Trying Out Microsoft's Pre-Release OS/2 2.0 - Slashdot

Posted by BeauHD

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  • Re:

    You thought OS/2 2.0 was stable?

    • You thought OS/2 2.0 was stable?

      In my experience, YES... compared to Windows 3.x

      Back in the 1990s I saw OS/2 doing stuff that Windows could only dream about until Windows NT became a viable workstation option some years after that with the introduction of Windows 2000.

      Even OS/2 2.x was graceful under load, even heavy loads like a full GUI combined with a MS-SQL backend, all shoe-horned into 16MB (yes, MB) of RAM. OS/2 3.x and later improved on that.

      Windows 3.x & 95/98 were barely stable under load. Windows NT 3.51 was better under load, but not a viable workstation choice; NT4 was a bit of a bandage. Windows 2000 finally pulled it all together.

      OS/2 was a viable workstation option if you could tolerate the very narrow range of software choices.

      • Re:

        It was for me; I never remember having issues with it. Learned some REXX on it, too, as well as running multiple "bare metal hardware access" DOS games, mainly to see if I could.

        • Re:

          In my experience OS/2 had some major issues with cheap RAM.

          • Re:

            Mis-matched ram modules too. It was demanding of decent hardware. I had a 486 with what turned out to be a broken 16 bit DMA controller, OS/2 crashed a lot, moved to Slackware 2.0, where apps crashed with a bus error. Eventually set the sound card to use 8 bit DMA and both were stable.
            The other problem was the SIQ (single input queue) where a program could hang the whole desktop, which looked like a crash and unless you could do something like telnet in to kill the hung program, forced a reboot to recover.

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        IBM were partnering with Microsoft and wrote a big chunk of the code, from what I recall. It shows that programming is about discipline, and that perfectly good programmers existed at the time.

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        NT3.51 was perfectly viable for a workstation in its day, and it was the last version of Windows that prioritized reliability and security. Too bad about the 2GB filesystem limit... but it wasn't a problem for a workstation user at the time.

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          [Article author here]

          > NT3.51 was perfectly viable for a workstation in its day

          Yes it was. I used in in my day job at the time, on PC Pro Magazine.

          But it was the 3rd release of NT and it came out 5 whole years after this product. At that time, given the speed of development of computing in the 1980s and 1990s, half a decade was almost an eternity. It was time for NT 3.1+ 3 service packs, then 3.5 + another 3 service packs, then 3.51, which itself got 5 SPs.

          > the last version of Windows that prioritiz

        • Re:

          Har-de-har har. In '95/96, we went to NT, and we had an ethernet-based network. Try to save a file to a network drive... NOPE.

      • Re:

        Before Windows 2000 Windows NT 4.0 was also perfectly fine. I used to install direct x on it and run some games. It just didn't did graphics as fast as other windows versions but was stable and no blue screens in sight

      • Re:

        I had a similar experience, very reliable. I set up an OS/2 machine to automatically run dozens of regression tests that were implemented in DOS. Each test run in its own DOS box. If the test crashed the DOS session the Rexx script logged it as a failure and moved on to the next test. I tried to implement these regression tests under windows NT, but it was not reliable at all, and there was no easy way to get exit codes from the tests.

    • Re:

      Yes it was. I was working for a large financial company at the time and we had a bunch of DOS machines running programs to send analytical data to Reuters. We were able to get 2 DOS instances running on an OS/2 box, reducing our hardware requirements in half. We also kept a few DOS machines running for A/B testing and the OS/2 machines ended up being more stable.

      • Re:

        We used DESQview from Quaerterdeck to do that.

        I'd guess that was more stable, performant and lightweight than OS/2 and cheaper too?

        And QEMM-386 on all the other DOS boxes too.

• How would it have "killed off Apple"?
  
  That's like saying that if a different branch of worms succeeded it might have killed off the insects.

  • It might have

    How would it have "killed off Apple"?

    I probably would never have gone the Apple route myself if I could have been working with OS/2 all along.

    OS/2 was really potentially a better advanced UNIX than OSX was.

