back to article Chromium-adjacent Otter browser targets OS/2

The free open source web browser Otter – which uses the Chromium browser engine at the heart of Google's Chrome and Microsoft's Edge – is being ported to OS/2. For the uninitiated, OS/2 was an operating system that was created by IBM and Microsoft in the mid to late 1980s. The OS was compatible with some Windows drivers, but …

  1. MyffyW Silver badge

    Ran a handful of Lotus Notes servers on OS/2. The only time they had to be rebooted was when we upgraded the hardware. Or installed a TCP/IP stack (yes, you licensed TCP/IP separately). For some reason I have Statuesque by Sleeper playing in my mind.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Windows

      Bulletproof

      I never ran it on a server but I did on many personal PCs. It ran until you told it to stop running. No random error messages, unexpected reboots, or BSODs. Ditto the 360/370 mainframes I was supporting.

      O/S2 lived on in banking well past its use by date because of its bulletproof nature.

  2. 45RPM Silver badge

    Hmm. Let’s face it Windows, also technology from the eighties, has more than a slight toehold in 2022 - and this despite better alternatives being available.

    Speaking of which, Unix (technology from the seventies) and its progeny (Linux, Android, iOS, MacOS) pretty much dominate.

    I still have my OS/2 2 install CD - I can’t imagine that I’ll ever use it again.

    1. Captain Scarlet

      Not even to display it?

  3. Trygve Henriksen

    Technology from the 1980s?

    I feel the urge... to hit someone...

    Also, since OS/2 is being maintained you're allowed to use present tense when mentioning it.

    I can never remember seeing an error screen on an OS/2-based ATM. But you can't walk through a large shopping mall or international airport without seeing at least a few winblows-based ATMs, ticketmachines or info-screens with either white text on blue or a dialog box that someone needs to click away...

    1. Dave 126 Silver badge

      Re: Technology from the 1980s?

      Seeing an OS/2 boot up splash-screen on the screen of an ATM which contained my only debit card when I was in a foreign city half a world away from home.

      The English-speaking tourist police were as nice as pie though. Cash card regained from a branch of the bank which operated the ATM at the bus station.

  4. demon driver

    I always feel a certain nostalgia...

    ... when anything OS/2 comes up; I used it as my primary OS from the early 90s on until well into the 2000s, and while I never was fond of its file systems' DOS and Windows kinship, there never was a desktop UI again that made me feel even remotely as empowered and at ease at the same time like the Workplace Shell used to, not on Windows and not on Linux, either.

    In addition to the article I'd like to mention that Microsoft had another, less innocuous part in OS/2's "gradually fading from use" than just Windows' rising popularity, which became public years later through a witness statement in one of the several antitrust lawsuits against Microsoft. It was around the time when Windows 95 was about to take on the world when Microsoft blackmailed IBM, whose PC division was still important at the time, threatening to stop giving Windows to the PC division unless IBM's software division stopped promoting OS/2 to the consumer market. And that was it.

    By the way, to the best of my knowledge the main reason why it never was open sourced was that it included quite a number of third-party components without which the OS wouldn't have been complete. All the creators of those components, some of which wouldn't even have been traceable anymore, would have had to be contacted and brought to also agree to the open-sourcing. IBM themselves, or so was my impression, would have been ready and willing to open-source OS/2.

    Whenever I read about OS/2 it makes me want to fire up the eComStation (ArcaOS predecessor) VM I still have... Although I confess that I never really considered buying a copy of that latest incarnation, or 'distro', as one might name it, ArcaOS. Even if it might still be usable in general as long as the few applications it has would suffice, in 2022 its most obvious limitation is its being a 32-bit OS.

    1. Trygve Henriksen

      Re: I always feel a certain nostalgia...

      One of those components was the HPFS file system. M$ owns that, and IBM paid royalties from it, so every time IBM sold a license, BillG got tingly...

