The Rise and Fall of the IBM PC Part 3: The Cloners Strike Back

[@stephenjohnson3591]

Thank you so much for finishing the series. As a software engineer who has watched the industry for almost 40 years, this is one of the best I've seen. Stunned that the series doesnt have more views.

[@AnotherBoringTopic]

Coming from an industry professional, that is very high praise indeed! Thank you for taking the time to watch and comment :) Well, the channel does keep steadily growing, as more people find their way here. Probably would help if we managed to upload videos more often, but researching and writing the scripts takes an enormous amount of time.

[@ronjon7942]

Around 16:00 you discussed IBM's method of 'detuning' hardware at launch to make upgrades easier, and it made me think of when I worked for Unisys and was sent to 'upgrade' a check sorter for a small bank. A check sorter is a mechanical monstrosity that can be around 50 feet long, with heavy duty electric motors spinning large belt driven pulleys that separate and launch paper checks down a 50- foot rail, separating them into separate pockets, a feat accomplished by beam-of-light and MICR sensors, sensors which detect the magnetic ink on the checks that identifies the bank and checking acct number. Anyway, this bank had a smaller version, the DP600, which runs at 600 checks per minute, and I was to upgrade it to a DP1200, doubling it's pace of check processing, for the cool fee of $80,000. I loosened one bolt to relieve tension on a belt, and moved it to a lower groove which had twice the circumference of the upper groove...then tightened the belt tensioner. Laf, it took about 20 seconds. Note, no new parts installed - the original machine was just sent out 'detuned' at the outset. There weren't any firmware or software changes required either! In fact, I didn't even bother turning it off, although obviously it was out of operation for a couple minutes.

[@AnotherBoringTopic]

I am simultaneously amazed and aghast….but definitely not surprised 😂 What a great story, thanks so much for sharing it!

[@darylcheshire1618]

I recall rumours where mainframes came with maximum RAM and you paid a lot of money to upgrade it where a tech would insert a jumper to enable the extra RAM. The other rumour that Pr1me was doing was supplying microcode with NOPs and you paid to upgrade to faster microcode which had less NOPs.

[@taipo101]

Tektronix did that with their microprocessor dev kits

[@BokBarber]

Great video. IBM is a company that seems to do everything in its power to evade success. From my experience developing for their midrange mainframes, this seems to continue to the present day. They have an extremely competent platform with a decent market share (largely legacy customers), and which they actively develop new standards for... but which they don't seem to be interested in marketing or selling to any new customers, and which their pricing structures on development platforms seem to actually encourage customers into not taking advantage of what the servers can actually do. I can only imagine the internal divisional struggles that are hobbling their individual lines of mainframes even into the present day.

[@shmookins]

OMG, thank you for removing the background music. My ears are still ringing from listening to the previous part. This is such a better listen to with only your clear voice. Cheers. P.S. I just found your channel and I am on a binge. Good stuff.

[@kenmohler4081]

What a great series. Having lived through all this made it even better. I little story about IBM’s early marketing. Here in Kansas City, there were only two possible places to buy the original PC. Sears Business Systems, who had none to sell, or an independently company whose name I wish I could remember. I went to them with checkbook in hand. But they wanted $1,000 over IBM’s list price. Figuring that IBM had given them ample margin in the list price, that seemed unreasonable. To rub some salt into the wound, the owners parked two expensive cars directly in front of the store, with personalized license tags that were variations of the store name. Although I wanted an IBM, I was pleased to go buy an Apple at only the “list” price. It served me well until Gateway came along. Later, in my professional life, I purchased hundreds Dell clones. What Dell could provide that most of the other producers could not, were computers that were identical. Most others made many changes during production to upgrade or use alternative parts as they went along. If you are using computers in classrooms to train support personnel, you want them all to be the same.

[@darthwalker007]

Wow, this brings back memories. Yes was an OS/2 user. In fact I was working at IBM in building 21 at Boca as one of the many on OS/2 at the time. I keenly remember after awhile and all of a sudden for some reason, we weren't able to contact our Microsoft partners we were working with the whole time over the shared link between us we called Oasis. Thinks were never the same after that, and your report does a good job of capturing that. Top marks.

[@Hal_T]

I lived through all of this. This series is an excellent recollection of those early years of personal computers. Take a bow.

[@AnotherBoringTopic]

I’m very glad you enjoyed it! Hearing that from someone who lived through this fascinating era means a lot to me

[@GenophefeElisabeth]

No waaaaaay, I just watched the first two episodes two days ago, but it already feels like I've waited an eternity for this. I was afraid there would be no part 3. This is a treat. Thank you!

[@AnotherBoringTopic]

Great to hear! Hope you enjoy part 3 just as much :)

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

17:18 TopView was soon completely forgotten (except perhaps in IBM-centric mainframe shops), but one aspect of it persisted a few years longer: Microsoft adopted its concept of “.PIF” files, to describe how to run non-GUI apps within the GUI, and retained that possibly until the end of Windows 3.x.

[@medes5597]

I think 95 still makes a really specific use of them, I'll have to check but I'm pretty sure PIF survived into 95

[@delhatton]

Really enjoyed this. I remember it all. In the early 2000s I supported a small group of PS2 users in a world of Windows. They were the land that time forgot. They could not use the same software everybody else was using. They couldn't upgrade their aging PS2s. They could not even get replacement parts through normal retail channels. The group was essentially married to its obsolete hardware base. When I left they were still trying to determine how to rebuild the entire system from scratch. In addition, OS/2 was "quirky". Occasionally it would drown in its own temporary files.

[@wildcat189]

Loves the series, and especially love that this episode doesn't have that looping music on it.

[@angrydove4067]

This was much better than part 2, no music loop and same graphics over and over. Excellent, thank you. Loved the IBM snail.

[@schweineful]

Thank you for leaving out the terrible music. Your content is one of the best on KZbin!

