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

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

#31

Post by white_devil »

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…

Someone has to produce those interesting articles you consume for free, but he probably doesn't want to work for free. Would you?

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

#32

Post by dantheta »

I was an OS/2 user from 1993 - 1996 or so. I have very fond memories of it - for those lucky enough to have a supported machine, it felt indestructable. You could do the most obnoxious things inside a DOS session, and the most that could be trashed was the DOS session itself. At the time, I was doing x86 assembly and C programming for a college course. The kind of pointer mistakes that would cause (or necessitate) a reboot on DOS only took out the session on OS/2.

I only stopped using it because I changed computer to one that didn't have a nicely-supported Cirrus video card (my replacement machine had a Diamond Stealth), and there were no drivers for the new machine. Graphics drivers on OS/2 are a separate story! Two years later, I was on Linux full-time, but I still find myself longing for a Workplace Shell clone.

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

#33

Post by pacaro »

sehugg wrote: post #3

I 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…

I remember buying multiple copies of OS/2, but never installing it, at one point it was so discounted that it was the cheapest way to buy good quality floppies. IIRC warp came on about 40

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

#34

Post by mbetter »

white_devil wrote: post #31
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…

Someone has to produce those interesting articles you consume for free, but he probably doesn't want to work for free . Would you?

Of course I would.

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

#35

Post by epc »

jgw wrote: post #25
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?

I don't think that's correct but can't remember well enough to say so definitively. You could certainly have multiple DOS and Windows programs "running" but whether they were all active simultaneously or not I can't remember.

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

#36

Post by blantonl »

pacaro wrote: post #33
sehugg wrote: post #3

I 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…

I remember buying multiple copies of OS/2, but never installing it, at one point it was so discounted that it was the cheapest way to buy good quality floppies. IIRC warp came on about 40

Yes indeed. I remember thinking I had gone to heaven when I got my hands on a Warp 3.0 CDROM. Installing any OS that has 40 floppies is painful. Kind of reminds of of the slackware days as well...

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

#37

Post by metric10 »

jgw wrote: post #25
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?

No, OS/2 2.0 and later could run any number of DOS and Windows 3.1 applications at once. I'm not sure about the 1.x series. You're probably remembering Windows 9x's feature of being able to automatically reboot into MS-DOS for running games.

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

#38

Post by mark_l_watson »

metric10 wrote: post #37
jgw wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No, OS/2 2.0 and later could run any number of DOS and Windows 3.1 applications at once. I'm not sure about the 1.x series. You're probably remembering Windows 9x's feature of being able to automatically reboot into MS-DOS for running games.

You are correct.

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

#39

Post by metric10 »

OS/2's big problem was it needed 8MB of RAM to run acceptably. 4MB (the stated minimum requirement) was just enough to boot it up and, maybe, run one very light weight application (with the HD thrashing trying to swap memory in and out). Things where worse with Win-OS/2, which was a full copy of Windows 3.1 running in a VM. You really needed 16MB to take true advantage of OS/2 multitasking capabilities. IBM should have billed it as a workstation OS until consumer hardware caught up, just as Microsoft did with Windows NT.

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

#40

Post by Zaak »

jgw wrote: post #25
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?

On an 80286, OS/2 could only run a single instance of DOS due to that processor's lack of a true virtual 8086 mode.
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