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25 years of OS/2: the legendary failure that refuses to die.

techland.time.com

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Re: 25 years of OS/2: the legendary failure that refuses to die.

#21

Post by sek »

tfb wrote: post #19

I realize this is off topic, so please forgive the following rant. I'm not sure if it's out of principle or just stubbornness, but it's gotten to the point where every time I read an article that is paginated (most likely only because whoever runs the website wants more page views), I refuse to continue to the next page and end up reading only a fraction of the article. My attitude towards pagination wasn't always th…

I have the same feeling, the most annoying thing is that i expect a specific amount of text.

When i see the scrollbar, i think this will take 2 minutes and the topic OS/2 is worth 2 minutes of time, but not 20 minutes. I feel cheated because i don't want to read it all and the first part was somewhat useless because i didn't get the whole story.

Re: 25 years of OS/2: the legendary failure that refuses to die.

#23

Post by rbanffy »

forinti wrote: post #11

A few years back (around 2008, maybe) I stumbled upon an ATM that had failed to boot all the way and was pretty surprised that it was running OS/2 (and a Rexx script). This was for Brazil's largest bank (Banco do Brasil). Since then I think they've moved to Linux.

They made the move around 2008 or so.

Re: 25 years of OS/2: the legendary failure that refuses to die.

#24

Post by patrickgzill »

Wow, this brings back memories. I was a total OS/2-Head until about 1993 or 1994 when I got both an Yggdrasil Linux CD for my 486, and, a NeXTCube; and from there, ended up a Unix fan.

The problem with installation, was that all development was done on PS/2s. The developers never did much testing on non-MCA (MicroChannel Architecture, a pre-PCI intelligent bus design) hardware.

That is why, for instance, when installing OS.2 2.0 and 2.1 on certain PCs you had to disable the CPUs L2 cache by using the legacy "non-turbo" mode and do part of the installation in 8Mhz AT mode; otherwise the installer would crash and you wouldn't know why.

I think a lot of OS/2 users went to Linux and their disgust for MS' admitted astro-turfing and plain outright lying, fueled Linux adoption.

ADD: OS/2 ran well in 32MB and flew in anything more than that. Unfortunately at that time, 32MB was hundreds of dollars, and some systems couldn't even take that much RAM.

Re: 25 years of OS/2: the legendary failure that refuses to die.

#25

Post by jgw »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #8

I 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,…

Never used OS/2, so maybe you can clarify this for me:

I thought that one of the limitations of OS/2 was that while it could run DOS programs, it could only run one DOS program at a time (in addition to a number of native ones). Is that correct?

Re: 25 years of OS/2: the legendary failure that refuses to die.

#26

Post by christoph »

tfb wrote: post #19

I realize this is off topic, so please forgive the following rant. I'm not sure if it's out of principle or just stubbornness, but it's gotten to the point where every time I read an article that is paginated (most likely only because whoever runs the website wants more page views), I refuse to continue to the next page and end up reading only a fraction of the article. My attitude towards pagination wasn't always th…

Readability didn't work for me on this page anyway. Very frustrating that content producers do this and provide no way to view the whole article in a single click.

Re: 25 years of OS/2: the legendary failure that refuses to die.

#27

Post by msluyter »

protomyth wrote: post #18

I tried to give OS/2 a try, but what happened was kind of bizarre. I had a DEC PClone with a 486 (cannot remember if it was DX or SX) inside. OS/2 needed a graphic driver for the S3 chip. I called DEC support to ask for the driver and they said they didn't have it but IBM did. The DEC rep kept me on the phone while he called the OS/2 support number. DEC had incredible service at the time. Then the bizarre happened. T…

I used to do OS/2 support as an IBM co-op back when I was in college. In many ways it was pretty sweet -- I did some cool stuff with the built in Rexx interpreter, which -- though not as or widely supported as, say, perl -- was still pretty nice.

Regarding your specific problem, I'd add that IBM's support structure was byzantine, with multiple groups with different agendas and tons of snafus like: "this isn't our issue, contact Thinkpad support," followed by "this isn't a Thinkpad issue, contact OS/2 support." (Aside: I once tried to get a different IBM group to handle an issue I believed to be theirs, and after getting rebuffed multiple times, I wrote a rather angry response which got me in trouble with my manager. Learned a lot from that -- mostly, don't write angry.)

9 times out of ten, the issues we received boiled down to a) missing / out of date drivers for some piece of hardware (as in the S3 chipset you mention), or b) incompatibilities/errors running existing windows apps. I think OS/2 failed for a variety of reasons, but ultimately, even though it was better than windows (for a while), people just didn't feel a strong need for pre-emptive multi-tasking, so it was never a strong selling point, especially if it meant you couldn't run the latest PC games.

Re: 25 years of OS/2: the legendary failure that refuses to die.

#28

Post by luser001 »

tfb wrote: post #19

I realize this is off topic, so please forgive the following rant. I'm not sure if it's out of principle or just stubbornness, but it's gotten to the point where every time I read an article that is paginated (most likely only because whoever runs the website wants more page views), I refuse to continue to the next page and end up reading only a fraction of the article. My attitude towards pagination wasn't always th…

First world problems. :)

PS: This is only as off-topic as your reply.

Re: 25 years of OS/2: the legendary failure that refuses to die.

#29

Post by pm90 »

kenna wrote: post #22

OS/2 is still in use in NYC's subway MetroCard system... shocking. The city is probably being squeezed out of tons of money to maintain technology that is ancient.

I don't find it all that surprising. A few large insurance companies still have a lot of their (core) software written in COBOL and outsource its upkeep to IT companies. It's a big expense, nobody likes it; but replacing it would cost more.

Re: 25 years of OS/2: the legendary failure that refuses to die.

#30

Post by spindritf »

christoph wrote: post #26
tfb wrote: post #19

I realize this is off topic, so please forgive the following rant. I'm not sure if it's out of principle or just stubbornness, but it's gotten to the point where every time I read an article that is paginated (most likely only because whoever runs the website wants more page views), I refuse to continue to the next page and end up reading only a fraction of the article. My attitude towards pagination wasn't always th…

Readability didn't work for me on this page anyway. Very frustrating that content producers do this and provide no way to view the whole article in a single click.

As far as first world problems go, this one is really annoying. Especially if you send an article to the Kindle and don't notice that you only got a part of it. After a few times, I learnt to view and check first but it really kills the flow.
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