      I believe at least some M$ marketing drones were told to FUD OS/2 as much as possible, too.

      I heard one once say that HPFS was critically flawed. (He was pushing NT server 3.51... talk about flaw... )

      I immediately stood up and asked when M$ was going to fix it, then since it was their product and all...

      1. mickaroo

        Re: I always feel a certain nostalgia...

        I, too, used OS/2 from the mid-nineties well into the 2000's. I LOVED the desktop GUI.

        At the time, I worked at a company that was all Windows 3.1 except for our group, which ran an OS/2 application. So we were all on OS/2 workstations with an OS/2 Warp Server back-end. I remember a young lady calling from IT to tell me they were coming to upgrade my workstation to Windows 95. I politely suggested that she go forth and multiply. Or words to that effect...

        Hmmm... OS/2 desktop theme for Linux Mint?

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Best headline

    Bravo

  6. Sabot
    Thumb Up

    The first OS I could say "Microphone off" to, and it would switch it off.

    With Windows you could set something up in no time, but it would also crash all the time. It took a little longer to set something up in OS/2, but after that it just kept on working forever.

    1. Gene Cash Silver badge

      Re: The first OS I could say "Microphone off" to, and it would switch it off.

      Yeah, this is why I use Linux... it takes a bit longer to figure out how to fix something, but then it's FIXED.

      Windows breaks. You fix it. Then it breaks the identical way next week.

      1. Anonymous South African Coward Silver badge

        Re: The first OS I could say "Microphone off" to, and it would switch it off.

        Windows breaks. You fix it. Then it breaks the identical way next week.

        Hah, WIn10 upped the game recently.

      2. Not Irrelevant

        Re: The first OS I could say "Microphone off" to, and it would switch it off.

        I disagree, my Linux notebook breaks on updates much more often than my Windows desktop. I've never had Windows update the kernel and then refuse to boot to desktop right afterwards as just one example.

        TLDR Linux breaks a lot, stuff doesn't stay fixed.

        1. captain veg Silver badge

          Re: Linux breaks a lot

          Er, no it doesn't. That's my experience. Yours might vary,

          -A.

      3. sreynolds

        Re: The first OS I could say "Microphone off" to, and it would switch it off.

        I use linux because I am a bit of sadist. Actually since systemds widespread acceptance I have now gone old school and run everything on a terminal. w3m etc.. Thanks for ruining everything systemd

        Mind you I did reject a job offer on the bases of the manager "coming on to me" saying that he wished that he stayed in development and that if he didn't have to use PowerPoint he would be using linux also

    2. Anonymous IV
      Megaphone

      Re: The first OS I could say "Microphone off" to, and it would switch it off.

      What happened then when you said "Microphone on"?

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: The first OS I could say "Microphone off" to, and it would switch it off.

        "Hello computer" is the magic phrase.

        1. Graham Dawson Silver badge
          Coat

          Re: The first OS I could say "Microphone off" to, and it would switch it off.

          Just use the keyboard...

          1. David 132 Silver badge

            Re: The first OS I could say "Microphone off" to, and it would switch it off.

            A keyboard. How quaint!

      2. anonymous boring coward Silver badge

        Re: The first OS I could say "Microphone off" to, and it would switch it off.

        “ What happened then when you said "Microphone on"?”

        Nothing, one would hope.

  7. cornetman Silver badge

    Saw OS/2 in the wild on professional photo-processing machinery as well, at Klick Photopoint in Birmingham IIRC.

  8. Charlie Clark Silver badge

    Get the facts straight

    The OS was compatible with some Windows drivers, but Windows 3.x did so well that the IBM/Microsoft partnership dissolved in unhappy circumstances in 1992.

