I got to work on a machine rocking a PC running this today
Posted by ohmslaw54321@reddit | vintagecomputing | View on Reddit | 109 comments
Posted by ohmslaw54321@reddit | vintagecomputing | View on Reddit | 109 comments
duckdodgers4@reddit
Still got the original package
uberRegenbogen@reddit
I've never used it; but i gather that it was a great OS. But it got edged out by Microsoft's aggressive (and occasionally predatory) marketing of Windows.
AppropriateCap8891@reddit
It was more the boneheaded decisions by IBM.
Microsoft did not make computers, they only sold software. So they wanted to sell it cheap and able to run on as many platforms as possible.
IBM on the other hand hoped that a large popularity for OS/2 would then cause demand for their own computers to return to dominance. If you talk to those of us in the industry at the time, most of us likely remember it well. Almost outright refusing to sell OS/2 to third party vendors, or offering them OEM deals where it cost significantly more than the equivalent Microsoft operating systems.
It was far less about predatory Microsoft than it was simply incompetence at the highest levels of IBM.
And here is a big freaking one. Microsoft had always pretty much away their software development kits (roughly the cost of the OS because it included a fully functional copy of the OS), because the more people who create software for their OS the more likely that OS will be successful. IBM on the other hand charged $3,000+ for the SDK for OS/2.
Needless to say, that put a serious damper on smaller software studios having any interest in creating programs to run on OS/2.
webdbbt@reddit
Are you sure about that SDK cost? Maybe it was priced that way initially but by the time I wrote my first OS/2 app, around 1996, I'm pretty certain I got the SDK for free.
Incidentally before writing that OS/2 app I was writing client side applications for Windows 3.1. OMG, the OS/2 API was SOOO much better.
I miss OS/2, it was way ahead of Windows at that time. If anyone wants to try it out now, it runs in virtual machines and there are VM images out there to download.
AppropriateCap8891@reddit
By 1996, OS/2 was playing catch-up and doing all it could to remain relevant. By that time Win95 was released, and it was crushing OS/2 in the marketplace. Especially as MS had been shipping $100 Win95 SDKs since late 1994, so when it released there was already a ton of Win95 compatible software available.
Meanwhile, there was damned little actual "native OS/2 software" around, most of it was Win 3.1 software that OS/2 was able to operate under their original agreement.
And I would say that the final blow was in 1996 when NT 4 shipped. Now NT 3.51 never got a lot of traction, many of the corporations I worked at in that time simply continued to use Win 3.11 (WFW). But NT 4 really changed everything. And because NT 4 could run 95 code, that was yet another reason to select it over OS/2.
One really does have to keep track of when the various operating systems released. OS/2 was doing decent numbers, until Win95 released. IBM did pretty good with their "Better windows than Windows" campaign. But Win95 pretty much made that obsolete overnight, as OS/2 could not run Win95 software, and had little native software available.
As an FYI, in that era I was a "Corporate Gunslinger", primarily called in to help train and run teams doing rollouts or upgrades. And some of the companies I worked for were Chevron, Raytheon, Hughes, Disney, Downey Savings, Honda, Toyota, and Nissan. And out of all of those between 1994 and 1998, I only saw OS/2 used in a single department at Raytheon. Everybody else generally used Win 3.11 or NT 3.51, or after 1997 they used NT 4.
cj_adams@reddit
Sadly IBM couldn’t market its way out of a paper bag.. we are all worse off for that… OS/2 was a far better built more robust OS built on a object model database… we wasted 30+ years on microCRAP and here we are.. its even worse now than ever..
AppropriateCap8891@reddit
Uh, I guess you are not aware that a significant amount of OS/2 was made by MicroSoft. It was a joint project between the two companies.
That is why when the partnership ended, IBM could use a lot of Windows code, and MS could use a lot of IBM code in creating NT.
I have no idea why people believe such nonsense, it is very false however.
Next time, I will discuss how for a decade MicroSoft had the most popular Unix variant on the planet. Literally the "Linux before Linux".
pbrunnen@reddit
... I don't know how you can compare Xenix/SCO with GNU/Linux. Yes, it was popular but nothing like Linux. SCO can remain in the hell that they dug themselves into.
AppropriateCap8891@reddit
I am not comparing, they are not even close to the same thing. But it is a fact that Xenix was the most popular version of Unix for well over a decade.
The GNU project with Linux took a decade to finally make an actual operating system. By the time Linux came out, XENIX was already done and being sold off to SCO.
pbrunnen@reddit
Misinterpretation then, as that is how it seemed to me. Appreciate the clarification post.