[@sampson1952]

I grew up during this time frame. I love reliving all the drama. It is an amazing reminder of how far we have come since then

[@youngloudandscotty]

Absolutely loved this series. Need more of them desperately. lol. Fantastic job putting this together. Sound was off compared to the previous two in the series, but that's the only quibble I have for the series. Really enjoyed your narration.

[@mardus_ee]

Much better than with background music.

[@bryede]

There were so many giant companies who became paralyzed by their massive inner structures. RCA is another great example. At some point, it just becomes impossible for everyone involved in a project to agree on a reasonable path forward. This is less inevitable today because technology has enabled better oversight of more people and resources, but it still serves as an example of why we're usually better off supporting smaller businesses.

[@bunkie2100]

What a trip down memory lane! My favorite joke from that era was this description of the PS/2 and OS/2: Yesterday’s hardware today and yesterday’s operating system tomorrow!

[@BobFrTube]

Ran OS/2 as my main system for years and am very aware of how much the IBM mindset hobbled it. One big issue was the choice of the 286 which meant virtual machines were not available.

[@sharg0]

Used "Warp" when I switched to Pentium in -95. Compared to Win 3.x over DOS and early Win95 it rocked. Sadly the driver for my graphics card had a mind of its own and only rarely picked up the right config which, if I remember correct left me with unaccelerated 800x600 (card and monitor allowed for 1600x1200) but the times it worked somehow even picture quality improved over what I could get in Win3/95.

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

When IBM brought out the AT in 1984, they made a promise to their customers that they would eventually ship an OS to take advantage of the features of the CPU. By the time 1988 rolled around and 80386-based machines were selling like hot cakes, most customers no longer cared, yet IBM still felt it had to keep that promise.

[@cap_eath]

I remember a lot of this although it was mostly my grammar school years. I remember seeing my uncle's PC running Win 2.0 as he was an IT guy for a large insurance company. He had given me a Sperry 8088 that had been "tossed in the dumpster". I really wanted a 286 upgrade, but my high school allow allowance was impeding that. My cousin was a huge OS/2 fan, but by the time I was of age to replace the Sperry, I couldn't makes sense of using OS/2 as it wasn't compatible with any of my games or programs.

[@zubinix]

This all makes the Amiga story even more sadder. Lightyears ahead of these systems in the 80's.

[@billcoltharp]

I was an early OS2 user when I went to a computer club meeting and saw a demo of it running two programs simultaneously. I ran it on a IBM clone with "dual boot". I could boot in windows or os2. OS2 was so buggy that I had my own problem account number at IBM customer service in Boca Raton!

[@billyjoejimbob75]

Went to a computer store in a mall years ago and told the one guy I needed a PS/2 keyboard. He didn't know what I was talking about. Still have a 3ghz Lenovo core 2 duo with the ole green and purple hooked up.

[@jecelassumpcaojr890]

IBM actually had 7 patents on the PC AT even though they had none for the original PC. After the PS/2 strategy fizzled out, they spent the first half of the 1990s suing chipset makers (mostly Japanese companies by then) and the second half of the 1990s suing clone makers around the world. Their deal to not be sued consisted of licensing these patents plus a bunch of others (the AT ones expired around 2001 and they would prefer to keep collecting money after that) as well as retroactive royalties on a clone produced up to that point. The patents were related to the mixed text/graphics modes on the EGA (though the Apple II had the same thing), the bus master line in the ISA bus (which didn't work very well and which many older busses had) and a trick for checking if a floppy had 40 or 80 cylinders (seek to track 0, check the "track 0" line, seek to track 50, step in 49 tracks, check "track 0" line again).

[@AnotherBoringTopic]

Very interesting! I'm surprised that IBM had some success with suing Japanese companies, I wonder if they also similarly attempted to sue any of the Taiwanese OEM's to force licensing and royalties from them, as some of my sources (Cringely in particular) seem to indicate that Taiwan was where the bulk of compatibles came from. Thanks for watching and commenting!

[@jecelassumpcaojr890]

@@AnotherBoringTopic I had seen the thing about IBM going after the chipset makers in EE Times and similar magazines. I only know about their later efforts against the clone makers themselves because I was asked for help evaluating the patents by a brazilian clone maker in 1995 and then by a second one in early 1999. So I have no idea what IBM did in other countries, but I would expect a similar strategy from them. In both cases my opinion was that these patents could be easily challenged since every idea in them had been used in older products. I also considered it unfair for them to charge both the chip makers and the system makers - normally if you buy components which include patent licensed in their price you don't have to additionally license these same patents yourself. Both companies thanked me for my advice but decided not to try to fight IBM.

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

Remember that IBM had thousands of patents--the biggest patent portfolio of any company back then. Even if you fought back and won lawsuit after lawsuit, they could just snow you under with even more infringement claims, until you were simply forced to give up and pay them some money to go away. One of the patents they had was on the way to blink the cursor on a text terminal, by XORing the bits under the cursor with a mask.

[@98of99]

There was a saying that explains the state of IBM at this time: “PS/2: yesterday’s technology, today. OS/2: yesterday’s technology, tomorrow.”

[@CaptainDangeax]

I owned a computer shop between 1997 and 2000. One of my customers was a kitchen designer, and he used a software called 20-20, running only on OS/2 Warp 3. I think I still have the installation CD somewhere in the attic. About 20-20, it's the software used by Ikea to create the kitchens anyone can touch at local store. The French SNCF also used OS/2 for years, with a text-graphics interface divided into 16 squares, for selling tickets and reservations, with a specific 16 square function keyboard and huge 21" CRTs

[@medes5597]

When I did work experience (2010ish) Natwest bank ATMs still used OS/2 to run. I think it must have been running on the background all over commercial installs.