    I'm not sure what the first phrase is supposed to mean because OS/2 required its own drivers for all hardware. One of the reasons Windows 3.x did so well was that large companies could run Windows 3.x applications in OS/2 with more memory and fewer crashes, because each application effectively got its own VM. OS/2 pioneered software virtualisation. But the reason why the partnership between IBM and Microsoft was dissolved was that Microsoft was working on a competing OS called Windows NT. Outsourcing the development of OS/2 to Microsoft was a terrible decision and indicative of IBM's management at the time.

    1. BinkyTheMagicPaperclip Silver badge

      Re: Get the facts straight

      I think to be perfectly fair, it's more complicated than that. Whilst Microsoft did not play fair in several instances, IBM didn't help itself. If IBM had moved to OS/2 as a 32 bit OS from the start the world might have been a very different place (although memory requirements would likely have caused problems for the late eighties).

      There's a number of poor design decisions in OS/2 and differences from other competing OS for no reason than politics, purity, or pique (such as the GPI origin being bottom left in OS/2 and top left in Windows..). Windows NT was slower and used a lot of memory, but they did get the architecture right.

      Much though I like OS/2, I think it would have failed or at least had to have a lot of money spent on it, had it managed to navigate the mid nineties successfully. IBM wasted a lot of time on OS/2 PPC, which never would have succeeded, when OS/2 x86 needed re-architecting.

      1. Charlie Clark Silver badge

        Re: Get the facts straight

        I think you're right about most of the decisions. Of course, it couldn't have been 32-bt from the start, and initially it was too tightly tied to the MCA of the PS/2, which while better than ISA, wasn't sufficiently better for anyone to want to license or copy it, if IBM refused to license it.

        By the mid-nineties the game was largely up. Those companies who'd invested in OS/2 knew their investment was safe and wouldn't have to replace it for > ten years and in the meantime they'd profit from "a better Windows than Windows", which it was. This is, at least, what Lou Gerstner later said when he pulled the plug on it. But it wasn't the development of the OS itself as much as spending money on marketing and getting application developers on board. At the time IBM was making more money than Microsoft by selling applications for Windows NT. IBM was later to drop the ball on Lotus Notes in much the same way, which let Microsoft sell the cancer that is Exchange to corporates.

        1. BinkyTheMagicPaperclip Silver badge

          Re: Get the facts straight

          Well, it could, it's just that a 386 with loads of memory was a hard sell for the time. However, was OS/2 1.x enough of a success to validate producing it?

          However, yes, the sweet spot of OS/2 2-4.x was really 93-95. Gerstner wasn't exactly wrong, professionally I was still using OS/2 until the early 00s for customers using it as an application server. Personally I stuck it out longer than most and moved off it as my primary platform to NT4 in 1999. At that stage OS/2 had lost critical mass so lacked popular products such as Python, and games had moved away from DOS so that had become a real issue.

          Agreed that applications were always the issue, and people were too eager to use 16 bit Windows apps, rather than shell out for native OS/2 apps.

          I'm not sure I get the Exchange hate - it has some interesting design decisions (you do wonder if the developers ever spoke to anyone that had written a serious mail server or database before starting the design). However, trying to find something third party that manages mail (that bit is quite easy), but also integrates calendaring, plus then workflow and other product integrations turns out not to be straightforward.

          I did use Notes for workflow, and it was great for that, but the client could be better, and it really sucked for e-mail.

        2. captain veg Silver badge

          Re: Get the facts straight

          OS/2 was clearly a better system than Windows 3.x, and Microsoft's '95 riposte required just as much RAM for an inferior experience. The problem was that IBM was less interested in OS market share than in selling PS/2 boxes.

          -A.

  9. TrevorH

    I was always told the reason why it could not be opensourced was that a lot of the source files are "Copyright IBM, Microsoft" and that getting the two teams of lawyers to agree to anything like that would be, shall we say tricky.

    1. A.P. Veening Silver badge

      getting the two teams of lawyers to agree to anything

      The only thing those two teams of lawyers ever agreed on was their disagreement.

