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

329 点作者 jorgecastillo超过 11 年前

33 条评论

Stratoscope超过 11 年前
&gt; 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.<p>Ah, yes. Mavericks, California. It&#x27;s a great little offshore town, just off Pillar Point. I love that town.<p>Kidding aside, this is a great article.<p>Related to this story, the Windows 3.0 visual shell was originally not supposed to be Program Manager and File Manager. It was going to be a program called Ruby that I worked on with Alan Cooper and our team.<p>Ruby was a shell construction kit with a visual editor to lay out forms and components, which we called gizmos. You would drag arrows between gizmos to connect events fired by one gizmo to actions taken on another.<p>The shell was extensible, with an API for creating gizmos. A really weak area was the command language for the actions to be taken on an event. It was about on the level of batch files if that. But we hoped the API would allow for better command languages to be added along with more gizmos.<p>BTW, this project was where the phrase &quot;fire an event&quot; came from. I was looking for a name for process of one gizmo sending a message to another. I knew that SQL had triggers, but for some reason I didn&#x27;t like that name. I got frustrated one night and started firing rubber bands at my screen to help me think. It was a habit I had back then, probably more practical on a tough glass CRT than it is today.<p>After firing a few rubber bands, I knew what to call it.<p>(As one might guess, I&#x27;ve always been curious to know if the phrase &quot;fire an event&quot; was used before that. I wasn&#x27;t aware of it, but who knows.)<p>Anyway, Ruby didn&#x27;t become the Windows 3.0 shell after all. The went with ProgMan and FileMan instead. To give Ruby a better command language, they adapted Basic and the result was Visual Basic. Gizmos were renamed &quot;controls&quot; (sigh), and my Gizmo API became the notorious VBX interface (sorry about that).<p>And we still don&#x27;t have a programmable visual shell in Windows.
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protomyth超过 11 年前
I bought OS&#x2F;2 for work to run on some DEC PC (not the damn Rainbow, the decent 486 DEC sold). The graphic card (S3) wasn&#x27;t supported out of the box, so I called the IBM and got nowhere other than an acknowledgement it existed.<p>I called DEC and they too believed it existed, so they (while I was still on the line) called their contact at IBM. After being transferred twice, we arrived at the person who could mail me the driver, but I would have to sign an NDA. Myself and the DEC rep explained we didn&#x27;t want source or a beta driver, just the release one. He insisted every customer had to sign. I said I&#x27;d think about it. After hanging up, the DEC rep couldn&#x27;t stop laughing. He asked if I wanted a free copy of NT compliments of DEC. I took it and it had the correct driver.<p>I tried, but they had no chance.
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melling超过 11 年前
If anyone wants an insider&#x27;s view, here&#x27;s a Usenet post from one of the early Microsoft employees, Gordon Letwin:<p><a href="http://gunkies.org/wiki/Gordon_Letwin_OS/2_usenet_post" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;gunkies.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Gordon_Letwin_OS&#x2F;2_usenet_post</a><p>Somewhere in the Usenet archive is Gordon trolling the OS&#x2F;2 users for weeks (or months?) on end. I can&#x27;t remember the exact details, but he had a bet with several people that Windows would have multitasking, or that OS&#x2F;2 wouldn&#x27;t have some sort of multitasking before Windows. The bet was to fly the winner to any city of their choice and buy them dinner.<p>The discussions were quite heated and it was particulary memorable because he was one of the first 12 employees at Microsoft.<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Letwin" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Gordon_Letwin</a>
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jboggan超过 11 年前
Up until March of last year a lot of ATMs in the US were still running OS&#x2F;2 . . . I &quot;upgraded&quot; a lot of them to Windows XP. Yuck.<p>When I would take the OS&#x2F;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 felt the OS&#x2F;2 machines were rock solid, especially compared to the vulnerable Windows machines. Most small banks with NCR machines are running two software packages (APTRA Edge or Advance) with default admin passwords and are really behind on the monthly bug patches. Eek.<p>The OS&#x2F;2 machines required you to input config info in hex though, so I was glad I didn&#x27;t have to work on them in the field too much.
