is also the author of the article, so I'm not surprised he went and fixed it. But I'm a little miffed he didn't even give me a thank you.
We stumbled upon either a 2" or 2.5" floppy early in my college career. None of us had ever heard of such a beast - it was a bit like alien tech landing in our laps. We figured it was "the future" and that smaller floppies would see mass-adoption, as some sort of CD-killer.
Then our professor destroyed our dream world and said they'd died off in the 80s. (And then wisely predicted flash-like memory would kill off all of them.)