[@ronjon7942]

This was great stuff, thank you for taking the time to do the research and presentation; it really is excellent work. I love articles and stories of the PC Wars of yore, and in our computer industrial history in general. It doesn't matter how often I listen to stories of IBM, I still hope one of these times it ends differently. I was an IBMer twice - the first time was shortly after school (the 386 was still in the wild, the 486 was in production, and hints of the Pentiums were just showing up, to give anyone interested a timeframe. I was young, full of energy, and just started learning about PCs, and I thought the sun rose and set on the IBM empire, bled Blue, and just couldn't understand why the PS/2 and OS/2 weren't flying off the shelves! :). To be young and not very bright. The 2nd time at IBM was due to acquisition, and I was fully versed in IBM's Power series and AIX, which I loved to pieces and was thrilled to be back at the company I respected, but it was a totally different company that had missed so many opportunities it felt largely irrelevant. While there, IBM was so far behind in Cloud infrastructure I truly did not understand how they were even keeping the lights on, eventually learning they weren't except through mainframe sales along w burning through their cash reserves to chase this nebulous and directionless fantasy about Watson, and sell off so many of their hardware technology. Who knows, maybe this latest restructuring will help IBM refocus their strategies, but it feels like they're just going to fade away. Imused to love the fact no matter where I went, everyone had heard about and respected IBM - nowadays, no one mentions them and younger engineers, programmers and technicians barely consider working there - unless, of course, you're interested in RedHat .

[@AnotherBoringTopic]

It’s pretty neat that you worked for IBM in two major periods in its business history: when it was still considered the PC leader, and when it was still struggling to figure out what sort of company it was (some may say it’s still in that state). Thanks for taking the time to leave such a detailed comment!

[@punboleh7081]

So I'm not the only one who hopes each time it will end differently this time. :) There got to be a way to at least salvage the Workplace Shell to make computers productive again.

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

39:49 This ability in Windows 386 to take advantage of the “Virtual-86” mode in the 80386 processor was the real Windows killer feature. Thanks to this, users gained a new ability--multitasking existing real-mode DOS apps--without developers having to write a single line of new code to take advantage of it. Once the Windows installed base grew to a significant amount, it became worthwhile for developers to actually start writing apps specifically for it.

[@davehempstead9817]

I was with IBM as a Systems Engineer from 1975 to 2005 and saw it all. In fact I sold/supported the father of the PC. (IBM 5100/5110/5120 and S/23). Used OS/2 a lot because it was so stable. OS/2 was used it in Banking to drive check sorting gear. And teller systems. Another off the wall system was the first MPEG4 video conferencing system developed that used a PS/2 with CODEC and a 25mb ATM network card OS/2 was rock solid. System was only rebooted after putting on driver/application fix packs typically after many months of 24/7 use. OS/2 was to expensive for home market but great in industry. My first LAN trace tool was a portable PS/2 with OS/2 and both Ethernet and Token Ring cards. Still have that 386 pc and it still works

[@AnotherBoringTopic]

Whoa you actually sold the 5100?! That's so cool! Did you get one for your personal use, and if so, what happened to it? OS/2 really was a remarkable system, I've been buried under a pile of research for the upcoming video I am doing on it and it certainly deserved far better than it got.

[@davehempstead9817]

The 5100 had the 3M tape only for 208k storage. Hard sell. When the 5110 & 5120 had random access 8" 1.2mb floppy (up to four drives) serious work was done. I sold four times as many. I did keep a demo 5120 machine until the 1990s at home. The best part of the final two models was being able to use the floppy to exchange data with far larger systems even main frames. The 51xx systems also had reasonable async & sync Communications support that permitted attachment of third party devices of all kinds.

[@ericsharesvideo]

Great series. I worked developing an internal application for a large insurance co right out of college in 1992. The platform? PS/2 running OS2. I had never developed for a GUI but I remember it being pretty straight forward. We used MicroFocus COBOL with a separate IDE to hook up Presentation Manager views. As I recall, you had interfaces and outlets in code (using COBOL variables) and you would hook those into GUI objects like text boxes, buttons, drop downs, etc. Many years later when I started developing for iOS using XCode’s Interface Builder, it was quite a flash back to those early days! I only used OS2 though for 2 years then moved on to PC, DOS and of course Windows development. :-) I remember liking OS2 fine but with the lack of adoption, everyone just knew it was a dead product. :-(

[@richardbrayshaw570]

Magnificent piece of work! I was there on the periphery of some of the OS/2 and PS/2 shenanigans in the late 80s, when IBM was still a proud, innovative company. How are the mighty fallen.

[@punboleh7081]

Thanks for the video :) As another commenter wrote, when watching these documentaries there's always the thought "please don't repeat the same mistakes!!". It can be quite painful to watch even though you know in advance how it will end. Back in the day I had a 286, running DOS and Windows 3.x. At first I liked Windows, even though it was completely useless at the time, but it had potential and showed what computers could become one day. In spite of all the potential, for every day use it was faster to use DOS programs, or just the command line. Not only because Windows was so slow, but also because the interface was too clumsy. Yes, easy to learn because of the mouse, but everything you wanted to do just took too many steps, so it wasn't practical. Then came OS/2. It took me a while to upgrade my computer with a new motherboard / new processor to actually be able to run it, but once I did there was no going back. While Windows' Programming Manager and File Manager looked like it had potential, OS/2's Workplace Shell actually fulfilled that potential. Suddenly the graphical user interface was actually useful by providing a desktop one could work with, instead of just providing some tools to slow you down. It didn't even matter that I never bought any OS/2 programs. Mostly I continued using the same DOS and a few Windows programs as before, but the Workplace Shell provided such seamless integration (in addition to crash protection, crash recovery and multitasking) that OS/2 was worth it even just to run DOS programs. Basically you could organise your documents on your desktop, and double clicking would open them, whether it opens the document in an OS/2 program, a DOS program or a Windows program. New documents were created from the templates folder, no matter what type of program would open them. Windows 95 offered a similar style of working, but apart from being crash prone, it got all the details wrong. Like the control panel that looked like a folder but wasn't one. Or that it wouldn't remember icon positions for any folder other than the desktop folder. Or windows positions, for that matter. Later I switched from OS/2 to Linux, once it looked like Gnome might soon catch up with the Workplace Shell, but it never did. And after some years they stopped trying. So Linux left me in the same "It will be useful soon" state as Windows did before. Except that Linux has a very powerful command line, which I'm still using today. For a while desktops emulating some parts of the Workplace Shell, like the Linux desktops or Windows, allowed at least a document centric style of working, but that's getting more difficult in recent years, as everyone doubles down on multi-document interfaces, where each app duplicates the whole desktop, but can only open their own files. 🤦 In OS/2 you didn't even need "File Open" or "Save As" dialogues, because you had a desktop to do that, and you didn't need project managers, as you just put all files of a project into the same folder, and so on... programs just needed to do their jobs, the Workplace Shell took care of everything else. That style of working worked even with less powerful desktops, but it depended upon apps opening one window per file, which new apps don't like to do any more. Nowadays everyone just accepted desktops being useless and every app duplicates the whole desktop, so starting apps by clicking on documents becomes more and more unfeasible. (Tabs for multiple open documents, side bars with file managers and project managers, or even just complete file managers, and so on, they're all great if you run only one program at a time, but become a nuisance once you try to work with even two different file types.) I'm rambling, but you asked viewers what they liked about OS/2, and which of its features they still miss in modern operating systems. :) Honestly, I'd happily forego all progress we've made in the last 25 years (hardware wise and software wise) just to use the Workplace Shell again. I've got ArcaOS running in a virtual machine, and use it to work through Charles Petzold's "OS/2 Presentation Manager Programming", which I regrettably didn't do back then. Anyway, enough of the memories. Back to using those "modern" interfaces, no matter how grating they are. And thanks again for the trip down the memory lane. :)