  10. Anonymous South African Coward Silver badge
    Thumb Up

    Would love to have a WorkPlace Shell for Windows and Linux.

    That was the shiz!

  11. BinkyTheMagicPaperclip Silver badge

    Excellent!

    It'll be interesting to see how it copes with OS/2's 32 bit nature. The per process memory limit was already a huge issue building Firefox, but browsers are also very memory hungry, and other OS are dropping support quickly.

    1. VoiceOfTruth

      Re: Excellent!

      What has happened to browsers, eh? 20 years ago when 32MB for a decent amount of RAM for a home user, browsers ran OK. Now you apparently need 4GB to run a frickin' browser.

      It's all the client-side Javascript, of course. The next time somebody tells you that you shouldn't run programs you have downloaded from the internet, tell them not to browse anywhere.

      1. captain veg Silver badge

        Re: Excellent!

        Browsers could easily tokenise JavaScript in their caches. If they don't do that already, I would be surprised.

        Grossly inefficient JavaScript is, alas, predominant. What shocks me is the widespread belief that somehow minification will fix it.

        It won't.

        -A.

  12. jfollows

    OS/2 was interesting

    I worked for IBM ... back in the day ... and I installed OS/2 on my own 386SX bought in about 1990. It was better than running Windows at the time, but this was before Windows 3.x.

    I then got a company laptop which ran OS/2. It over-promised and under-delivered, perhaps a mantra for IBM in recent years? The idea was that it was a "proper" operating system, but rogue applications (Netscape was especially bad) could still take over control and require a power-on reset.

    Later on I ran Linux on my IBM laptop and that was all that OS/2 should have been.

    IBM sold products with "embedded" OS/2. I remember the 3172, which was a microchannel PS/2 which probably ran OS/2 and was a good product; it was a mainframe-LAN gateway which supported TCP/IP and was relatively cost-efficient for companies to connect their mainframes to the new TCP/IP. I remember going to a customer in Cardiff to set one up .... and discovering that the control workstation required OS/2, which of course the customer didn't have. I think I returned the next day with 30 diskettes and installed OS/2 on to the machine that the customer provided and all was good.

    Later I sold a different customer a 2216 solution, which ran OS/2, and which ran "AnyNet" software which allowed IP transport over SNA networks. It was perfect for the customer, but it was a dreadful product and just didn't work properly. I spent a lot of effort replacing the 2216s with 2210s which were re-badged IP routers which worked perfectly.

    Good experiences, but OS/2 never matched its hype.

    1. Proton_badger

      Re: OS/2 was interesting

      I still wake up in a cold sweat sometimes, hearing in my terrified mind the tell tale grinding sound of the disc drive encountering an unrecoverable CRC error on one of the last disks of an OS/2 install.

  13. frankvw
    Megaphone

    A few more pedantic details

    While most of what has been said about how MS never played fair against OS/2 is quite correct, as are the statement about IBMs fragmented management at the time, there's a little more to it than that.

    When Windows came into existence, Microsoft had been collaborating with IBM on OS/2 1.x for some time. This collaboration sprung from the insight that with the advent of the 80286 CPU and Intel's plans for the 80386, DOS had essentially become obsolete. IBM worked mainly on the OS/2 kernel, which in its first incarnation was basically a 16-bit successor to DOS with a command line interface. Microsoft concentrated on the Graphic User Interface (GUI).

    The idea for a Graphic User Interface was neither new nor original. Years before, Xerox had demonstrated a mouse-controlled GUI in their Palo Alto Research Center. This demonstration featured the Alto computer, which in 1973 sported a GUI, a mouse, graphic WYSIWYG technology and an Ethernet network interface. The demo was attended by Steve Jobs (Apple) and Bill Gates, among others. Jobs saw the possibilities of the GUI and went on to implement the idea into Apple's OS and application software, while Gates decided to stay with the text-based user interface. Later Gates was forced to revise his opinion about the GUI when it turned out to be successful on the Apple platform. Thus it was decided that OS/2 would have a GUI.