    Yes OS/2 was like ten years ahead of OSX but just think of what 10 years of development would; have done for it!

    It was just a really awesome architecture for multitasking.

    I think it says something that the very last OS/2 version was released in December 2001, and Mac OSX launched for consumers in March 20

    • OS/2 bears no resemblance to unix. It is not time sharing.

      • Re:

        OS/2 bears no resemblance to unix. It is not time sharing.

        It was more from the user side that it was comparable, in terms of a useful terminal, and window-manager like window interactions. TBH it's all a little fuzzy at this point as it was a long time ago I used it.

        However like I said, it had a better architectures than UNIX under the hood - I agree in there it's really not like UNIX, but what it was I really liked. And the world would be a vastly better place if it had killed Windows.

      • Re:

        Citrix made a multiuser OS/2. Nobody wanted it and they moved on. Mostly nobody wanted OS/2 either, but especially nobody wanted a special version of it.

        There are a few packages that implement multiuser on OS/2, but since it doesn't have any real multiuser security, there's as little point as there was to doing it on the Amiga (e.g. with MUFS.)

        OS/2 is a pretty good multitasker though, even 2.x was fairly excellent at it. If they'd put security into it, it could have been a contender.

      • Re: It might have

        What do you mean by time sharing ?
        OS/2 had preemptive multi tasking.
        It even had kernel threads, long before POSIX threads came around. I was unable to find a good time-line for native threads on various Unix platforms.
        Certainly, early Linux implementations threads, as processes, were very screwy. Solaris was far more sane.
        IRIX had user threads.

        I started using OS/2 in 1992. Finally gave up on it in 2007 to be assimilated by the Borg (MS).

        • Re:

          Time sharing means multi user. OS/2 was not a multi user operating system. Yeah it was a very good OS but you couldn't have 10 people logged in and editing code.

          • Re:

            Well, you *could*, you just had to implement the multi-user functionality yourself. I did exactly that under 1.3 EE for the Naval Undersea Warfare Center back around 1991 or so for what essentially was a BBS on steroids that could have as many simultaneous user accounts active as there were serial ports available, each with their own enforced user space. It was a hell of a lot of fun to work on, but frankly the Navy would have been just as well off running something like MajorBBS under DOS and having us w

      • Re:

        Posix compatibility would be a better description, an old version of Posix at the time and I don't think IBM totally finished it.
        HPFS386 (thousand dollars to buy from MS) supported ACL's, which regular HPFS respected and allowed multi-user in the server environment.

  • Re:

    [Article author here]

    > How would it have "killed off Apple"?

    Win95 nearly did kill Apple. A good desktop and good-enough multitasking and networking damn near sank the Mac.

    This isn't the IBM OS/2 that launched in 1992. This is *Microsoft* OS/2 2 from two years earlier. MS had a properly multitasking 32-bit OS with networking support in 1990. If they'd launched it, before Apple even got to launching _System 7_, then the competition would have killed Apple much earlier on, before even the PowerMac line was

    • Microsoft Antitrust

      Speculations cross my mind:

      One of the explanations I've heard about why Win95 merely only "nearly did kill Apple" instead of "completely killing" it, is that Microsoft was being investigated for antitrust since 1990 and definitely needed to still have a somewhat not completely dead Apple around to point at whenever the word "monopoly" came in the discussion. (see: this article [thebusinessanecdote.com])

      If Microsoft had launched an Apple-crusher a bit earlier, they would still have launched it during their antitrust lawsuit era, so t

      • Re:

        Yeah, that's utter bullsh1t.

        MS didn't invest in Apple. MS stole code from Apple, got caught, and settled out of court.

        I've seen that claim loads of times -- it's all over Quora -- and it's a flat lie. It's credulous fools believing the marketing lizards' BS.

        https://www.zdnet.com/article/... [zdnet.com]

        MS is utterly amoral and ruthless.