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steven2012超过 11 年前
I actually bought a copy of OS&#x2F;2 Warp when it came out because I was interested in its preemptive multi-tasking, and it was a decent operating system for what it&#x27;s worth. I was definitely more stable than Window 3.11, but its real problem was compatibility. Back in the early 90s, everything was about getting compatibility, and while OS&#x2F;2 had good compatibility, didn&#x27;t have perfect compatibility.<p>As well, I worked at a bank, and as the article correctly stated, the entire bank was run on OS&#x2F;2, most notably the ATMs, except the ATMs I worked with was using OS&#x2F;2 2.0.<p>However, when Windows NT 3.51 came out, that was the game changer. I was the only person I knew who even knew what it was (I read about it in a magazine at the time), and I was able to get a student-priced copy at my college bookstore. I started using it, and it was awesome, everything just worked, except for some games. You couldn&#x27;t even compare NT 3.51 to OS&#x2F;2, it wasn&#x27;t even in the same level. The look and feel of NT was exactly the same as Windows 3.11, and all the programs worked.
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mdip超过 11 年前
I worked at a large computer chain (R.I.P. Softwarehouse &#x2F; CompUSA) from 1993 - 1996 and had been building clone computers for businesses from 1990-1993. I remember how this played out <i>very well</i>.<p>At the time, IBM had sent in scores of company reps to train up our floor staff on the advantages of OS&#x2F;2 over the always-soon-to-be-released Chicago. They did a good job getting all of us to &quot;drink the Kool Aid&quot;. I received a free (not pirated, promotional) copy of blue OS&#x2F;2 Warp 3.0. It was a fantastic operating system for running a DOS based multi-node Telegard BBS and it did well with Win16 applications.<p>The impact of Windows 95 coming on the scene, though, is difficult to fully appreciate unless you were there. We had been selling pre-orders for months and there were a myriad of promos. I remember some of those preorders were sold under the threat that there wouldn&#x27;t be enough copies to go around on release day. I had been playing with pirated copies of the betas of Windows 95 for the prior two months. Even in its beta form, it ran circles around Windows 3.0&#x2F;3.1 in terms of reliability. I even remember reloading my PC with the most recent beta after release because a DOS application I used ran more reliably in it than in the RTM code.<p>Then launch day came. It was unlike anything I had ever seen in terms of a software release. We closed up at 9:00 PM and re-opened at 12:00 midnight to a line of customers that went around the building --- A line of customers ... for an operating system. We joked at the time that &quot;Windows really was <i>that</i> bad&quot;. There were tons of additional promotions to ensure people came and lined up--Some RAM &#x2F; hard disks selling under &quot;cost&quot; and others. And the atmosphere of the store felt like a party. We had theme music playing (start me up?) and some Microsoft video playing on our higher-end multi-media PCs. It was obvious to us, on the floor, trained by IBMs marketing machine, that Warp died that day.<p>As an anecdote to the stories about IBMs marketing being a little off: I remember around the release of Warp 4.0 I saw an advertisement at a subway station something along the lines of &quot;Warp Obliterated my PC!&quot;-- that tagline, evidently, meant to be some hip new use of the word obliterated.
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jjguy超过 11 年前
If you liked this article, you should read Show Stopper. It&#x27;s out of print, but there are ample used copies via Amazon.<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0029356717/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;gp&#x2F;aw&#x2F;d&#x2F;0029356717&#x2F;</a>
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sehugg超过 11 年前
OS&#x2F;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.<p>Even Windows 95 was limited by many system calls being funneled through single threaded BIOS or DOS 16-bit land.