ZappaLlamaGamma@reddit
Yeah this mindset of IBM back then is how MCA happened (not the music label)
AppropriateCap8891@reddit
The issue was far less MCA itself, but that they wanted an insane amount of money to license it to other hardware makers.
I did work with a fair amount of MCA systems when I was at Hughes Aerospace. We were junking them in the mid-1990s, mostly the huge PS/2 Model 80 that worked as engineering workstations and local file servers because of the speed of the MCA SCSI controllers. Incredible in 1987, obsolete in 1995.
And at the same time we had EISA (which was an open standard), followed quickly by VESA Local Bus and then PCI. IBM might still be making PCs and dominating the top end market if they had also made MCA an open standard like EISA. Then you would have had the clones still using it, but for the ones that price did not matter, they would have kept buying IBM.
Because Hughes sure as hell did not care about cost. In 1995 we installed around 35,000 computers in a corporate wide upgrade and rollout program. And they did look at the IBM Aptiva, but realized their riser card BUS system would create bottlenecks so opted to instead get Dell and Apple's (the PowerPC 7200 was another disaster which lasted around 9 months).
ZappaLlamaGamma@reddit
I also worked with MCA at NCR. MCA wasn’t bad tech.
AppropriateCap8891@reddit
I never said it was bad, I worked with it also and it was quite good.
But the way they tried to hold it almost entirely in-house pretty much guaranteed it would never gain widespread traction in the industry. And when other competing standards that were available to anybody came out it lost what little traction it did gain.
In a world where MCA was not held so tightly by IBM, it might have remained the industry standard until the 2000s. And been replaced by "Micro Channel Express".
KingDaveRa@reddit
I think they relied a little too much on the "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" maxim.
AppropriateCap8891@reddit
It was more that they simply did not comprehend that hardware mattered much less than software did. And that is something that MicroSoft realized early on.
Most do not realize that MS dominated the operating systems of the 8 bit era also. Every Commodore from the PET to the C-128, Atari 400-800, TRS-80, Apple, even the original IBM with MS Basic in ROM.
MS always saw itself as a software company. When IBM decided to try selling their own OS (which they made with MS), they did not comprehend they were trying to enter the software market with the mindset of a hardware manufacturer.
And we saw that in the "Operating System Wars" of the late 1980s and early 1990s. We had a slew of competing operating systems for the PC, some from real heavy hitters like Digital Research and Novell. But none grasped what MS had learned early on. Make them affordable so there is more incentive to buy them.
In an era when CP/M was still selling for $250, a boxed retail version of MS-DOS was selling for around $80. And they still sell cheap, tell me anything that cost new $80 in 1990 that sells for only $140 today. Even factoring in nothing but inflation, that would be $198 today.
I have long called this the "Walmart Approach". Sell it cheap, and rely on volume to make the profit. I still remember one customer that needed GEM so she could run Venture Publisher. A GUI that really only ran a single program. And it shipped with the program for $900. That was a Digital Research GUI, that they charged over $500 for the SDK. Then wondered why no other software developers jumped on board.
uberRegenbogen@reddit
BASIC isn't quite an OS—though many of the early OSes revolved around it a bit.
In the MS-compatible (DR-DOS, etc) OS war of the mid '80s, MS were definitely predatory, with the whole undocumented API thing, and coercing devs to do things that would break in the competing OSes, which they got sued over.
Ambitious-Pie-845@reddit
Microshaft did that to loads of stuff in the day, like Netscape got pushed out along with loads of other stuff plus Linux got into trouble with Microshaft, Microshaft said Linux stole or was using some of its code so threaten them with legal action and as far as I can remember they never revealed what code but because they were so big and powerful other OS bowed to their will some went to the wall other changed the code the threat of legal action was enough. It happened a few times MS threatened and never disclosing what to was. These small start ups didn’t have a chance same with browsers once ms started packaging a browser in their windows etc it affected other smaller popular browsers. Also the same as the media player etc. it didn’t help with ms undercutting other companies to supply os to companies at discount. Of course once they had the os running along with all their own software they knew they were trapped as it would cost a fortune to replace the os for open source and retrain people.