        It stole from Stac:

        https://www.latimes.com/archiv... [latimes.com]

        https://tedium.co/2018/09/04/d... [tedium.co]

        It sabotaged DR:

        https://www.geoffchappell.com/... [geoffchappell.com]

        It screwed over Central Point:

        https://www.dosdays.co. [dosdays.co.uk]

• Windows NT would almost certainly still have happened, although it's likely that the interface would have been different. Gates had hired a bunch of guys from DEC as it was slowly imploding, including Dave Cutler, and they built the kernel to be the most secure OS at the time, with the NTFS journaling file system. Until that time nothing had been able to pass the stringent security testing of the NSA and Pentagon, but NT was such a leap forward in security that the government almost immediately standardized on it. Being one of the largest customers for desktop and server machines on the planet at the time, that standardization ensured that Windows would be around for a long time.

  • Re:

    Imagine if Microsoft had gone full NT from the start, instead of segregating home users to the less stable, less secure 9x line.

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    • • Re:

        If Microsoft had gone full NT from the start, driver availability would have not be a problem, as the manufactures would have made drivers for the only existing Windows, NT.

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        • • Re:

            Win2k had practically no bloat. Everything in it did something meaningful.

            Yes, it used more disk space than Win98. But it also did a lot more stuff. Win98 did almost nothing. In some ways that was a feature, as long as all you did was run games. If you tried to use it online, your system was super likely to get infected with something.

            Win2k would install and run on a 486 with 16MB RAM, despite the "minimum requirements" of 64MB and a 133 MHz CPU. But it was doing stuff unrelated to gaming in the background.

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        • Re:

          When exactly was "the start"? Windows 9x/Me was the final form of 16-bit MS-DOS-based Windows, a line whose development had started in the early 1980s and far predated PCs capable of running NT.

          On NT's release, it was too large to run on the majority of PCs out there, even ones with 386 CPUs. It also didn't support a lot of common hardware that only had 16-bit drivers available. It wasn't until a decade later that the general PC-buying public was ready to migrate to NT.

    • Re:

      This was never really a choice.

      It is really hard to remember that far back for a lot of people but in the NT 3.1 / 3.51 period had Microsoft not kept clients on Windows 3.11 + DOS5/6. They never would have captured business office.

      Keep in mind PCs were still really expensive back then. A 386SX with 4mbs of RAM with Windows 3.x + Norton Desktop + Excel + Word 6. It was pretty good use experience on that type of machine. Was a great office tool that almost any employee could get a lot of value out of. Those

      • Re:

        I've done a lot of retro computing in the last few years and one of the surprising things I've found is that NT 3.51 runs surprisingly well on some pretty low end stuff. Most notably a 386SX/16 mhz with 11MB of RAM (Yes, 11, it has weird RAM setup) Toshiba T3200SX. It even runs Office 97 mostly decently. As it happens I actually ran OS.2 2.1 on the very same machine back in the late 90s during high school and it was... OK but the lack of software available, especially networking/internet stuff, really limit

    • Re:

      With the price of ram at the time, NT wouldn't have been a good decision for the average home owner. OS/2 had the same problem with ram prices.

      • Re:

        For sure. When I was working on an OS/2 1.3 app back in the very, very early 90's, I needed a 386DX-33 system with 8 megabytes of RAM and a 120 meg disk. The wailing and gnashing of teeth from the procurement/accounting folks was biblical in scope.

  • Re:

    @cusco: “NT was such a leap forward in security”
    
    Not according to its Wikipedia entry:
    
    June 2019 [archive.is]: “although Windows NT and its successors are designed for security (including on a network) and multi-user PCs, they were not initially designed with Internet security in mind as much, since, when it was first developed in the early 1990s, Internet use was less prevalent”

    • Re:

      All of these secure systems were never internet connected. Hardware that gets placed in a SCIF stays there literally forever, it can't leave. So you'll still find things like VAX boxes happily plugging away after decades.

    • Re:

      IIRC Windows NT 3.51 didn't even come with a browser because the only people using the Internet at that time were academics, scientists, and a very few corporations. To download drivers in 1998 at my job we used my boss's CompuServe account (even AOL didn't even have a real connection to the Internet then).

