News Preview version of Microsoft OS/2 was sold for $650 on eBay

[Admin]

eBay user finds and sells a "holy grail" for OS/2 collectors: a real prerelease Software Development Kit for OS/2, which Microsoft and IBM developed.

Preview version of Microsoft OS/2 was sold for $650 on eBay : Read more

 

[OneMoreUser]

Funny how the article in a way illustrates why OS/2 didn't get a foothold and Windows did. People saw the two as competitors, but only OS/2 was an operating system and only on the surface was there a similarity.

OS/2 was great, ahead of its time in a way and a proper multitasking operating system. In contrast Windows back then was essentially a graphics interface running on top of DOS, it allowed for task switching (and it stayed like that for some years).

With Windows if a program crashed your computer froze and you had to reboot, in OS/2 you just closed the program that crashed and anything else you had running was unaffected. It is something we taken for granted for a while, but back then it was a miracle. And there was lots of other advantages to OS/2, you could even run a Windows sessions on it, allowing you to kill a crashed Windows without having to reboot the whole system.

My take on why OS/2 didn't become the standard is that most peoples computers back then wasn't big enough to take advantage of OS/2, unless you were a high end user of sorts putting OS/2 on your machine would essentially drag it down as you did not have the RAM and the CPU power it needed. Some tried regardless, found OS/2 to be slow not realizing the reason and then tried Windows 3.1 which ran better on smaller machines so OS/2 got a bad rep. because people was ignorant.

 

[bit_user]

Windows back then was essentially a graphics interface running on top of DOS

This point gets overstated. Yes, Windows did run atop of DOS, rather than instead of it. However, that doesn't mean Windows programs were limited to doing only what you could do in DOS. For instance, with Windows 3.x running on a 386, programs could easily use megabytes of memory without having to jump through the same hoops as in DOS.

What it actually means to "run on top of DOS" is basically that:

1. You had to start DOS first, then launch Windows from DOS.
2. DOS runtime services remained resident. I think Windows could use these, to some extent, rather than going directly to the hardware. I'm not sure it did, especially if you look at how basic DOS services really were. Likewise, I think Windows programs could theoretically use DOS interrupts to go beneath the OS, but unless you were running a program in a DOS box, that usually wasn't done.

With Windows if a program crashed your computer froze and you had to reboot,

This isn't true of Windows 3.x, at least. My knowledge of earlier Windows versions is much more limited.

Windows 3.x indeed had memory protection! The 286 introduced "Protected Mode", which the OS could use to prevent different programs from stepping on each other. If you had actually used Windows 3.x for any amount of time, you probably remember getting "General Protection Fault" error messages, when a program would crash. All you needed to do was restart the program, not restart Windows or reboot the machine!

My take on why OS/2 didn't become the standard is that most peoples computers back then wasn't big enough to take advantage of OS/2,

Windows became more popular than OS/2 probably because of Microsoft's aggressive marketing and ruthless business practices.

OS/2 actually died when IBM lost a court case vs. Microsoft about running Windows programs inside OS/2. After that, IBM quickly broke off OS/2 development and discontinued the OS. What's so galling about that is I think it involved people actually having Windows installed on a separate partition and IBM not even being allowed to run Windows programs by loading some Windows system DLLs from that other partition!

 

[derekullo]

Funny how the article in a way illustrates why OS/2 didn't get a foothold and Windows did. People saw the two as competitors, but only OS/2 was an operating system and only on the surface was there a similarity.

OS/2 was great, ahead of its time in a way and a proper multitasking operating system. In contrast Windows back then was essentially a graphics interface running on top of DOS, it allowed for task switching (and it stayed like that for some years).

With Windows if a program crashed your computer froze and you had to reboot, in OS/2 you just closed the program that crashed and anything else you had running was unaffected. It is something we taken for granted for a while, but back then it was a miracle. And there was lots of other advantages to OS/2, you could even run a Windows sessions on it, allowing you to kill a crashed Windows without having to reboot the whole system.

My take on why OS/2 didn't become the standard is that most peoples computers back then wasn't big enough to take advantage of OS/2, unless you were a high end user of sorts putting OS/2 on your machine would essentially drag it down as you did not have the RAM and the CPU power it needed. Some tried regardless, found OS/2 to be slow not realizing the reason and then tried Windows 3.1 which ran better on smaller machines so OS/2 got a bad rep. because people was ignorant.

Never used OS/2 but if it required a high powered PC to run it at that time and those computers costed an exorbitant amount of money,$4000+, then I wouldn't say people giving OS/2 a bad rap were ignorant, just price conscious.