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

9:17 Trivia question: how do you calculate the capacity at “1.44MB”? What are the units being used?

[@lordterra1377]

Why is the audio so low on this video?

[@CarlWong5]

I thought that music in Part 1 was too repetitive and loud. I like that the music is either absent or in low volume to accompany the script. For some reason, the audio is very quiet in this video.

[@AnotherBoringTopic]

I originally thought that I needed some kind of background music, which I eventually realized was unnecessary. I do try my best to make each video better than the last in some way, unfortunately for this video I messed up the audio levels and set them way too low.

[@ultrametric9317]

Microchannel is a magnificent achievement. Had IBM opened it up like the ISA bus, we'd all be running on version 10 or so of the bus. Bus mastering was the clear wave of the future in the mid-late 80s. Amiga showed the way with coprocessors. Apple was totally not even in that game. They didn't achieve pervasive bus mastering until they bought NeXT. But IBM had a home run in the first at bat in that game. And then to compound the error of closing the bus and establishing punitive licensing terms, they decided to force OS/2 to run on the 286 which could not mode switch easily between real and protected mode, when Intel had solved this problem in hardware with the virtual 8086 mode in the 386 processor. Death by management.

[@RyanDanielG]

Awesome. People are sleepin on these vids. Can’t believe they don’t have a million views. Great job

[@devilaverage6718]

I was at university around 94/95, when a guy from IBM came, and gave a speech about OS/2. He handed out free copies of OS/2 Warp 3.0. It took YEARS before I had a decent PC, that was able to run it, but had no real use it for, without any software. In theory it could run win3.1 programs in a simulated "windows session", but was painfully slow. But it was a REAL 32 bit OS, unlike W3.1. I still have the box on my shelf.

[@eleghari]

They should have handed out free copies of OS/2 when it came out...

[@flounder31]

Interesting series, thanks for making it! I was a manager at a Waldenbooks (!! Remember those?) back in the mid-90s. Our store's main PC -- that controlled the IBM cash registers, managed the store's inventory files, etc. was a PS/2, running OS/2. I only had occasion to work with it outside of our company's shell software a couple of times, with the help of our IT dept on the line as we troubleshot something. As a Mac guy, I couldn't see why anyone would use what seemed by all rights, to be a crappy version of DOS and Win 3.1.

[@AnotherBoringTopic]

So glad you enjoyed the series! I also was a Mac guy growing up, that was all our family had. Our family Mac was a Mac+ that sat on top of a 40 Mb hard drive…I still fondly remember the “chunk” of throwing the hard drive power switch and then “click” the Mac power switch made, after which I got to stare at the HappyMac face for about 5 loooong minutes until I could start playing Oxyd… Man I loved WaldenBooks as a kid…for years it was the only bookstore that the area I grew up in possessed (aside from a couple excellent used bookstores) and I spent many happy hours at the mall browsing through it. Then Borders bought them, and ruined them along with the rest of the chain…

[@kevikiru]

This is the best, most thorough and satisfying analysis of IBM PC that I have ever listened to or read

[@AnotherBoringTopic]

Appreciate it! And I appreciate your comments on how to make the channel better, constructive criticism is always helpful 👍

[@ctcards2636]

Very well done ! :-) Great video that brought me back to better times. I miss this era of computing for sure.

[@pjimmbojimmbo1990]

Really enjoy your Series on this. I installed OS2 Warp on one of my Compatibles, I can't remember if it was a 486 or 2nd Gen Pentium. Both had about 20MB . I wasn't all that impressed with it, and reinstalled either 3.1, or 3.11 WFW. In early 1995, I signed on with MS to do Beta Testing of what became Win95. I ran 5 different Betas of Win 95, and none gave me any issues in Windows, however I was never able to get any DOS based Games to run within a Window. So I always kept another HD loaded with MS DOS 6.22, to be swapped in when I want to run the games.

[@conroypaw]

Hardly boring. On the contrary, quite riveting. Although I was still young at the time, I remember these days, and just grasping to understand at all of the events that were going on in the PC world. Great job covering it!

[@AnotherBoringTopic]

Glad you enjoyed it! The 1980s have got to be the most exciting decade in personal computers, and one where consumers had a massive amount of strong choices to pick from for the first time

[@DaxVJacobson]

Thanks so much for this series of videos, brings back so many memories of this time.

[@AnotherBoringTopic]

Glad you are enjoying the videos! :) I love studying this part of computing history, although sadly my own memories of it are pretty limited, starting with using the family’s aging Mac+ in the early 90s

[@iteachtime]

Thanks! Loving your videos!!