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dangoldin超过 11 年前
I remember my dad getting a promotional shirt for OS&#x2F;2 with the caption &quot;Flight 4.0 to Chicago has been delayed, I&#x27;m taking off with OS&#x2F;2&quot;<p>The idea being that Windows 95 was internally called Windows 4.0 with the codename Chicago.<p>I keep on searching for it but can&#x27;t find it anywhere.<p>And Bill Gates on OS&#x2F;2 in 1987: &quot;I believe OS&#x2F;2 is destined to be the most important operating system, and possibly program, of all time.&quot;
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mschaef超过 11 年前
I have fond memories of OS&#x2F;2 from the summer of 1995. At the time, I was a undergraduate at the University of Texas at Austin, and IBM needed summer intern testers for a product they were calling &quot;OS&#x2F;2 Lan Server Enterprise&quot;. OS&#x2F;2 LSE was IBM&#x27;s effort to re-platform OS&#x2F;2 LAN Server on top of OS&#x2F;2 DCE (in development on the lab next door to LSE). The general idea was to provide a way to scale up OS&#x2F;2 so that it would interoperate with other DCE-based systems (mainly RS&#x2F;6000 AIX, IIRC).<p>Anyway, the machine IBM gave me to use was a PS&#x2F;2 Model 80. This was a 1988-era machine that had been brought to the semi-modern era with 20MB of RAM memory installed via several MCA expansion cards. Against my best expectations, the machine ran well, despite the fact that its CPU was at least 10% the speed of the then-state of the art.<p>From what I remember, the OS&#x2F;2 LSE product itself was fairly solid. However, the biggest memory I have from that summer was the afternoon we spent playing around with the Microsoft Windows 95 beta disk we received for compatability testing. Towards the end of the afternoon, we tried to DriveSpace (compress) the disk. We got bored during the wait for the compress, so we pulled the power on the machine thinking that would be the end of it. However, once we powered the machine back up to install OS&#x2F;2, Windows 95 just resumed compressing away like nothing happened. A few weeks later, a friend and I went to CompUSA for the Windows95 launch. Even at midnight, there was a line out the door, winding past the Windows 95 boxes, then the Plus Pack, then Office 95, and then memory upgrades... Didn&#x27;t hear much about OS&#x2F;2 after that...
damian2000超过 11 年前
Incredible that companies like Apple (Mac), Atari (ST) and Commodore (Amiga) weren&#x27;t able to fully capitalise on their leading position in GUI based OSes of the time, which were miles ahead of both MS and IBM.
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michaelhoffman超过 11 年前
&gt; IBM licensed Commodore’s AREXX scripting language and included it with OS&#x2F;2 2.0.<p>I find this hard to believe, given that Rexx was developed by IBM.<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rexx" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Rexx</a>
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lbarrow超过 11 年前
Great read. In the end, it seems like a classic failure to resolve the innovator&#x27;s dilemma. IBM decided that the future of computing would revolve around mainframes because <i>they liked mainframes</i>, not because that&#x27;s where the facts led them. And ultimately they paid the price for it.
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kabdib超过 11 年前
When OS&#x2F;2 Warp came out, I remember it being insanely cheap ($20?), so in a what-the-hell mood I bought it. Took it home and tried to install it. It was a hopeless mess of disks, both optical and floppy, and I never got it to run.<p>One of my cow-orkers at Apple had worked on the OS&#x2F;2 Presentation Manager at IBM. I tried talking with her about it, but she said the experience had been &quot;absolutely awful&quot; and she didn&#x27;t want to say much else.<p>IBM never had a chance.