 

[bit_user]

Never used OS/2 but if it required a high powered PC to run it at that time and those computers costed an exorbitant amount of money,$4000+, then I wouldn't say people giving OS/2 a bad rap were ignorant, just price conscious.

I don't really know too much about the hardware requirements, TBH. As far as I knew, it would run on a similar machine that Windows supported. Probably a 386 was the baseline. Maybe it wanted more RAM... I think hardware requirements weren't onerous for the early-to-mid 90's, though.

I knew a guy who switched from Linux to OS/2, actually. He was much more fanatical about OS/2 than he ever was about Linux. I don't recall him having a particularly high-end PC, but it was a long time ago.

At my first job, I joined shortly after they switched from OS/2 Warp to Windows NT. I forget exactly why they switched, but it might've had something to do with better aligning ourselves with what customers used. At the time, I recall some of the developers being sad about the switch, saying they preferred to develop under OS/2. A lot of them would've been coming from a background of developing under various UNIX flavors, FWIW.

 

[COLGeek]

I ran OS/2 for a couple years, back in the day. Application support was bad and expensive. Super solid OS.

 

[NedSmelly]

I ran OS/2 Warp for a year or two. Driver support was an issue for the Trident video card and my printer. Took some searching on a BBS for something that worked - so it wasn’t a straightforward out-of-box experience. Also prevented lots of Real Mode DOS games from working. So whilst it was very stable, it had to be used within fairly strict boundaries. IMO it wasn’t ready for mainstream consumer sales.

Edit: I actually think IBM incorporating Windows compatibility was a strategic error. MS Word and Excel still hadn’t gained market dominance, and they could have pushed Lotus much harder in the SMB space through bundling discounts etc. It was pre-Win95 and had so much going for it - long fie names, memory stability, and Big Blue corporate support.

 

[OneMoreUser]

<SNIP>

Windows 3.x indeed had memory protection! The 286 introduced "Protected Mode", which the OS could use to prevent different programs from stepping on each other. If you had actually used Windows 3.x for any amount of time, you probably remember getting "General Protection Fault" error messages, when a program would crash. All you needed to do was restart the program, not restart Windows or reboot the machine!

<SNIP>

Clearly we remember differently, but it is a long time ago so there is that.

As for the protected mode and all that it did not change the multitasking problem, the thing is that with Windows back then a program had to essentially pass the torch voluntarily and if a program crashed it could freeze the whole system. With OS/2 the OS was in control of the torch.
Look up up cooperative and preemptive multitasking to learn more, the later came with Windows 95 while OS/2 was preemptive from 2.0 (or maybe earlier).

 

[Darkoverlordofdata]

We used to use os/2 in IT because it ran Xwindows, so you could connect to unix systems easier than using citrix on windows. That is actually a picture of the SDK not the OS. It was used to create programs on windows that would then run on os/2, Never went anyware after MS and IBM had a fallout over licensing. Same old story,

 

[bit_user]

As for the protected mode and all that it did not change the multitasking problem, the thing is that with Windows back then a program had to essentially pass the torch voluntarily and if a program crashed it could freeze the whole system. With OS/2 the OS was in control of the torch.
Look up up cooperative and preemptive multitasking to learn more, the later came with Windows 95 while OS/2 was preemptive from 2.0 (or maybe earlier).

I know the legacy Windows products didn't have preemptive multitasking. They used an event loop model. I've written enough legacy Windows programs to know that much.

One of the main selling points of Windows NT was that it had preemptive multitasking. In fact, this was so heavily emphasized that I had initially wondered if "NT" was a misprint and perhaps the actual name was Windows MT.

 

[Dr3ams]

From 1999 to 2001 I worked as a network administrator in the Lufthansa Campus Project. In that project we staged and installed 6,000 workstations and 800 servers in 400 cities in 100 countries. The three operating systems installed on the workstations were OS/2, Windows NT and later Windows 2000. The servers were staged and delivered with Novell Netware. The choice of operating systems was made locally by Lufthansa admins. Along with some workstations with Windows, all of the OS/2 installs were in the United States and Britain. No other Lufthansa locations in other countries requested OS/2.

 

[SunMaster]

This isn't true of Windows 3.x, at least. My knowledge of earlier Windows versions is much more limited.

Windows 3.x indeed had memory protection! The 286 introduced "Protected Mode", which the OS could use to prevent different programs from stepping on each other. If you had actually used Windows 3.x for any amount of time, you probably remember getting "General Protection Fault" error messages, when a program would crash. All you needed to do was restart the program, not restart Windows or reboot the machine!

Prior to wimdows 3, there was (surprise) windows 2. You had Windows 2 286 and Windows 2 386. Only Windows 2 386 had the ability to multitask. The main. advantage of the 286 version, if I remember corrextly, was the ability to use linearly addressed memory beyond 1MB called xms.

