The history of OS/2

[@LatitudeSky]

My own OS/2 anecdotes: a former employer with a data center at one point had to install a black-box server for a government agency. That is, it was being placed on our network, by this agency. And it wasn't a regular rack server. It was a huge desktop case with every port and screw and opening epoxied shut. No labels. Just a power cord, ethernet jack, a VGA port and a slot to insert DVDs. So this thing sat on our network doing unknown things while displaying nothing on the screen. Periodically we would get update DVDs in the mail with the only instructions being insert disc 1 and follow the screen prompts. This process eventually caused a reboot and revealed the OS/2 boot logo. The DVDs were PGPd. Of course we looked. Whatever this box did, it was running OS/2. The other notable thing were many many ATM bank machines running OS/2 well into the last decade. There are probably still some out there.

[@slightlyevolved]

It's still available, updated, and in use. It's been known as EcommStation since the (mid?)-2000's. Mostly for legacy apps on new hardware, and it really hasn't changed since around 2012. Really, if they still updated it better, at least for security, I'd rather still be seeing embedded systems running OS/2 than WinXP. For embedded shit, I really wish they'd just run QNX and be done with it instead of trying to shoehorn in a desktop system. Stripped down or not.

[@LatitudeSky]

@slightlyevolved And I had forgotten, all our custom apps at that company were written in REXX although actually run under various flavors of Windows. It was extremely powerful and reliable and easily did stuff competitors still struggle with. We could not possibly have done what we did without REXX.

[@HaveYouTriedGuillotines]

People need to stop working for the glow in the darks.

[@freeculture]

Well, i guess that explains how the NSA got into hardening Linux later (SELinux) :)

[@trannusaran6164]

yikes

[@foxtyke]

OS/2 will always hold a special place in my computing memory...

[@peteblazar5515]

In 1995 on IBM presentation day I was given trial OS/2 Warp CD (it worked only from April to May same year), so I lived a year only in April. ;-)

[@cheekybastard99]

High memory?

[@peteblazar5515]

@@cheekybastard99 No, protected memories.

[@PaulaBean]

I used OS/2 once. I had to make a Windows application run adquately on OS/2 Warp. I don't remember much of OS/2, but I do remember that I succeeded.

[@peteblazar5515]

@@PaulaBean I think they had a slogan for OS/2: "Better DOS than MS DOS, better Windows than MS Windows." Apps for both those subsystems thru isolation inside of OS/2 obtained advantage of preemptive multitasking.

[@StringerNews1]

I bought a copy of OS/2 Warp 3.0 whilst Christmas shopping, as a gift to myself. I had built a 486 PC, and needed something more than MS-DOS or the "borrowed" copy of Windows that I had, but felt guilty using. It was a big step up. The bundled apps worked well enough for reports, even on my ancient MX-80 printer. OS/2 actually printed fonts on it, using a graphics mode. Near letter quality. Not long after, I got a job in a shop that was beta testing Windows 95, and had copies of NT 3.51 for me to try. I just found Windows easier to install, and to understand. And there was software for Windows too. That was when we'd download a new version of Netscape Navigator almost every day, hoping this one would crash less. When Windows 95 came out, OS/2 was all but forgotten. Then NT 4.0, my ultimate OS. I bought my first new PC with NT4 preinstalled. I never looked back. Linux took over as the alternative OS, and KDE 2 and 3 became my favorite desktops. If someone made a deal to sell a modernized NT4, I'd buy it in a minute. There's at least software...

[@eriksiers]

In the 90s I was convinced that one day I'd have to grow up and install OS/2. I never actually did so until eComStation 1.0 in the early 2000s. 😂 I still have copies in VMs.

[@arlencarlson]

I skipped Windows 95 because I was running OS/2 Warp 3…then I went straight to Linux. Still had a copy of Windows running in a parition at about the time Windows has evolved to Windows 98SE. But really skipped the 95 era and first of 98.

[@EinChris75]

For a software engineer, that must have been the living hell. Good technology, but awful "business" decisions making all work a waste of time and effort.

[@woldemunster9244]

Dilbert is propably a manifestation of that period.

[@sunnohh]

Luckily nothing has changed, 😂

[@JuanPerez-cs1gx]

"engineer"? What is that? I think I haven't heard that word for more than a decade. Is that when you work on arbitrary tasks on a call centre style "ticketing system" set up by non-technically inclined people based on focus groups or emails with the words "please do ASAP" that have not been read by anyone? For me living hell is when I look for jobs as an "engineer" and the recruiters ask about my social media and online communities presence before they even consider looking at my CV or work history.

[@The_Boctor]

@@woldemunster9244Dilbert is absolutely a product of that period. Look at projects like Taligent and Workplace OS, to get a rough idea of the dissonance between management and engineers.

[@techkev140]

@EinChris75 Agree with your comment, frustration is not a good thing. We all watched the same (in)competence kill Commodore and stunt the Amiga. A platform which seems to have survived to some extent despite the mayhem. OS/2 did look stronger at the time, but simply faded once the PC clone market turned to the MS-DOS Windows combo.

[@MKnife]

I started working at the nordic IBM Helpware Hotline and OS/2 Support Hotline in Copenhagen in early June of 1992, just after OS/2 2.0 was released (I worked there almost 3 years). All of it was completely new and amazing, and the multitasking between dos, windows and OS/2 was just awesome. Demoing the simultaneous formatting of a floppy in drive A: while running excel and even playing a rudimentary video (the one with the parrot) blew peoples minds. Some time later IBM distributed a FREE version of OS/2 (I think it was 2.1) on CD with a large PC magazine in the nordics, and did NOT tell us at support beforehand. The joy of supporting people getting the thing to install (or even recognize the cd drive) was something I still remember some 30 years later. And I still run Warp 4 in a virtual machine on occasion, just for nostalgia.