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outworlder超过 11 年前
And not a single mention of Babylon 5.<p>The special effects were created on Amigas: <a href="http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/making/effects.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.midwinter.com&#x2F;lurk&#x2F;making&#x2F;effects.html</a><p>Also, while looking at Video Toaster&#x27;s entry on Wikipedia, I found this gem:<p>&quot;An updated version called Video Toaster 4000 was later released, using the Amiga 4000&#x27;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 &amp; DiscreetFX.&quot;<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Toaster" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Video_Toaster</a>
kickingvegas超过 11 年前
A previous HN thread on OS&#x2F;2.<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3785819" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=3785819</a>
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nnq超过 11 年前
Why aren&#x27;t the unix-family OSs of the era part of the story? Why didn&#x27;t IBM even consider porting a unix-family OS to the PCs instead of paying an unproven company like Microsoft to write an OS?<p>(...all the events from this stretch of computing history seem so weird to me, like from a steampunk-like alternate reality movie. There&#x27;s surely <i>lots</i> of context missing and stories that nobody will ever tell, since most of the decisions taken by all the key players seem so anti-business. Computers may have changed a lot from back then, but business is still business and all the decisions made seem either &quot;irrational&quot; or based on &quot;hidden information&quot; that is not part of the story.)
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swampboy超过 11 年前
I enjoyed the article. It was a nice trip down memory lane. Regarding development tools, there were 2 commercial IDEs based on REXX: Watcom VX-REXX and VisPro REXX. I used Watcom&#x27;s VX-REXX and it was a joy to use and allowed for incredibly fast and powerful application development. I heard the same about VisPro REXX. IBM&#x27;s early set of tools C&#x2F;2 and C Set++ were a bit painful to use. VisualAge C++ 3.0 was a decent toolset once you got over the weirdness of it. For a while, if you wanted to write C or C++ code using sockets you had to purchase IBM&#x27;s TCP&#x2F;IP SDK for $100.<p>The SIQ was a &quot;synchronous&quot; input queue and the problem has been understated in the article and comments. It was really bad. The base OS was incredibly stable, but the GUI shell, not so much due to the SIQ problem.<p>There were a number of Unix and Unix-like systems in addition to the ones already listed: Coherent, Interactive, and SCO are some that come to mind. They were pretty expensive IIRC, around $1000 to license.
mathattack超过 11 年前
I remember an internal training class at a large consulting firm in the mid 90s that was using OS&#x2F;2. I thought, &quot;This is an awful sign. Are we doing this just to get some business with IBM?&quot; They were a big user of Lotus Notes 2. You never know...
nikbackm超过 11 年前
Interesting read. This part really brought the current Windows 8 push by Microsoft to mind.<p>&quot;These machines were meant to wrestle control of the PC industry away from the clone makers, but they were also meant to subtly push people back toward a world where PCs were the servants and mainframes were the masters. They were never allowed to be too fast or run a proper operating system that would take advantage of the 32-bit computing power available with the 386 chip. In trying to do two contradictory things at once, they failed at both.&quot;<p>Not quite the same situation, but they have many similarities.
zenbowman超过 11 年前
Thank you for sharing, a great article indeed.<p>I&#x27;m glad it ended up the way it did, Microsoft at the time was betting on openness being a feature, and I think they helped move the computer and software industries they have gone in since, towards greater openness (and thereby professionalism).<p>People associate Microsoft with closed source, but it is of course relative, they were in their day the vendor who was banking on openness and courting developers harder than the others.
mnw21cam超过 11 年前
The article says that the Mac OS was the only OS to ship that ran on PowerPC CPUs. This is not true - later versions of the Amiga OS ran on PowerPC.
picomancer超过 11 年前
Here&#x27;s a perspective from the founder of a successful bootstrapped software startup that began by developing native OS&#x2F;2 applications:<p><a href="http://www.stardock.com/stardock/articles/article_sdos2.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.stardock.com&#x2F;stardock&#x2F;articles&#x2F;article_sdos2.html</a><p>I own a copy of the OS&#x2F;2 Galactic Civilizations 2.
jgeorge超过 11 年前
One of my fondest memories of OS&#x2F;2 (there weren&#x27;t many, sorry) was finding a media file on one of the diskettes called IBMRALLY.MID which was a little piano rendition of &quot;Ever Onward, IBM&quot; from way back when in the Way Back When Days of IBM.
zura超过 11 年前
Hah, I was thinking to Ask HN these days about the availability of exotic jobs, including OS&#x2F;2 (or eComStation) programming jobs. I also wouldn&#x27;t mind to take Motif jobs. Feel free to contact me if you have any ;)
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justincormack超过 11 年前
As this article admits, it is just a rewrite of &quot;Triumph of the Nerds&quot;.