[@AnotherBoringTopic]

Thanks so much for the donation, glad you are enjoying the videos!

[@stratochief_relaxation2504]

Another installment in these excellent series about interesting, forgotten histories! You should have a Patreon!

[@AnotherBoringTopic]

Glad you enjoyed it! We’ve definitely considered setting up a Patreon at some point…on the off chance I can ever do this full time I might actually get videos out at a crazy tempo--such as once a month! 😜

[@nicholasstevens9922]

This was a really good series. I enjoyed all 3 parts. Thanks for making this and sharing!

[@AnotherBoringTopic]

Thanks for watching! This series has been a blast to research and put together and it’s great to see people enjoying it :)

[@rok1475]

OS/2 was the Betamax of the operating systems while Windows was the ubiquitous VHS. It was quite difficult to crush OS/2 while the “blue screen of death “ and the “three finger salute “ that followed entered common dictionary. OS/2 would have beed brilliant on the modern hardware with fast CPU, huge memory and SSDs. But its timing was off by a few decades…

[@jarvisfamily3837]

The humorous take on IBM's "How you gonna do it? You're gonna PS/2 it!" was "Hey, IBM! PS/On it!" :-) The company I went to work for at the end of '88 bought me a nice, new, shiny PS/2 Model 80 with a 16 MHz 386 processor - 20% slower than the 20MHz 386 I was running in my six-month-old clone at home. And, oh yeah, the PS/2 at work cost two-and-a-half times as much. And it was still running PC/DOS, not OS/2. I tried OS/2 at home for a while, but when Windows 3.0 came out I ditched OS/2 and went back to DOS with Windows as the front-end. OS/2 wasn't *bad*, per se, it just wasn't where the action was. It seemed like everything interesting was happening in the DOS/Windows world, while OS/2 was just kind of...an also-ran. At work (different job by then) we rewrote our scheduling system, ditching VMS with X/Windows for Microsoft Windows 3.1, with the next generation a couple years later requiring Windows NT. A few people at work ran OS/2 into the early 2000's, but it was obviously a dead duck by then.

[@RoamingAdhocrat]

39:05 can we take a moment to appreciate that car

[@Mosts20]

One of the best documentaries I've seen... good job

[@AnotherBoringTopic]

Thanks!

[@terrybullock3140]

I've loved this series - so many old memories! I had my first IBM-clones in the late 80s / early 90s. By now Win 3.0 was out if you felt the need for that sort of thing, but my friend 'acquired' a copy of os/2 which we installed on my machine. Spent a good part of the next day removing it and reinstalling ms-dos / windows, lol.

[@AnotherBoringTopic]

So OS/2 (I’m guessing 2.0 or 2.1?) didn’t exactly impress you right away? :D Thanks for watching!

[@albertome4109]

Really great videos. Lot of historical facts. I would appreciate a similar video on the unix/linux rise and fall and resurgence

[@AnotherBoringTopic]

Glad you enjoyed it! I do definitely want to at least cover Linux at some point, and it's one of the subjects that I try to periodically gather research material on (just got a new book on open source a month or two ago).

[@InLightFilm]

I am bing watching your videos. This is the beset series on the topic EVER.

[@cellularmitosis2]

Thanks so much for this series! In future videos, can you boost of normalize the volume?

[@AnotherBoringTopic]

Audio is a perennial issue for me, I keep trying different things (tips, tutorials, etc) and I think overall I’m getting better but there are definitely still things that make me wince in every video’s audio. Appreciate the advice! Glad you enjoyed the video :)

[@cellularmitosis2]

@@AnotherBoringTopic no worries, I figured you were working on it, it is obvious you care a lot about your videos!

[@keithswindell6212]

I was the part time IT guy (later to become the full time IT guy) at the company I worked for when PS/2 and Microchannel launched - we bought a few but they were complete junk compared to the Compaqs of the day. Of course, upper management then went out and bought a bunch of DEC PCs. Well built but soooooo expensive.

[@dansimpson6844]

I was one of the OS/2 fanatics back in the day. I was part of an OS/2 User Group. I hung in there until Warp3 but trying to maintain compatibility with software I was using at work eventually tipped the scales. I'm still not a big windows fan. I use it out of necessity at work and use Macs at home along with my HP-86B and HP-71B.

[@mjouwbuis]

The PS/2 mouse/keyboard port is indeed serial, which suggests it might not be as analog as you mentioned in the video, or rather: not analog at all. The only analog standard carried over from the PS/2 is the VGA port.

[@Billblom]

OS/2 had a basic problem: IBM promised the world that it would run properly on the 286 systems they sold. The problem was that there was no fast way to go from kernel mode to user mode after a call to the OS for anything. A "solution" for that was a hammer that slowed things down dramatically. How was it done? You reset the processor, that then took a millisecond (if I remember correctly) to call the bios, which then had to check to see of OS2 was running, and if so, start the system in user mode. That meant that EVERYTHING got incredibly slow. Again, assuming I remember correctly, the start up of OS2 would change the reset vector in the startup dispatch table in low ram, giving it a redirect to the OS2 environment. Going to a 386 would solve that problem, and IBM was told that they had to spec a 386, but IBM naturally said "Hell no!! We promised..." End result was IBM taking full development of the system. Little other issues: When you got it loaded with the TCP/IP stack, you ended up with almost no ram to do anything else on a machine with A maxed out 286 system with 16 gig of ram. You might have a few megs of ram, but not enough to do a serious load of work on a 286. IBM discovered that only after their engineers discovered that TCP/IP stacks were large. Very large.. The 386 would handle bouncing from kernel to user mode nicely, and could address FAR more RAM..

[@ultrametric9317]

I was a contractor at IBM in Atlanta in 1987. We didn't do shit. I was in name a C programmer. I never wrote a line while there. We sat around and jawed all day and went to meetings. I played with the compiler and studied REXX. The IBMers were telling me the company was doomed. The stock was at 130 or so. It was a sad experience. I was very proud to be at IBM and I loved the company. Their hardware was magnificent. To this day, the excellence of IBM lives on in Lenovo Thinkpads. But damn their management was a riot of confusion.