Tartan-Pepper6093@reddit
It got edged out because it had a DOS and Windows compatibility layer, ran Windows apps better than Windows in some respects (whilst requiring beefier hardware), so hardly anyone wrote applications native for OS/2… cheaper to just compile for Windows and let the user sort it out. So, OS/2 didn’t really displace cheaper and more familiar Windows desktops, it remained a cool OS but with no compelling killer app to justify its cost and risk that it may not play nice in your environment. It only made sense for special-purpose embedded systems like ATM’s and automation control, where its reliability justified the cost.
ellicottvilleny@reddit
Also IBM is famous for mis-management and non-existant marketing.
rick420buzz@reddit
I remember the IBM OS/2 Warp Fiesta Bowl.
uberRegenbogen@reddit
They weren't great at designing micros, either. The IBM-PC likely would've sunk without the IBM name. It was a mess of brute-force horribleness.
lonelygayPhD@reddit
Doesn't sound like David Hill was too fond with how they managed the ThinkPad division, either, despite the amazing laptops they were turning out. Seems like he really enjoyed the shift to Lenovo.
ellicottvilleny@reddit
Didn't they just borrow the whole thing. They got MS-DOS from MS, who got it from Seattle Computer Products, and they basically farmed out the PC motherboard and bios.
_cjplusplus_@reddit
I’ve been watching the Computer Chronicles (It’s available on YouTube and the Internet Archive), and it is fascinating how IBM kept coming out with cool stuff and then completely botching its marketing/licensing
Albos_Mum@reddit
It makes sense today for retro hardware enthusiasts aiming to run MS-DOS and Win3.1 era stuff, especially in a dual-boot situation with Win9x for a machine typically capable of handling almost anything from the early 80s to the start of the WinXP era.
Cwc2413@reddit
This is very true. In the early days it was far superior. MS practices slowly chewed away at its base. The quality slowed considering where it has been around for a while.
Different_Bat8765@reddit
I still have a test machine at work running O/S2 and a CNC drill the runs in Win3.1
thx1969@reddit
Shadows is the OG of shortcuts
Low_Lie_6958@reddit
Does it run Doom?
thx1969@reddit
hell ya, in windowed mode
harexe@reddit
We still have 2 systems at our company that run on DOS ( Specifically DR DOS ). If they fail some of our production testing will grind to a halt immediately
IronMew@reddit
Ancient crusty legacy interface boards that can't be easily replaced or replicated?
harexe@reddit
Yep, in house developed ISA cards with unobtainium chips. Currently we're 4 men working on developing a new modular platform to replace that + the newer gen of PCI based cards (which at least run under Win10 32bit)
Ambitious-Pie-845@reddit
I still have a copy somewhere in box I thought is was far superior to windows at the time it came out
IronMew@reddit
It absolutely was.
lwbii00@reddit
There are boxes and boxes of this at my parents. Is it worth anything?
IronMew@reddit
It is for the floppies; if they're all unused there's a fair chance a lot of them are still usable.
Consistent_Cat7541@reddit
Is it an ATM machine or a gas pump?
ohmslaw54321@reddit (OP)
It's actually a machine to read the dot codes off of glass bottles to determine which mold they were cast from. I learned way more about class casting than I ever wanted to know. There are a row of dots around the bottom of the bottle that correspond to the mold used to cast that bottle. This machine reads the codes and kicks out bottles from specific molds that are known to cart defective bottles. Quite a little complicated process from a machine built in the 70's and upgraded to the PC shown in the early 90s.
otakunopodcast@reddit
Oh wow. I have always thought those glass dot things were a byproduct of manufacturing process, or a weird defect or something. TIL.
Just_to_rebut@reddit
>specific molds that are known to cart [cast?] defective bottles
Is this like if a big batch is already made and a few defective bottles are identified and traced to a specific mold, then all glasses from that mold are removed from the line?
ohmslaw54321@reddit (OP)
Yep. It was an company that inspects and repackaged glass bottles. I'm an electrical systems integrator who was called in for a down machine, so I don't know what all the business does. I do know that there are specific molds that produce defective parts, this machine read the codes and kicked those bottles into the reject container. It was doing over a bottle a second.
Emanuel2020b@reddit
I never knew that about glass bottles. Very cool!
RangerShaneGooseman@reddit
I remember ordering this for peanuts just for the masses of floppies it came on! Monkey Island 2 Warp Edition..
PaleDreamer_1969@reddit
Oooh!! I so miss Warp. It was a fantastic OS. The HPFS was amazing and it sounded so unique at boot up.
BigDaddyThunderpants@reddit
High pressure fuel system?
PaleDreamer_1969@reddit
lol High Performance File System. Great for HDDs as they put the Partition and sector map in the center of the drive which decreases search time and speeds up reads.
DominantDan24@reddit
It also auto-defragged. There were so many good innovations on OS/2 Warp, it's a shame it didn't catch on.
The_Jizzard_Of_Oz@reddit
Virtual machine images....