      • Re:

        However, even NT 3.5 has FTP, which can be used for downloading stuff from the Internet, plus it also has ARP, FINGER, IPCONFIG, LPQ, LPR, PING, RCP, REXEC, ROUTE, RSH, TELNET, TFTP, TRACERT... a fairly useful stack of IP tools.

      • Re:

        NT4 and the whole Cairo project ended up somewhat delayed and kind of a mess. I've always felt like NT 3.51 was a bit of a stopgap to get a handful of the Windows 95 common controls and DLLs and such out there in the wild while they were finishing up NT4. There was only just barely browsers released for NT 3.51 at all - Microsoft never released 32-bit versions of IE for it which means it was stuck with the same 16-bit IE straight from Windows 3.1, and a handful of other 32-bit browsers like Netscape did wor

    • Re: NT would still have happened

      You're misunderstanding a modern take on something designed thirty years earlier. That was the standard at the time, Unix and Linux were the same, unnecessary networked daemons running by default, no host firewalls by default or in practice, no application firewalls. Encryption was something you only bothered with over untrusted networks. They were all designed for trusted networks, everything was back then.

• This is the way the PC industry very nearly went until MICROS~1 sabataged it/s
  
  Microsoft Presentation for the 1989 IBM PS/2 forum
  
  Apr 1989 Steve Ballmer [edge-op.org]: “I would like to thank IBM for inviting me to talk with you this morning because it gives me a chance to talk to you about our plans are for OS/2 and try to reinforce some of its benefits.”
  
  Nov 1991 [groklaw.net]: Microsoft Confidential - Do Not Distribute
  
  “It is therefore critical that we prevent OS/2 2.0 from eroding Windows momentum and de
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• There was a large installation of OS/2 at one of the major banks in Spain for quite a few years after end of life, DEC was supporting it up until about 1995.

  • Re:

    There were a bunch of ATM machines (from NEC I think) as late as 2008. My boss's previous life was servicing ATMs, and he hated the things.

  • Re: Banking application

    I ran into it as late as 97 at a big clothing chain in Boston...still running fine back then

• A PC magazine: They don't exist now, most turning into home electronics, hardware and PC games blurbs before disappearing. In 1990, magazines explained how to do stuff: In DOS, Lotus 1-2-3, WordPerfect and the C or OOP Turbo-Pascal language.

  • Re:

    I do miss PC Week (later eWeek), and its insightful insider info.

    • Re:

      BYTE was the big dog for me, though. I miss that rag SO much.

• We used OS/2 1.6 and it was light years ahead of anything MS released. But, most people remember IBM's OS/2 warp and not Microsoft's.

  I had nothing but problems and issues with compatibility on my Pentium machine. Various Windows and early Linux soon found themselves on my machines....until I got a modern OSX system and never looked back.

  But, what IF Microsoft released their OS/2 vs the 3.x and 9x peace's of crap we were forced to accept? What then?

  1.6 offered true multitasking - we used at my place of em

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  • Re: I remember OS/2

    1.6 ? I have never heard of that OS/2 version.
    Do you mean 1.2 or 1.3 ?

  • • Re:

      It just used more memory, and memory was stupidly cheap at that time. It wouldn't have been a problem.

      • Re:

        Memory was actually expensive at the time. Though MS OS/2 2.0 would have been lighter as no WPS. I ran Warp on a 4M 386, wasn't bad with a light weight shell

        • Re:

          Compared to today, it was a smaller part of the overall price of top of the line computer. I remember having 16Mbytes for some reason, though I only needed 4Mbytes for most applications, and that was the standard most computers came with when I bought my computer.

          • Re:

            When I bought my 386, ram was still expensive with 2-4M being normal. It did eventually become cheap but took longer then expected

  • Re:

    [Article author here]

    > We used OS/2 1.6

    No you didn't. No such release ever existed.

    It went:

    1.0, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3... 2.0, 2.1, 3.0, 4.0, 4.5 server.