[@mrmosk2011]

In the early 90's, a friend's father bought a PS/2 running DOS. I was very impressed by the 256 color and jealous about how nice Prince of Persia looked on it. I had a Tandy with Hercules display at the time.

[@AnotherBoringTopic]

I remember enjoying Prince of Persia on the family Mac+…in glorious 16 shades of gray…256 colors would have absolutely blown my mind

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

The Mac Plus only did black and white.

[@ourtvchannel]

I have just watched this again and want to say thanks for a great history lesson. I was there for all of this, i saw OS2 and IBM Microchannel for what they were at the time and had many arguments with the IT director about them - but he was IBM to the core. I always thought I'd have the last laugh and did. I love the Microsoft OS2 development team , must have been hell for all. I worked in corporate enviroments and recognise that awful feeling when you know you need to change sometihng and know you'll need endless meetings to get it done.

[@cephelotron]

A video on the rise and fall of screen saver software could be entertaining or a series on early internet protocols and the BBS scene.

[@AnotherBoringTopic]

I do have a lot of fun memories of gathering around the family Performa to watch the various Looney Toons After Dark screensavers…

[@jeremyweatherford3922]

Circa 2001 my summer internship involved operating a DNA sequencer that ran OS/2. I remember being very confused about the environment's similarity to Windows, even though everything was in different places. Sadly I don't remember much else about the software or how the specialized hardware was connected to it, but it was probably a decent choice for an industrial/embedded system back then.

[@AnotherBoringTopic]

OS2 was incredibly rock solid, almost Unix like in its stability (once some bugs were sorted out). OS2 Warp was used fairly widely in areas like ATMs that needed something that didn’t BSOD periodically like Windows did. I have heard that there are still OS2 installations running in various places, usually embedded systems. There is a spin-off of OS/2 called ArcaOS that has the right from IBM to keep developing the software and its allegedly still under development. I don’t really know anymore than that, might be the topic of a future video though.

[@punboleh7081]

@@AnotherBoringTopic I remember a computer magazine describing OS/2 as having "a (super)human will to live". While Windows would just crash knowing it will be restarted anyway, OS/2 would cling to life no matter what. I've used OS/2 as my daily driver for years, and while the crash recovery was sometimes so slow it would have been faster to just reboot the system, it never crashed once. Which was quite a change from Windows that crashed at least once a day. I still miss that aspect of OS/2. While Linux hardly ever gets into any trouble, it doesn't try to recover from it when it does.

[@KapiteinKrentebol]

This episode is soooo much better because it doesn't have the droning background music. 😁

[@olddisneylandtickets]

Fabulous series, thank you for all the time and effort.

[@rfvtgbzhn]

From what I understand, the reason why MCA was also offered in a "slower" version with 16-bit instead of 32-bit was not that IBM artificially crippled it, like claimed in this video, but that it was also used for the 80286, which couldn't support a 32-bit bus, as it's own databus was only 16-bit. Actually some of the first PS/2 models with MCA already used 32-bit version, as they already had the 80386. The 80286 versions where just a cheaper option. See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_IBM_PS/2_models#Main_line

[@mechajay3358]

Fascinating series. You really dive into IBM's downfall in the PC Market. The one nitpick I have is the audio, it's a little bit low.

[@AnotherBoringTopic]

I’m very glad you enjoyed the series and thank you for the constructive feedback!

[@AlexanderWeurding]

Thanks!

[@AnotherBoringTopic]

Thank you, glad you enjoyed it!

[@SMWBraden]

Fantastic. All three episodes were amazing. Thank you.

[@AnotherBoringTopic]

Awesome, glad you enjoyed them!

[@tracyterpstra]

I love your historical videos. Please consider doing a video on the history of SGI. Or a wider topic idea are the business insights that can be gained from demise of the Unix workstation manufacturers. Thanks!

[@ropersonline]

OS/2 user 2.0-3.0 checking in. One of OS/2's problems was that despite its having a great font system, it shipped with no more than two or three fonts. Also, I never understood why the Presentation Manager had to make every file it presented an abstraction, an object that didn't directly represent the actual file. Why oh why? The Mac and ST were both so much better in that regard. Windows had the same problem of pointless abstraction with its Program Manager. Honourable mention: DeScribe32. Gone but not forgotten.

[@olivierbeltrami]

PS/2 was Baldrick’s cunning plan … it all makes sense now.

[@dukenukem5768]

I had just come from Part 2 and thought my headphones had failed! This was a whisper, so had to turn my volume right up. Then there was a brief something in here that was suddenly full volume again!

[@0utc4st1985]

I'd be very interested in seeing the story behind Topview and OS/2 in a format like this. Very impressed with the series.

[@AnotherBoringTopic]

Glad you enjoyed it! The OS/2 series should kick off sometime this summer or so, TopView is on the list but I’m not sure yet when it will get put on the schedule, definitely not before next year.

[@punboleh7081]

I would love to hear more about that, too. It is said IBM wanted OS/2 to be text only at first (using TopView as the user interface), but Microsoft insisted on a GUI. Given the memory issues of OS/2 1.x, I wonder whether a text only OS/2 would have been more successful.

[@mardus_ee]

​@@punboleh7081The video has it, that OS/2 was released as text-only initially, but still had massive memory requirements.

[@punboleh7081]

@@mardus_ee That's kind of the point. DOS support made the whole first MB of RAM inaccessible to OS/2 1.x. If you had 2MB of RAM, half of it went to the DOS box, the other half to all your OS/2 programs. Running Presentation Manager more than used up the available memory before you started any applications. A text only system would have given pretty much all the available RAM to your applications. Also, if people had started using OS/2 1.0 instead of waiting for Presentation Manager (meaning to say if it had gained any traction early on), DOS programs would have been recompiled as family mode programs, so there wouldn't have been any need to keep the DOS box around. (It can easily be disabled, giving OS/2 another MB of memory.) So, yeah, Presentation Manager wasn't the only memory hog, but adding it to an already memory restrained system didn't help.