    Soon Microsoft's code began to diverge from IBM's (especially from Presentation Manager, then IBM's GUI component of OS/2) and became increasingly incompatible with it. Meanwhile Gary Kildall of Digital Research had already released the first version of GEM, a Graphic Environment Manager for DOS. In order to sabotage this, Microsoft announced that they were working on their own, much better, graphic environment. Eventually they took the GUI portion of what should have become OS/2 and sold it as a separate DOS application which they named MS-Windows. In its initial form it was mainly text based and hardly useful, but MS claimed to work on it in preparation for the upcoming OS/2. In the meantime, application developers (e.g. Word Perfect Corp., Ashton-Tate and Lotus) spent huge R&D budgets on rewriting their applications for OS/2, assuming that the IBM/Microsoft partnership would deliver as promised.

    MS-Windows could have been a new start, but (mainly for strategic and marketing reasons) it wasn't. It tightly clung to the mistakes of the past, being based upon the underlying MS-DOS architecture for basic OS functions such as file system access. It added a simple cooperative multitasker to MS-DOS, in a manner strangely like that of DesqView (a multitasker for DOS that had been available from Quarterdeck for years). It also sported a GUI that was so close to the one used by Apple that it kept lawyers occupied for over half a decade. But as far as innovation was concerned, that was it.

    Initial versions of Windows were very bad, but Microsoft kept promising that a better product would come out Real Soon Now, still as part of their joint OS/2 efforts with IBM. Until one day, that is, when suddenly they turned their backs on OS/2. They cried "innovation" and went back to DOS in spite of earlier having admitted it to be obsolete. Then they went and dropped out of the collaboration with IBM entirely, taking with them a lot of IBM technology that had ended up in Windows, which they now suddenly positioned as the operating system of the future. They never even mentioned their earlier promises about OS/2 again.

    Microsoft already sold applications for the Apple Macintosh. This gave them a good look under the hood of Apple's operating system software, and enabled them to muscle Apple into granting them a license for portions of the MacUI. (They threatened to withdraw all Mac applications, unless Apple would grant them a license to use MacUI code to port Macintosh apps to the PC.) They then raided MacUI for extra ideas. The remaining few bits (e.g. the font technology they later called TrueType) they bought, occasionally bartering vaporware that later failed to materialize. They also threw in a random collection of small applications, completely unrelated to an operating system (e.g. Paintbrush) which they had bought from various sources to flesh things out a bit. The resulting mixed bag of bits and pieces was massaged into an end product and released as Windows 3.0.

    It was not too difficult for Microsoft to adapt the Apple versions of Word and Excel to run on Windows 3. There is some indication that Windows was adapted to Word and Excel as much as Word and Excel were adapted to Windows. By the time Windows 3.0 hit the market, competing application developers had already put their R&D money into OS/2 versions of their products, on the assumption that OS/2 would be delivered as promised by the IBM/Microsoft partnership. And now OS/2 did not materialize. But a blown R&D budget was only half the problem. Even if most of the application manufacturers had been wealthy enough to fund two separate development efforts to upgrade their DOS products, there was not enough time to do the Windows version before Windows' projected release date. The fact that the Windows API had not been published in any permanent form yet didn't help either. Without a good API specification, an application developer is not able to interface with the operating system or with other software products. This essentially prevents application development. And Microsoft was the only application vendor at the time who knew enough about the Windows API to come up with market-ready Windows applications.

    So Microsoft shipped both an OS and an application suite for it, several months before anyone else in the applications market had a chance to catch up with Microsoft's last-moment switch to Windows - and that was that. All those who had expected to sail with the IBM/Microsoft alliance missed the boat, when Microsoft suddenly and deliberately decided to cast off earlier and in another direction than they had originally promised.

    Most of the independent application vendors who had committed themselves to OS/2 never recovered.