LuigiThirty-@reddit
I’m running OS/2 right now on a Pentium 90 server tower. It’s my Windows 3.1 development machine for that reason - you can crash 3.1 all you want since it’s virtualized in a DOS box.
spastical-mackerel@reddit
Just curious, are the big LLMs helpful with win3.1 stuff?
Splodge89@reddit
Probably not.
LuigiThirty-@reddit
I have never and will never use an LLM for coding.
Boring-War-1981@reddit
Pentium 90 server tower? Is it par chance a PS/2 model 95/ PC server 500?
LuigiThirty-@reddit
Uh-huh, I just got my hands on the P90 complex for it. Dual XGAs, a M-ACPA, and a transputer card. https://imgur.com/a/FUn5Voh
gnntech@reddit
I have a PS/2 9595 with the P90 complex card and XGA-2 card as well. Originally purchased it in 2001 and used it as a development machine running OS/2 Warp 4 until about 2010 when I moved and put it in my closet.
Recently pulled it out and powered it up only to realize the original IBM SCSI boot drive has failed. Replaced the drive with a BlueSCSI SD card adapter and it works perfectly.
Had to reinstall Warp 4 but no biggie.
Boring-War-1981@reddit
Last year I got a pc server 500, sadly the mca raid card is mostly dead, but got a sound card, a few scsi cards and XGa/2
lee4hmz@reddit
High Performance File System, OS/2 1.x's replacement for FAT.
NTFS is what you get when you mash up HPFS with FILES-11 from VMS.
mallardtheduck@reddit
Back in the OS/2 1.x days, there were two HPFS implementations; the "standard" one written to work on all systems that could run OS/2 1.x (i.e. compatible with an 80286) and "HPFS386" that required an 80386.
The story goes that during development, both MS and IBM each developed their own filesystems. When it came to make a decision about which to use, MS's HPFS outperformed whatever IBM had come up with. However, this was because MS's implementation was 386-specific (i.e. HPFS386 was the "original" implementation). Once HPFS was ported to the 286, it was no faster (some even claim it was slower) than IBM's filesystem.
BonezyNZ@reddit
HPFS was a Microsoft product!
teknosophy_com@reddit
Well I'll be dipped! All these years I assumed it was Hewlett-Packard File System.
2raysdiver@reddit
There are a lot of similarities between NTFS and HPFS.
lee4hmz@reddit
NT was going to be OS/2 3.0 before The Divorce pushed Warp into that role, so that makes sense.
G-I-T-M-E@reddit
My first job was developing a streaming media system for OS/2 based on some godawful early version of Real Player and Netscape held together by a ton of self developed tools trying failing miserably at their task.
To this day I hate all three with a passion. I‘ve never encountered a setup where the issues and bugs of multiple components added to each other in such a perfect way.
Ambitious-Pie-845@reddit
I miss Netscape, and the original real player
lonelygayPhD@reddit
An even worse version of Real Player???
teknosophy_com@reddit
Right? Come to think of it, RealPlayer might be the first example of crapification!
Albos_Mum@reddit
It's likely either RealPlayer or Nero Burning ROM.
lonelygayPhD@reddit
I still think of the era where I needed Quicktime for this website, Real Player for this one, and Windows Media Player for the other. This site requires Flash to display properly. Oh, what a mess.
teknosophy_com@reddit
True, at least they finally figured that one out. I wish they'd standardize a lot of other things now!
cj_adams@reddit
One of my favorite OS of all time… this was my daily driver during the 9x years.. i only swapped to windows during the 2000/NT era..skipped all of 9x .. ran am apple IIGS from 1987-1996 and that machine was on the internet in 1990 with a syQuest removable HD and a 12 inch graphics tablet then.. GOOD TIMES..
QuirkyImage@reddit
Used to be use a lot in ATMs
jetkins@reddit
NT was to OS/2, as VHS was to BetaMax — a triumph of marketing over engineering.
riotz1@reddit
Probably been running without a reboot since it went online in 1995.
Legal-Swordfish-1893@reddit
Last time I saw OS/2 out in the wild was an ATM in NYC
Liquid_Magic@reddit
I ran OS/2 Warp back before Windows 95 on my 486. It was tight! I liked how it ran Windows apps.
The cool thing was it asked for your boot media so it could copy some windows files to make that work. I kinda always wished that wine for Linux had a mode where you could feed it windows files and it would just work in the same os/2 warp did. But I get that’s obviously different.
sputwiler@reddit
It kinda does. WINE ships with it's own runtime environment made of re-implemented dlls that you can replace with your own legally obtained* windows ones if you want. That can sometimes improve compatibility. Of course, any program that delves too deep into the system will still find that there's no windows kernel down there running the show, but wineserver(?) on top of linux.
