Half an operating system: The triumph and tragedy of OS/2 • Hacker News Board

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

#161

Post by jboggan » Mon, Nov 25, 2013, 5:47 PM UTC

gnaffle wrote: post #78

jboggan wrote: post #51

Up until March of last year a lot of ATMs in the US were still running OS/2 . . . I "upgraded" a lot of them to Windows XP. Yuck. When I would take the OS/2 system offline and replace it with a Windows cage the payment network would sometimes tell me the uptime on the deprecated machines . . . one network operator claimed 8 years of uptime at one particular machine. I have no way of confirming that, but I definitely…

When you think of it, 8 years of uptime isn't special for a machine running on a UPS and not needing a reboot for software updates. There simply isn't a reason for a well-built operating system running on solid hardware to crash.

No UPS for a lot of machines. I can't imagine the OS/2 getting an update simply because core ATM features haven't changed since the 80's. But it was still impressive uptime because ATMs are generally cantankerous creatures.

A software upgrade on the XP machines was ridiculous. It usually involved 3-4 hours of loading and booting and restarting with several different CDs. The other techs and I were convinced that NCR padded the installs/updates to take longer since their certified field techs billed out at around $300/hour.

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

#162

Post by Stratoscope » Mon, Nov 25, 2013, 6:32 PM UTC

w0rd-driven wrote: post #114

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.…

Inadvertently, you could say I owe my entire programming career to you specifically. Yes I can expound upon VisualBasic's retarded conceptions but playing around and making "Forms" was how I got really interested in programming as a career choice. One could say DOS batch scripting had a hand before that but it wasn't until VB3 that I really pursued it in earnest. It wasn't until a CS 101 course teaching Pascal where…

Wow, thank you, it's great to hear your story.

Actually, the apology at the end of my post wasn't about Visual Basic as a whole, but the VBX interface specifically. People did use it to build a lot of nifty controls and extensions, but the interface itself wasn't the best-designed thing in the world, and Microsoft eventually replaced it with COM/OCX.

Hmm... Not sure if that was an improvement!

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

#163

Post by petejansson » Mon, Nov 25, 2013, 6:33 PM UTC

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.

About 1985 IBM had a product called TopView that ran a multitasking supervisor on top of DOS and could do real multitasking with the right disk drivers. No protected memory though. TopView was really memory heavy, though -- you gave up at least 160KB just with TopView. Two guys created a TopView clone called Mondrian that ran in just 40K, and ran much faster. Those two guys were Nathan and Cameron Myhrvold. Mondrian was sold to Microsoft and those two guys went with it. Mondrian was a really clever engineering feat.

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

#164

Post by Stratoscope » Mon, Nov 25, 2013, 6:37 PM UTC

dalke wrote: post #152

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.…

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...

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

#165

Post by outworlder » Mon, Nov 25, 2013, 6:45 PM UTC

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.

That's my reason for switching to Linux, back in the Slackware days.

Back when CD burners were still uncommon, I got as a gift a japanese, SCSI-based one. With my hardware, I'd lose a CD if I forgot to disable the screensaver - the amount of disk seeks required to load the screen saver executable was enough to starve the buffer, and I'd get a buffer underrun every single time.

So, one time I was trying a linux system, and had to do a last-minute presentation, which required files on a floppy drive. For some reason, I had no usable floppies and had to format one, and I couldn't wait for the burn to finish.

So I inserted the drive and, fully expecting to lose the CD, called fdformat. cdrecord didn't even flinch, the buffer was still full when the format finished.

I only ever booted Windows from then on to play games.

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

#166

Post by Stratoscope » Mon, Nov 25, 2013, 6:50 PM UTC

agumonkey wrote: post #128

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.…

I knew about Alan Cooper legacy in VB, but not the Ruby project. Is VB the only program that used this idea at Microsoft ? even another internal project ? Were you from tripod too ?

I wasn't working with Alan when he wrote the original Tripod prototype. He hired me and Gary Kratkin, Mark Merker, and Frank Raab to rewrite the whole thing in a more maintainable and extensible way.

Alan was a good coder before he decided to concentrate on UX design, but like many prototypes where a number of different ideas have been explored, the code got a bit messy and he felt a fresh start was called for.

There's more of the story here:

http://www.cooper.com/alan/father_of_vb.html

I don't know of any other Microsoft projects that used the Ruby code or ideas, just Visual Basic.

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

#167

Post by outworlder » Mon, Nov 25, 2013, 6:52 PM UTC

And not a single mention of Babylon 5.

The special effects were created on Amigas: http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/making/effects.html

Also, while looking at Video Toaster's entry on Wikipedia, I found this gem:

"An updated version called Video Toaster 4000 was later released, using the Amiga 4000's video slot. The 4000 was co-developed by actor Wil Wheaton, who worked on product testing and quality control.[6][7] He later used his public profile to serve as a technology evangelist for the product.[8] The Amiga Video Toaster 4000 source code was released in 2004 by NewTek & DiscreetFX."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Toaster

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

#168

Post by Stratoscope » Mon, Nov 25, 2013, 6:58 PM UTC

wglb wrote: post #53

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.…

I don't think we used that exact terminology, but back in the '70s in the real-time interrupt-driven world, the concept was there. In fact, if you had used that phrase at that time, everyone would have grasped the meaning.

Indeed, when I was firing those rubber bands, I didn't think I'd coined some truly novel piece of terminology. It seemed like a fairly obvious word, especially given the use of "trigger" in the SQL world.

Ah, it starts to come back! In SQL, "trigger" is a noun, not a verb. It refers to a stored procedure that's executed in response to some event.

I knew "trigger" could also be used as a verb, of course, but it seemed that it might be confusing to use it that way given its meaning in SQL. So that's when I started searching for words and firing rubber bands.

I might have fired up something else too, but that's a story for another day...

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

#169

Post by pjmlp » Mon, Nov 25, 2013, 7:09 PM UTC

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.

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.

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

#170

Post by npsimons » Mon, Nov 25, 2013, 7:27 PM UTC

melling wrote: post #125

npsimons wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, did Letwin ever pay up?

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 that would pluck the password out of the registry and put it in the clipboard so you could paste it into the password box (no memory protection). That and the memory shotgunner: a program that would write random data to random memory addresses. No Windows machine would stay up for more than about 5 minutes running that, while Linux would kill the program and merrily continue on its way. Or the packet of doom to lock up Windows remotely.