[@mardus_ee]

@@punboleh7081 Your explanation is very detailed, but does not yet clarify what I want to know. I understand, that OS/2 would certainly have been a memory hog with Presentation Manager. But since OS/2 1.x was released without Presentation Manager, the operating system should not have been such a memory hog. Or it your point, that OS/2 1.x was a memory hog even without Presentation Manager, because the OS had to support both OS/2-native non-graphical / text-based applications, and DOS-native applications, the latter of which, without recompilation, required the first megabyte of RAM due to how DOS-native apps were designed to use just that segment of RAM?

[@WallaceBMcClure]

It sent shivers down my spine when you said “token ring.”

[@mikeh7704]

I needed to stop at 9:00. My first PC (that I purchased myself back in the 90s) had a 386DX CPU. Hard disks in the 10s of MB don't seem right. You can barely fit a couple of software applications in that much space these days. My laptop has 16GB of RAM. We've come a long way since then!

[@somethingelse4878]

Makes me realize how advanced workbench 1.3 on my 1989 Amiga 500 was

[@Roman-nu1om]

Amazing content, why so few views??? I'd love to see another video series about OS/2 and Windows development!

[@AnotherBoringTopic]

Glad you enjoyed it! And since you mentioned it, I am excited to tell you that a brand new series called the Rise of Windows will be launching before the end of the year, starting with a one hour long part 1 :) Rough draft of the script is already done, I’m just editing it and will be recording the audio within the next couple weeks.

[@sampson1952]

Love the history. My only suggestion is to increase your audio. To hear the audio I have to increase my sound to its maximum so that when it is done the next video blasts my hearing!!!

[@AnotherBoringTopic]

I think I do a much better job on current videos with the audio levels, but editing the audio correctly has definitely been an (ongoing) learning process. Thanks for watching and taking the time to leave a comment!

[@sampson1952]

@@AnotherBoringTopic I want to emphasize that I really like your videos on the history of the Apple and PC (and related topics). I grew up during the 80s. Everything was so much different then. It was like a small club of friends in the 80s and then in the 90s it became more corporate. I would not want to change what we have now, but I miss those early days.

[@sampson1952]

@@AnotherBoringTopic I don't know if it would be helpful, but there is a product named VSDC. It is a free video editor. You could run your current videos through it permitting you to increase the overall audio level. You probably already know about this kind of option, but I thought I would throw it out there anyway.

[@AnotherBoringTopic]

I always welcome and appreciate feedback and advice, that’s how I get better as a creator :) I edit in a program called DaVinci Resolve, it has very powerful audio tools, the problem was that for the longest time I wasn’t exactly sure where I should set the audio levels. I got some good feedback on what db level to shoot for and I think videos past IBM part 3 have the levels about where they should be.

[@pebear]

Back in the Late 80's working for Sears Business Centers, IBM would come around and give us cases of OS2 Warp for free. I had a dozen copies that I played with. OS2 hung right into the 2000's. Lots of companies that used them as control systems that hardly ever got rebooted or even touched. They just worked and hardly ever crashed. OS2 was the first OS with Internet connectivity built into the OS.

[@kenoliver8913]

But of course for things like control centres and manufacturing robots then if you needed an OS where reliability and performance was everything and user-friendliness unimportant you always had Unix. It was hard to see a use case for OS/2 even for these applications.

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

I gather OS/2 was used a lot for ATMs at one point. Presumably none of those are still in use.

[@qualin1974]

You should re-record the audio for this video. It's very low in comparison to your other videos on this topic. Fascinating and well done video series!

[@AnotherBoringTopic]

Glad you enjoyed the series! I unfortunately messed up the voiceover audio levels on this last part and didn’t realize it until too late. Some years ago KZbin unfortunately removed the ability to adjust audio volume in an already uploaded video

[@v8pilot]

S-100 bus! I remeber it! Probably haven't giving it a thought for well over 40 years!

[@michaelvaughan3929]

I attempted to be an OS/2 user in my 386 computer, but finally threw in the towel when Windows NT became available. A story about those two OSs would be interesting.

[@CarlosEBernal]

Same here I was an early user of OS2 but soon after moved to Windows NT because of the large availability of Windows applications; also my OS2 didn't support my then expensive brand new laser printer...

[@rhubarb99999]

well done! So many memories.

[@AnotherBoringTopic]

Glad you enjoyed it!

[@Elkarlo77]

For the OS/2 Launch Problem. In modern History would be Vista. Vista ran fine when you had at least 2GB of Ram, it ran much faster than XP when you had 4GB. Problem was that thanks to the 32bit Maschines only some Athlon 64 and the newest Intels could use 4GB+ of Ram. Vista minimum requirements were 512kb and a 'modern 1.5ghz prozessor' on a XP Maschine you could putt the Os down to 150MB usage so you could work with 512MB. Vista couldn't be pushed below 400MB without extreme measurements. Worse where the Netbook craziness lot of the Netbooks had a brandnew Atom with 1.7ghz and came with 512MB of Ram and Vista. Win7 reduced the Memory requirement with much Tamer GUI-Effects and suddenly the "bareminimum" Vista Maschines were running Win 7 fine. 100MB less Memory requirements and less graphic Effects.

[@1st_ProCactus]

Excellent series. I remember trying OS2/warp on a 486 4MB ram... I miss DOS

[@AnotherBoringTopic]

Warp really was an excellent OS…shame that IBM was in full self-sabotage mode by this point

[@1st_ProCactus]

@@AnotherBoringTopic I definitely can't say it was worse than Doze95

[@RalphWeber-nm1ip]

yes i installed it, OS/2. I loved the idea of multi OS.