• Back when Windows 95 first came out I gave it a shot. It crashed continuously so I went back to DOS 6.22 and WFW3.11. I then purchased OS/2 Warp. It was stable and worked really well.. I mean really well! I eventually had to abandon it though because IBM dropped the ball on driver support. By this time Win95 OSR2 was out and much more stable (but still not nearly as good as OS/2 Warp). I loved Warp and wish it would have had a future. IBM should have stuck with it providing better driver support and market

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  • Re:

    They never showed a screenshot because visually OS/2 Warp looked like trash next to Windows at that time, as far as anyone who wasn't an OS/2 fanboi was concerned.

    I don't mean to suggest it wasnt better in every technical way or even that the actually display/windowing system was technically inferior but it sure looked worse. Windows had nice shadows and 3D effects on buttons by then; appropriate size widgets and handles for people running it on 800x600 displays, and default color schemes that were chosen b

• Most people forget, or never knew, that OS/2 was a joint IBM and Microsoft project. So with MS's marketing and IBM project management, it could have done well. But MS feared that it would compete with MS WIndows 3.x...whichwas true, it would have blown the doors off Windows. I wrote a kiosk application on OS/2...started on OS/2 2.1 just before OS2 3.0 Warp came, using what was called "IBM's Audio Visual Connection", or AVC, which later became the Ultimedia Builder. The big trick that AVC had was a IBM video

  • Re:

    You could do all that stuff on a Mac, too. Once I found four nubus near-broadcast-quality video capture/playback boards for Macintosh II in a dumpster, and sold them via USENET...

    (Background blathering not relevant to the story follows)
    I was a teenager at the time and living in Santa Cruz, and my friends and I used to go up to Scotts Valley and get stuff out of tech company dumpsters. We also used to have a used computer store called Computer Jones that was founded by this guy Brian who got out of homelessn

    • Re:

      Definitely fun times. We had a place here in Ottawa called Century 21 (No relation to the realtor) that had used computer...stuff. Everything from Mainframe tape drives to all sorts of weird an obscure stuff. I traded a bunch of Apple ][+ manuals I dumpster dived for all the RAM I needed for the Apple ][+ clone I was building. It was a great place to hang out and oogle weird looking equipment and try to guess what it was for.

• Thanks for the reminder, I should re-copy my OS/2 Warp CD to avoid bit rot.

  • Re:

    Tip: WinWorld [winworldpc.com] has several ancient operating systems for download.

• How different? I am confident the computers would be pretty much the same hardware and same WIMP (windows-icons-menus-pointer) paradigm. Maybe even more of a walled garden than today, with IBM keeping tighter control over the systems... that means Linux would have happened anyway.

  • Re:

    Microsoft might not have violated antitrust law, if they'd been working with IBM, and that would have resulted in a healthier ecosystem.

    OS/2 would have meant that microchannel architecture would have replaced the old bus standard, which might have accelerated bus development. Or might have throttled it entirely.

    That's the problem with alternative histories, there's a lot of subtle and not-so-subtle interplays and you can't factor them all in.

    • Re:

      I don't think OS/2 being successful would have automatically meant that MicroChannel would have gone anywhere. It was a great system at the time, and technically advanced, but the licensing fee they wanted for its use pretty much guaranteed that everyone bought an ISA-based 386 from Gateway, Dell, or Compaq instead of a Model 80, given that OS/2 ran just fine on those other machines. The only place I ever saw MC in use in the wild was in IBM shops where they were supporting a S/390 or something like that.

  • Re:

    [Article author here]

    > How different?

    Apple dead by the mid-1990s. No iPod, no OS X, no iPhones or iPads. No touchscreen handhelds, because all previous tablets flopped.

    We'd probably be using Blackberry clones with tiny QWERTY keyboards.

    Linux would look very different, because Win95 never came out. It might evolve into a Mac clone or a NeXT clone instead. (Which sounds quite good to me, actually.)

    • Re:

      We'd probably be using Blackberry clones with tiny QWERTY keyboards.