    IBM eventually went on to release their own version of OS/2, and botched its marketing completely with campaigns revolving around dancing elephants and nuns with pagers. This is partially due to the fact that by the time OS/2 hit the market, that market had already been taken away from them by Microsoft, and IBM never fully realized the extent of the changes that had been wrought upon the market while they weren't looking. Most application developers had irrevocably committed themselves to Windows at that point, and application developers now used Windows development tools which produced code that was extremely hard to port to another OS. Native OS/2 application software remained scarce, and hardware support was even a bigger problem. As a result, most OS/2 users first tried to run Windows applications on OS/2, which often came with quite a few hurdles and problems.

    Even so, IBM remains responsible for much of the demise of OS/2. Although it had an infinitely better architecture than Windows, OS/2 was killed off by some of the worst strategic and marketing decisions in the history of the industry. Its brief and unhappy existence was marked by a lack of drivers and hardware support, a lack of development tools, and a lack of native applications. In typical IBM fashion the end user was expected to manually edit a lengthy CONFIG.SYS file (four pages or more of text-based and cryptic configuration items) to configure the system. Partnerships with hardware vendors to ship OS/2 with systems that couldn't run it properly made the problem even worse, and disastrously bad marketing drove the final nail into OS/2's coffin.

    After this debacle IBM withdrew from the desktop software market which they had never really understood, in spite of having created the original IBM PC.

    1. Charlie Clark Silver badge
      Pint

      Re: A few more pedantic details

      Thanks for all the extra details OS/2 could have been great if neither IBM nor Microsoft had had anything more to do with it!

    2. TeeCee Gold badge

      Re: A few more pedantic details

      Actually, you missed the two "big ticket" items.

      1) When OS/2 came out, what you paid for was the CLI. If you wanted the GUI (Presentation Manager) that cost as much again. If you wanted it to talk to anything else you had to purchase Communications Manager on top of that. So, when OS/2 had the market to itself and could have owned it, nobody who gave a rat's arse about cost bought it. A prize cockup that doomed it from the word go.

      2) Until OS/2 and its successors came out, there'd been no such things as drivers for the various bits of hardware with associated APIs. Many, if not most, DOS applications had their greasy paws deep into the hardware to make things work. When Windows came out, it sat on DOS and a quick button press would provide a reboot into "real" DOS, should one of your applications not run in a DOS box under Windows. If your application wouldn't run under OS/2 (and most DOS applications of any complexity wouldn't), you were screwed.

      So, back when IBM and MS were best buddies and Windows wasn't even in the design phase, IBM shot its redheaded stepchild in the head due to sheer corporate greed. I always assumed that MS were so disgusted with IBM's pricing and marketing that they fucked off to do Windows. The alternative was a market where this new Apple stuff was the cheaper option...

      1. AlanC

        Re: A few more pedantic details

        As you say, initially OS/2 only had a command line interface, although you could have several of them and flip instantly between them - all full-screen and fully multi-tasked. I used to demo this by starting a trivial program beeping in one session and then flip to another to do something else - while the beeping continued in the background. It sounds ridiculous now, but to people mostly to DOS, it was impressive.

        That was in V1.0. The Presentation Manager was introduced as a standard feature in V1.1 at no extra cost. But to get networking, 3270 emulation or a relational database, you had to buy "OS/2 Extended Edition" at a higher price. This bundled the Communications Manager and Database Manager features with the base OS.

  14. Captain Scarlet
    Coffee/keyboard

    Some users preferred Opera before that change

    *Bursts our crying*

  15. iron

    So let me get this straight... in order to have a version of their beloved Opera browser like it was before it was corrupted with the Chromium engine these guys have created a copy of Opera using the Chromium engine?

    Does no one understand irony any more?

    1. Zippy´s Sausage Factory
      Pint

      It's almost as though they don't even know that Vivaldi exists.