[@TrimeshSZ]

There is a significant omission in this story though - which is that in the end EISA was pretty much as big a failure as MicroChannel. Sure, companies like Dell and Compaq used it in their server products, but it had close to zero desktop use. What most people were actually running were systems using various 32-bit local bus extensions, which eventually coalesced into the VESA Local Bus - this used the same 16 bit slot with an expansion connector approach that EISA did, but implemented in a far cruder and dumber manner. Of course, in this case "dumb" and "crude" also meant "cheap", which was in the end why it was far more popular than the much better designed (and also far more expensive) EISA bus. That was, in turn, superseded by Intel's PCI bus - which effectively took the good bits of MCA while losing the dumb bits (like MCAs brain-dead configuration management using adapter support diskettes) and was licensed in a much more agreeable manner. There were still some VLB machines using early models of the Pentium, but the later models made the VLB requirement to run at the FSB speed increasingly a problem as the speeds increased.

[@anthonyferguson7158]

Are you still planning to do the OS/2 series? These were fascinating and I worked at IBM during these times. I actually learned a few things too which was surprising and explained quite a bit! Thank you!. Subscribed.

[@AnotherBoringTopic]

Glad you enjoyed it and I appreciate the compliment! I was thinking I would do a two part OS/2 series, however it looks I’ll be able to cover everything in a single video, called “The Fall of OS/2”. It’s the next major video I’ll be releasing, the script is getting close to done so I HOPE to record the audio sometime next month. As with any schedule of mine…please treat this with a healthy dose of skepticism

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

I remember a Microsoft representative coming to my employer at the time to give a presentation on OS/2. I remember he made a big deal out of a hack that they had invented (and possibly also patented) to run real-mode DOS apps. Once you entered protected mode on a 286, there was no way back to real mode except by resetting the CPU. And if you do that, the running OS loses control and you are effectively rebooting the entire system. But they found a way around that, to regain control after the processor reset and continue OS execution in real mode--not sure how.

[@punboleh7081]

@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 That was the (in)famous "triple fault". Running into three error conditions in sequence would reset the processor (thereby returning to real mode) without resetting all of the state of the processor, so it could shrug it off and continue as if nothing happened, but now in real mode. It would do that to run the DOS sessions for a few milliseconds, and then return to protected mode to run OS/2 programs..... and a few milliseconds later cause another triple fault to return to real mode. Apart from the triple fault being rather slow, it still allowed only one DOS program to run, and since it ran in real mode, any DOS program could mess up OS/2's memory, so.... yeah, it was a hack. It also added to OS/2's memory restraints, as in effect the whole first MB was inaccessible to OS/2. I've never used OS/2 1.x myself, but my understanding is that disabling that DOS sessions increased OS/2's speed and stability considerably.

[@lilmsgs]

I had a bunch of Amigas. What a great OS it had

[@mikehosken4328]

I would really like to see a video series starting with Apple. Not the usual Jobs is a genius bit, more the open design that Woz created with the apple 2 line ( not including the 2c) Vs the closed system that Jobs champions with the Mac which lives on to this day in the subscription based tech world, where you carry around your computer in your pocket that needs replacing every 3 years. The story of open and closed source software from 1960’s - 2000’s Unix > CPM > BSD > Rise of MS and closed source > GNU/Linux free BSD> Rise of open source running the internet.

[@werre2]

the PS/2 clicky keyboard had perfect feel to it

[@oleharbo]

I loved watching this series, thank you for your content

[@AnotherBoringTopic]

I’m very glad you enjoyed it!

[@drbali]

Thanks for releasing this!

[@AnotherBoringTopic]

Your welcome! Glad you enjoyed it :)

[@drbali]

You should use audacity and increase the volume of your audio. I had to crank up the volume to max. Thank yo for the heart and waiting for what you are lined up next.

[@AnotherBoringTopic]

I made a slight mistake when I was mixing the sound (I edit in DaVinci Resolve), and had my headphones turned up all the way, making the audio levels unfortunately come out quieter than they should have. I will fix that in videos going forward

[@drbali]

Thank you

[@marvinrowen5894]

I tried to use os2 many years ago. It was very hard to configure. I gave it up when windows came out. Ps I used to work on ibm 360 and 370 computers. Good show

[@AnotherBoringTopic]

It definitely took a couple versions for OS/2 to actually hit its stride. Thanks for watching and commenting!

[@varianbohling251]

Great content and production value. Only constructive criticism is the audio is very low. Some of your videos have better audio, like the VisiCalc one.

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

40:33 I don’t think Windows was actually preinstalled until Windows 95. Prior to that, it was simply included in the box, whether or not users wanted it or used it.

[@mardus_ee]

Windows 3.1 was certainly preinstalled on notebooks, and I'm certain several OEMs had it so on desktops, too.

[@FaintKarmatic]

Back in the early 90's I worked for Arthur Anderson's Solutionworks. They were an OS/2 shop will all lotus productivity/mail apps, C front end, with Cobol code and a DB/s Back end. After 6 months their, on a friday they unveiled their Customer Ordering system for a Large National Bank to all 50 ish of us. I went out they night and bought VB3 (I was a C dev, which is why I was on the cobol team), learned the language over the weekend, on during my lunch breaks the next week or two I coded the same app solo and showed it to my boss. For some reason she didn't find it funny

[@AnotherBoringTopic]

That's an awesome story! How was the Visual Basic coding environment on OS/2, was it better than developing directly in DOS or Windows?

[@SirKenchalot]

Is OS/2 still used by the ticketing machines on MTA in NYC? That's the only place I've used it since 1995 when it came on a PC I bought, along with Windows 3.1, however, with only 4MB of RAM, I didn't use it much.

[@AnotherBoringTopic]

I have no idea if it’s still used there, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it was still hanging on. It’s a tough, resilient OS that requires little maintenance, I know quite a few ATMs used to run it as well. ArcaOS is a modern day licensed continuation of OS/2 (based on the last major release OS/2 Warp) and it’s also possible that it may have supplanted OS/2 in some areas where legacy applications still needed to run. Might be an interesting follow up video at some point :)

[@SirKenchalot]

@@AnotherBoringTopic Thank you for your reply and I'm looking forward to your next video on OS/2 and the continuing windows series.

[@gc1418]

This was just outstanding. Thanks for sharing.