      This is absolutely preposterous! QWERTY keyboards stopped being used on phones because companies completely independent from Apple took it upon themselves to create capacitive touchscreens. These new screens would replace the resistive touchscreens that required practically spraining your finger to stab the screen hard enough to register a press event. Apple wasn't even the first company to release a keyboardless phone with a capacitive

• Microsoft is not a trend setter. Apple is not a sole source of innovation. Much of what lead us to this very point has had little influence by either company. Sure some of their products shocked the industry, but there's zero reason to believe the industry wouldn't get there on its own. Take a look at the LG phone with full touch screen (prior to the iPhone), or what was it that CmdrTaco said about the iPod, less storage than a nomad, lame? Yeah that's because while being quite popular it was ultimately a m

• There was an ACE standard to use Portable OS/2 on MIPS devices and use MIPS expansion cards in PCs to turn them into RISC workstations. All it needed was ARC BIOS and could run 286 DOS binaries in emulation. https://virtuallyfun.com/2021/... [virtuallyfun.com] Has the NT 4.0 version of MIPS before Microsoft abandoned it.

  According to Eric S. Rayman of "The History of Unix" IBM and Commodore traded technology. IBM got the GUI Workbench which became Presentation Manager, and Commodore got the REXX language to develop apps on. I tried adding this to Wikipedia's article on OS/2 and Amiga but Pagemisters quickly reverted it even if I cited that book, because Rayman is non-notable they claim.

  • Re:

    Do you mean Eric Raymond?

    If you get the name of the co-inventor of the term "open source" right, rather than confusing him with a French videogame character, it will make your comment rather more believable.

  • Re:

    IBM got the GUI Workbench which became Presentation Manager

    Do you mean Workbench as in the Amiga Workbench? Presentation Manager was nothing like Workbench, aside from using a window-centric paradigm, using a mouse, etc. Presentation Manager under OS/2 looked and behaved nothing at all like Workbench, and in the OS/2 1.3 release, PM was practically indistinguishable from the then-new Windows 3.0 unless you looked closely. I own three Amigas myself (a 1000, 500, and 1200), and spent a few years working o

• Windows trounced OS/2 because it was easier to pirate, thus the vast array of young computer users who were experimenting with such things cut their teeth on Windows, not OS/2.
  Everyone I knew in my age group and lower at the time (mid 20s) was running some form of Windows (illegally) while I couldn't beg borrow or steal a copy of os2 despite wanting desperately to try it.

• I remember when I got OS/2 Warp one of the torture tests was formatting a floppy in a dos box, playing Wing Commander in another dos box, playing a MOD file on a tracker, and running Word in a window and typing normally.

  486DX/25 at the time. That was so cool, coming from Windows 3.1 - everything just worked without any glitches. That seemed like the future.

  Today on a 4GHz Ryzen (or current Intel) if I copy a file to a network drive or flash drive my keyboard and mouse in X11 or Wayland becomes unresponsive

  • Re:

    Bill,

    There is *something* really wrong with your setup. I am stilling running an AMD-FX 8-core; I can have BTRFS backups running with NAS storage as a target, a 6-core Windows 11 VM installing updates running on a separate display, multiple browsers open, one with youtube playing, and my XFCE desktop runs like nothing is even going on.

    This machine does have 32GB of memory and 3 SATA SSDs in raid-0; but it is a tree stump compared any Ryzen generation, with a single PCIE-m2 SSD.

    granted those windows updates

    • Re:

      I dual boot ArcaOS (OS/2 4.5+) and Linux Mint, OS/2 feels much more responsive. Mint, if I do too much at once, does seem to get really laggy.
      A lot of that is due to OS/2 being tuned for single user, foreground apps get a priority and IO boost whereas Linux is more tuned as a server and out performs OS/2 in things like running Apache instances.

• Workbench 2.04 was out by then, that was a pretty good OS

• I didn't get on board with OS/2 until 3.0 (and onwards to 4.0), but it has far far superior to Win95 at the time. Presentation Manager, Desktop Shell and virtual machines were *very* handy. Our main manufacturing software at the time absolutely would not run on anything other than DOS 6.22. So, I followed the directions to build a DOS 6.22 VM on my OS/2 workstation, and it ran great.

  It would actually use all of the 4GB of RAM (if you could afford it) addressable in a 32-bit system, and if a poorly behave