      (That said, I now want to dig out my OS/2 install discs and build an OS/2 4 virtual machine to play with... I miss OS/2. A virtual pint to the Otter guys for aiming to support it!)

      1. VoiceOfTruth

        If you visit archive.org you can find a chunky load of OS/2 software. In no time you can have Lotus Smartsuite, DB2, etc, up and running.

        To get some more useful UNIX-type tools visit hobbes. They have all kinds of utilities. The really crazy thing about hobbes is that newer versions of OS/2 software is quite often uploaded. There are probably more people using OS/2 today than is apparent.

        1. Zippy´s Sausage Factory

          Well it looks like that's my weekend sorted then...

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      When Opera went Chromium it was just the stuff under the hood that changed - it was the thing, IIRC things like mouse gestures disappeared (think they are back again?). The forums were full of fanboys that claimed it was better this way.

      So Vivaldi, while still Chromium based is more Opera than Opera!

  16. Steve Graham
    FAIL

    When I moved house a few years ago, I found the 14 install floppies for OS/2 v3 in the attic, and the version with 2 install floppies and a CD. I spent more than a day trying to get either version to install in a Linux Qemu VM, but gave up in the end. I could get it to bring up the GUI once after installing, but then the next time I booted the supposedly installed image, it asked for the floppies again. I was probably pretty close but got bored.

  17. AndrueC Silver badge
    Happy

    I still rate the WPS as the best GUI shell I've ever used(*). Its object oriented nature and REXX support was awesome.

    OS/2 was a brilliant platform for DOS and Windows development due its crash protection.

    (*) But only after IBM implemented multiple message queues. It was a bit of a pain before that.

  18. billdehaan

    I was an OS/2 developer from 1990 to 1992, and I used it as my home OS from 1990 to some time in 1994, whenever NT 4 came out. I would dual boot between them and planned to alternate which was better as my home OS. I was using Solaris at work by then, so I didn't need to worry about compatibility between home and work environments.

    I expected it would take three or four months to compare the two. I ended up switching over almost completely within about three weeks.

    OS/2 had a lot of good things going for it, but the PM's SIQ (Presentation Manager's single input queue) was the Achilles' Heel. Yes, the OS was robust, but if the SIQ was blocked, as it did often, all mouse and keyboard input was ignored. It didn't crash as Windows 95 did so often, but in practical terms, the difference wasn't that significant.

    It was terrific as a server. If you wanted a home file server and didn't touch the GUI, the HPFS was much more robust than FAT or later FAT32 under Windows, but as a workstation, it was far too problematic. If you had native OS/2 software, it was very robust; the problem was that native OS/2 software was rare, and for the most part, if it did exist, it was immature and missing features compared to the competitive Windows offerings. The result was that people were always trying to run Windows applications under OS/2, which had all sorts of problems. And when things went sideways, the vendor wouldn't help, because they didn't support OS/2, IBM wouldn't help, because it was a Windows application, not their software, and Microsoft wouldn't help, because they weren't supporting OS/2. A lot of stuff worked fine, some worked partially, and some worked not at all. It really was a crapshoot.

    By the time OS/2 v4 (Merlin) finally officially addressed the SIQ issue that had been there for years, it was too little, too late. NT4 matched it for stability, and while the GUI was nowhere near as elegant or mature as the PM, it was functional, and there was no SIQ issue. There's a strong argument that SOM and DSOM were better than Windows' COM and DCOM, but so little OS/2 software actually took advantage of it that it really didn't matter.

    When my dual boot machine blew out a hard drive six months later and I had to regen the system from backups, I realized I hadn't booted OS/2 in months, so I only installed the NT4 partition. I left the space for OS/2 unused and figured I'd see if I had a need for it. A few months later, I just partitioned the unused space for NT, and never looked back.

    I enjoyed using OS/2, but there isn't really much in it that isn't in the Linux, MacOS, or Windows offerings today. The GUI shell is very innovative, but even there, there's not a lot that can't be done with the modern OSes.