The protected mode of the 286 was not particularly useful as you needed to reset the cpu via a triple fault to get back to real mode. Windows 3 did not offer multitasking on a 286 but allowed the use of xms.

 

[kiniku]

Never used OS/2 but if it required a high powered PC to run it at that time and those computers costed an exorbitant amount of money,$4000+, then I wouldn't say people giving OS/2 a bad rap were ignorant, just price conscious.

Not true. It had similar hardware requirements as competing Windows versions.

 

[35below0]

My take on why OS/2 didn't become the standard is that most peoples computers back then wasn't big enough to take advantage of OS/2, unless you were a high end user of sorts putting OS/2 on your machine would essentially drag it down as you did not have the RAM and the CPU power it needed.

The reason as i recall is much more simple. Consumers followed the herd instincts. Computer magazines had some nice things to say about OS/2, but critically they never called for the masses to adopt it.
Before Windows 95, there wasn't so much of a personal computer demand for Windows OS or any other OS. Most machines people had in their homes ran DOS and kids played games on it while grown ups maybe used WordPerfect or something like that. Plus those machines were quite expensive. Same is true for laptops of the day.

I think it was far more likely that a personal computer was an Apple. Or a "cheap" XT or 286.

OS/2 competed with Windows 3.11 for office computers. It wasn't an economical solution so it died off or was killed off.

For gaming, it was a toss up between Nintendo/Sega, and DOS, with an occassional Amiga 500 or ageing Atari ST in the mix.

Once Win 95 launched, Microsoft marketed not so much the OS for OS sake, but instead pointed out how the information superhighway is here and it was time to get on board. Also, plug & play debuted around that time.
This was the serious beginning of PC mass appeal (and PC annoyances and troubles for the masses). There was so little point in even trying anything other than Windows, unless it was curiosity.
If you were going to have a PC, you were going to run Windows on it.

As for the advantages of OS/2, it reminds me a little of how the Amiga Workbench 3.x had many advantages over Win 3.11 and Win 95. Things like custom size icons, separate selected and unselected icons for the same file, window backgrounds (Microsoft later adopted and abandoned this idea around Win 98), hiding unneccessary files by default, and other features i can't really remember anymore.
Of course the Amiga hardware was at a huge disadvantage compared to modular PCs, and the company was mismanaged into oblivion, but you may still find old fans reminiscing over that OS.
Point here being that even if an OS is good and better than a rival, it has to be a killer otherwise the masses just will not take it up. And without that it becomes a niche OS that doesn't run on a huge number of machines.
Also, it should definetly not crash as much as Amiga Workbench did.

Whatever you may think of Apple's modern OS, there are enough people who will swear by it (plus Microsoft never stops dropping the ball so there's that too), and this never happened with OS/2.
That OS had also ran written all over it in every article i've ever read about it.

So i disagree because i think back then there just wasn't such a thing as a high end user. Not in the sense there is today. High end users or power users kinda begin with Win 98 second edition or even XP.
The business professional crowd couldn't be lured on board in time so that was that for OS/2.

 

[bit_user]

So i disagree because i think back then there just wasn't such a thing as a high end user. Not in the sense there is today. High end users or power users kinda begin with Win 98 second edition or even XP.

I don't know what you consider a "high end user" or "power user", but I disagree. I knew people who had a LAN at home, people who had a SCSI controller and RAID setup, people who had full tower PCs... heck, Pentium even supported multi-CPU motherboards and I think a friend of mine had a dual-socket one, with only one socket populated. Not to mention other sorts of peripherals, like video capture cards and CD-ROM drives (which, when they first launched, cost like $800 - and we're only talking readers, not burners!). Then, you had BBS-heads with fast modems or even multiple and ran boards of their own!

 

[Pierce2623]

I know the legacy Windows products didn't have preemptive multitasking. They used an event loop model. I've written enough legacy Windows programs to know that much.

One of the main selling points of Windows NT was that it had preemptive multitasking. In fact, this was so heavily emphasized that I had initially wondered if "NT" was a misprint and perhaps the actual name was Windows MT.

There are still companies running those versions of NT

 

[SunMaster]

So i disagree because i think back then there just wasn't such a thing as a high end user. Not in the sense there is today. High end users or power users kinda begin with Win 98 second edition or even XP.
The business professional crowd couldn't be lured on board in time so that was that for OS/2.

I think you've misunderstood something. I had A2000 with a PC on a bridgeboard back in the 80s. I ran a BBS using ESDI drives around 1990. I ran OS/2 with SCSI drives and SCSI tape backup. After OS/2 there was Linux, Freebsd and NT4. Users like me (I think) never touched Win 98 because of it's instability (and ridiculously poor networking) compared to OS/2 and NT4. Linux and Freebsd was fun with dual Slot 1.
As long as computer hardware has been modular there have been power users I think.