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forgottenpaswrd超过 11 年前
&quot;Version 3.0 was going to up the graphical ante with an exciting new 3D beveled design (which had first appeared with OS&#x2F;2 1.2)&quot;<p>I think it was Next computers who got first on this.
erichocean超过 11 年前
I seem to recall UPS widely deploying OS&#x2F;2 internally back in the 90s, with custom (internal) apps written for it.<p>Probably all Windows by now...
mp99e99超过 11 年前
This was a great article, thanks for posting!
mbennett超过 11 年前
&gt;Finally, and most importantly for the future of the company, Bill Gates hired the architect of the industrial-strength minicomputer operating system VMS and put him in charge of the OS&#x2F;2 3.0 NT group. Dave Cutler’s first directive was to throw away all the old OS&#x2F;2 code and start from scratch. The company wanted to build a high-performance, fault-tolerant, platform-independent, and fully networkable operating system. It would be known as Windows NT.<p>A couple of decades later, Dave Cutler is still around at Microsoft and worked on the hypervisor for the Xbox One at the ripe young age of 71, allowing games to run seamlessly beside apps.<p>From <a href="http://www.theverge.com/2013/11/8/5075216/xbox-one-tv-microsofts-plan-to-take-over-the-living-room" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;2013&#x2F;11&#x2F;8&#x2F;5075216&#x2F;xbox-one-tv-micros...</a><p>&gt;Underneath it all lies the magic — a system layer called the hypervisor that manages resources and keeps both platforms running optimally even as users bounce back and forth between games, apps, and TV.<p>&gt;To build the hypervisor, Multerer recruited the heaviest hitter he could find: David Cutler, a legendary 71-year-old Microsoft senior technical fellow who wrote the VMS mainframe operating system in 1975 and then came to Microsoft and served as the chief architect of Windows NT.<p>&gt;It appears his work bridging the two sides of the One has gone swimmingly: jumping between massively complex games like Forza Motorsport 5, TV, and apps like Skype and Internet Explorer was seamless when I got to play with a system in Redmond. Switching in and out of Forza was particularly impressive: the game instantly resumed, with no loading times at all. &quot;It all just works for people,&quot; says Henshaw as he walks me through the demo. &quot;They don’t have to think about what operating system is there.&quot;
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yuhong超过 11 年前
The sad thing is that I have never seen an article on the entire MS OS&#x2F;2 2.0 fiasco that is what I call complete and detailed and many omitting for example the unethical attacks MS did against OS&#x2F;2 such as &quot;Microsoft Munchkins&quot;. I try with my own blog article, but I admit it is not very good either.
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derleth超过 11 年前
&gt; So the new System&#x2F;360 mainframe line would run the also brand-new OS&#x2F;360.<p>Bad example. <i>Really</i> bad example: Not even IBM could standardize on a single OS for the System&#x2F;360.<p>The System&#x2F;360 went through a few OS iterations before OS&#x2F;360 came along: OS&#x2F;360 was late, as recounted in <i>The Mythical Man-Month</i>, so DOS&#x2F;360 came along, then BOS&#x2F;360, then TOS&#x2F;360, and even PCP, which didn&#x27;t support multiprogramming. Other OSes were CP-67, which became VM, MFT, MVT, and still more OSes on top of that.<p>To this day, there are multiple OSes for the architecture descended from the System&#x2F;360, including Linux.
jlebrech超过 11 年前
don&#x27;t outsource for the sake of a few months, if things take time, then they take time.