*I don't think I've ever "bought" windows so like, lifted from the pre-installed windows on your PC or something.
Wbcn_1@reddit
You must’ve had a 66Mhz machine. On 25Mhz it was awful
Liquid_Magic@reddit
Actually I think I had a 40 MHz 486. It was good.
Cryptic1911@reddit
I ran os/2 warp as my daily driver back then
kd8qdz@reddit
there are still PDP/11's out there in the wild, im pretty sure.
KE3JU@reddit
I'm sorry. I worked with Warp 3 for 3 years. Warp 3 with Novell Netware backend. Never mind, you should feel sorry for me.
IPX/SPX FOREVER!!!
Oh yeah, and it was a Token Ring (Broken Ring) network.
MelGinsonDied4U@reddit
I worked with contractors from perot systems that worked on os2 warp. Don, wayne, suhas - wherever you are ❤️ yall were great dudes
eleete@reddit
Was it for metal cutting?
ohmslaw54321@reddit (OP)
It was a machine that scans glass bottles for their dot codes that designate which mold they were cast in.
eleete@reddit
Last time I worked on it a company used it on a plasma cutter for sheet metal. It used the serial port to communicate with fiber optics to the cutter. Pretty neat, but serial to fiber was crazy to me.
FlyByPC@reddit
Wow. And I thought our lathe running embedded XP was old.
Distinct_Definition8@reddit
I think I still have the install disks stashed away...
invokes@reddit
Epic!
kkaos84@reddit
I worked in an office 20 years ago that had an OS/2 Warp machine. It hosted a program that generated Cobol. Knowledgeware, I think? We were switching to Lansa, a "5GL" tool that generated...wait for it...RPG code instead. By the time I was leaving, they were talking about going back to Cobol.
Ok_Astronaut9243@reddit
I did my first multithreaded program to run a ray tracing calculation for my cgi course
mehkanizm@reddit
I liked it could run win3.11 apps
2raysdiver@reddit
OS/2 was actually one of the most often used OS's for kiosks and ATMs in the late 1980s through 1990s.
RealityOk9823@reddit
From what I've read, Windows worked better on Warp than it did on DOS, which is crazy.
Silly_Lengthiness781@reddit
It did work better. Not a lie.
TerrificVixen5693@reddit
Hell yeah.
desmond_koh@reddit
I always wanted an OS/2 machine. I read everything I could on OS/2 2.1. Then, I finally got my hands on Warp 3.0 and I was so exciting. It was short-lived though because then Windows 95 came out.
cchaven1965@reddit
I really enjoyed OS/2 in the 90s. Triple-booting DOS,windows 3.1 and OS/2 for Windows on a homebuilt PC. I also had OS/2 installed on an IBM PS/2 P70 but don't recall the version.
Steelejoe@reddit
I also loved OS/2 back in the day. Started on 1.3, went to 2.0 beta and then 2.0 and 2.1. We switched to Windose 95 around then time Warp came out and I was bummed. Not nearly as stable.
glhaynes@reddit
I bet the 2.0 beta blew your mind
Steelejoe@reddit
Yes. Although I kinda learned to hate it, since I was the guy porting our 16bit OS/2 1.3 code to 2.0. It was — painful
Own_Measurement4378@reddit
Está disponible el código?
Cwc2413@reddit
Let me guess. ATM?
wbr1958@reddit
I still have my OS2 tower, with 5.25 and 3 inch diskettes drives, saved mostly to read old disks if necessary. But I seldom have a reason to power it up.
54965@reddit
Back in the day I bought OS/2 to try out. Gave up when I discovered there wad no way to exceed 9600 baud modem rate when I already had a 14.4 baud modem running full speed on my PC clone. End of tryout.
caller-number-four@reddit
Loved OS/2.
Thought I was utter hot shit when I had OS/2 scripted to dial into the terminal bank of the college, telnet to an HPUX box, launch SLuRP (a PPP faker, we had terminal access only) and stuff that IP address into Windows 3.1 so I could use RealAudio and stream music from across the planet in, like, late 1994 / early 1995.
Still have the OS/2 Warp 4 box with media inside!
derpjutsu@reddit
Wait, you saw that TODAY! Wow. I saw an OS/2 server in a datacenter once back in 2010 and I thought that was old. Wasn't even Warp edition. Think it was healthcare related.
CoolBlackSmith75@reddit
Used that waaaaaay back in 2000 at a bank. It was the main post office system for the big customer