 

[35below0]

I don't know what you consider a "high end user" or "power user", but I disagree. I knew people who had a LAN at home, people who had a SCSI controller and RAID setup, people who had full tower PCs... heck, Pentium even supported multi-CPU motherboards and I think a friend of mine had a dual-socket one, with only one socket populated. Not to mention other sorts of peripherals, like video capture cards and CD-ROM drives (which, when they first launched, cost like $800 - and we're only talking readers, not burners!). Then, you had BBS-heads with fast modems or even multiple and ran boards of their own!

That would be years later and around the time i wrote in my post. Before pentiums, i would say there were certainly people who were precursors to enthusiasts and high end users but not in the sort of numbers we have today.

In the days of XT,286 and 386s, there weren't that many. By the time of Pentiums and CD-Roms, it was changing fast. What just a few years earlier would be rare peripherals, were quickly becoming mainstream. With the possible exception of video capture cards as those were still very rare and expensive.

All that stuff was covered by magazines, OS/2 included. But there was a definite sense that some were very niche and some were going to be or already were mainstream.

I think you've misunderstood something. I had A2000 with a PC on a bridgeboard back in the 80s. I ran a BBS using ESDI drives around 1990. I ran OS/2 with SCSI drives and SCSI tape backup. After OS/2 there was Linux, Freebsd and NT4. Users like me (I think) never touched Win 98 because of it's instability (and ridiculously poor networking) compared to OS/2 and NT4. Linux and Freebsd was fun with dual Slot 1.
As long as computer hardware has been modular there have been power users I think.

No disrespect intended but how many people had something similar? You were in the minority.
Yes, i conceed that as long as there has been hardware there have been power users, but there was a point in the 90s where that sort of thing became accessible and popular with a huge number of people. This has continued to today.

I disagreed because i don't think there was enough of a userbase, or high end users or power users. And business users could not be lured on board OS/2 so it was kileld off.
As a niche OS it may have been very good, but it wasn't adopted. Partly because the mainstream (such as it was at the time) couldn't be convinced to adopt it.

 

[ex_bubblehead]

The single biggest problem with OS/2 was IBM themselves. They were (and still are to a great extent) so fully entrenched in the corporate world that they didn't know how to market (anything) to the general masses. Other than the few OS/2 oriented publications of the time there was little advertising done, and what advertising there was never really showed off what it was capable of and how it was better than the alternatives. That and the fact that it could run Windows 3.1 programs natively led to developers simply not bothering to port their titles to native OS/2.

 

[bit_user]

That would be years later and around the time i wrote in my post. Before pentiums, i would say there were certainly people who were precursors to enthusiasts and high end users but not in the sort of numbers we have today.

First, your timeline is completely off. Pentium launched in 1993. You said:

"High end users or power users kinda begin with Win 98 second edition or even XP."
​

So, Win 98 would be 5 years later. WinXP would be 8 years after the Pentium launched.

Furthermore, while I mentioned Pentiums, I didn't mean to restrict all my statements to the Pentium era. The guy I knew who had his own LAN was still using 386's and I think one 486. Probably around 1992 or 1993. I think he was using one of those machines as a fileserver, because I know one of them had a RAID.

I'm not going to debate this further, because it's too arbitrary and loosely-defined what constitutes a power-user and when they became a "thing". I just really don't appreciate when someone tries to put words in my mouth and tell me I'm referring to a different era than I was. I was specifically referring to the early 1990's - up to & including Win95. All before Win98, which is my point.

 

[NedSmelly]

In terms of consumer OS/2 as Warp 3.0, it was most definitely 486/Pentium v1 (1994) and pre-Win95. I was using it on a 486DX2-66.

It was also when Linux was beginning to make waves and I was swapping Slackware CDs with friends.

 

[35below0]

First, your timeline is completely off. Pentium launched in 1993.
...
I'm not going to debate this further, because it's too arbitrary and loosely-defined what constitutes a power-user and when they became a "thing". I just really don't appreciate when someone tries to put words in my mouth and tell me I'm referring to a different era than I was. I was specifically referring to the early 1990's - up to & including Win95. All before Win98, which is my point.

Apologies for putting words into your mouth. It was unintentional.
And yes, the definition is very loose. Also no need to debate further. It's veering off topic of OS/2 uptake which was the main topic.
I would place that "era", loosely defined as it is, into the latter half of the 90s. You think it started earlier, early 90s or so. This is fine with me. Your experience is different from mine.