    1. jfollows

      The Single Input Queue - thank you for giving it a name. Absolutely the worst thing about OS/2 as I alluded to earlier - yes, the operating system hadn't "crashed" but so what, I could no longer interact with my computer and had to power it off to get it working again. I don't think there was a way around it and I never found one if there was. Now I use Linux and MacOS and hardly ever have to reboot to circumvent any sort of problem.

      It was a shame because I'd had a few years experience of MVS, and hoped that the 386SX+OS/2 combination might be a "real" operating system for the first time on a machine I could afford to buy. Maybe it was a valiant effort, but it wasn't good enough.

      1. BinkyTheMagicPaperclip Silver badge

        There were two ways round it (now three)

        1) Warp 3 fixpack 17 (technically it was first included in a special developer only modified build of fp12) included a fix. Easier to quote the text

        'SET PM_ASYNC_FOCUS_CHANGE=ON

        When you request a focus change for example, by clicking on another

        application or pressing Ctl+Esc the application that has the focus

        should respond to the message in x milliseconds. If the application

        does not respond within that time, OS/2 determines that the

        application is not responding to messages and flags the application

        queue as bad. It then switches focus to the desired application'

        2) Stardock's Process Commander (worked up to Warp 4 FP12, then stopped working) had a hot key (CAD, I think) that switched to a full screen session, then enabled the offending application to be killed off, clearing the input queue.

        3) A similar system to 2) is built into ArcaOS - haven't checked if it's their own code or a third party one, but it permits the same thing if a process is misbehaving.

        Obviously the SIQ was really annoying, but in the early days of OS/2 you learned which applications misbehaved, and avoided them.

      2. AndrueC Silver badge
        Boffin

        I don't think there was a way around it and I never found one if there was.

        Oh there was. Get a colleague to connect into your computer with Telnet and kill off the main WPS thread. Its watchdog thread would then resurrect it and you could continue from there.

        But yeah, it was annoyance until it was fixed.

  19. AlanC

    One mistake was targeting the wrong hardware

    One view that I've frequently heard and find very believable, is that IBM's original intention was to develop an OS that would exploit the 16-bit 80286-based PC/AT. The trouble with the 286 is that it was intentionally designed so that it would start in an 8086 compatible mode ("real mode") but could then be switched under software control to its native mode (Protected Mode) - but not back. The latter allowed for larger address spaces, with memory-protection between processes etc. - all the stuff you want for a multi-tasking operating system.

    The problem was that of course IBM needed to provide compatibility with by now well-established DOS apps and so they wanted an OS that would be truly multitasking and able to exploit the PC/AT hardware, but still able to run those DOS apps, and that required switching the processor back to Real Mode whenever such an app was running. As the 80286 was specifically designed to prevent switching back to Real Mode, this required an ugly hardware and software fudge that made the whole thing pretty difficult to implement.

    If they'd looked a little further ahead, they could have targeted the 80386, which had a lovely virtual 8086 mode built-in and a full 32-bit architecture that would have made the whole OS easier to design from the start. If they'd done that, OS/2 could have been out around in time for the first 386-based machines and would had a much better chance against Windows 3.0, which also exploited those features - though not as well - but had the huge advantage of having got there first. The massive take-up of Windows apps really only occurred once Windows 3.0 was in the market, so I believe it really was at this point that the seeds of OS/2's eventual demise were sown.

  20. Edgar Scrutton

    For all those reminiscing OS/2 thanks for the experiences. However, I am still using OS/2,) 1990), WarpX, EcomStation, and AracNoae, to maintain the financial books for my company. Written using Mesa2 spreadsheet and scripted with Rexx the Salesbook.M2, and Cashbook.M2 run in memory yielding a functional speed that makes a database crawl. Kudos to the people at Arca Noae for their good works.

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