[@RetroBytesUK]

If you so much a read a file from floppy in win3.1 the whole system would hang until the disk op waa done. OS/2 was like another world. The cover cd thing this exactly the sort of screw up I'd expect from IBM, often I think it was just a victim of its own size.

[@tookitogo]

I have a similar CD somewhere, included either with the UK edition of PC Magazine, or with one of the German computer magazines (I forget which).

[@Thiesi]

_Amiga - formatting disks in the background while running applications in the foreground since 1985™_

[@brostenen]

I tried version 2.0 or 2.1 when it was that demo version.... I lived in Middelfart at that time, and going from AmigaOS and MS Dos 6.22 with Win3.11 at that time, was like the most awesomme I have ever seen. Nothing tickeled my spine of curiosity as that demo did. However, we were only like 5 people in the whole of Middelfart, that saw the potential in Os2. Not even those classmates that I had in tech school in Erritsø saw the potential. They were all fully microsoftified at that time, and one still did assembler programming on his Amiga 500 or 1200.

[@brostenen]

​​@@ThiesiYup.... Pre emptive multitasking also only came to Mac with AUX in the corporate world and OSX for the average home user. Win9x was also only task managing and not pre emptive multitasking. That only first came to the home user with Win2000. NT on the other hand, were always multitasking, and Win2000 were NT5 for the home user. Then. I have no idea if AtariST and Atari Falcon were pre emptive multitasking at all. But Amiga sure was the first for the home user. I also dont know if BeOS was pre emptive multitasking or not. I believe it was.

[@davidfrischknecht8261]

Fun fact: One of the early names for Windows NT was actually NT OS/2. Of course, they had to change the name once they pulled out of the agreement with IBM.

[@blahorgaslisk7763]

I only used MS OS/2 once. I was building a server for a customer and they were to use a MS LAN Manager and it ran on OS/2. So the software included a MS OS/2 license to host the software. I remember that it seemed to work well. I set up the server, configured the user accounts and installed the mail server. That was the first and last time I touched MS OS/2.

[@chestermarcol3831]

@@blahorgaslisk7763 Windows NT was, and still is, the greatest operating system ever produced.

[@blahorgaslisk7763]

@@chestermarcol3831 I ran either NT 4.0 or Windows 2000 (can't remember which) for many years at work. I eventually was forced to upgrade to Windows XP when more and more programs moved beyond the old NT standards and required at least XP to run. Didn't really suffer for moving to XP. In my opinion this was the best version of windows ever. It had the more modern GUI and yet was very good at running old Windows programs. It was also very stable as long as all drivers were of decent quality. Every version of windows since has forced GUI changes that I don't really like.

[@mc-not_escher]

Years ago, when I was about eight or nine, my aunt was working at an IBM office and would occasionally bring me into the office (I lived with her since my dad divorced my mom and my grandma was in later stages of Alzheimer’s so they took care of gramma whilst raising me). I remember sitting on the OS/2 machine while my aunt was doing her work. Often I’d help her out by going to the mailroom and shred confidential papers and pick up the mail destined for the floor she worked on and delivering it to the various offices. The rest of the time was spent playing solitaire or SkiFree on the OS/2 Warp 4 machine that was on the opposite side of her desk. Happy times. The machine almost never needed rebooting that I can recall, and was way better than the 286 DOS machine that we had at home. It was on another level than Windows 95 though. Thanks for the video, brings back good memories!

[@Choralone422]

My fondest memory of OS/2 Warp 3 circa 1994 was via a friend who operated a local BBS and ran it on his PC. He used OS/2 so he could both run the BBS and use whatever DOS or Windows program he wanted to at the same time on one PC. He was college aged and his parents gave him a choice between purchasing a 2nd dedicated PC for BBS use or paying for a dedicated phone line. He chose the phone line as school & sysop duties occupied his time. I can still remember the name of the BBS was Prozac Island. Sadly he shut down his BBS after he finished college and went out on his own in the "real world." That was in 1997 after most of us in the area who had been in the BBS scene had migrated to local ISPs and onto the internet.

[@stamasd8500]

In the 1997-1998 era I unwittingly became the administrator of an OS/2 2.1 machine. It was a "legacy" system by that time, a 486 PC that was being used in the research lab where I worked to run a chromatography system. A quite expensive system too, and the problem was that the application software and drivers for the custom hardware (it was being accessed through a SCSI interface of all things) only existed for OS/2. So it became my task to maintain that machine in good working order, and to reinstall the OS and application+drivers when someone inevitably and periodically broke it in an unfixable way. I still have somewhere that boxed copy of OS/2, with the full set of 17 1.44M disks. Because when I left that place I asked if I can take it, and since that system had finally been decommissioned a little while before they had no more use for it and gave it to me.

[@sparthir]

My goodness the amount of work in these videos must be immense. So grateful for them existing through.

[@joaomarcelobadu]

In 1996 my father bought our first PC, a 486DX-100 IBM Aptiva, with Windows 3.1 and OS2 in dual boot. It was very impressive. The only thing that prevented us from using OS2 as a daily driver was the lack of drivers for our Canon Bubble Jet 4100 printer (there was no internet easily available at the time). I really was into IBM fanbase, but with Windows NT 4.0 I just abandoned it.

[@myhappyabby]

There was a community developed tool called PE2LX which converted the Windows portable executable binaries back to the native linear executable instruction set allowing a lot of Windows apps and drivers to run under OS/2 natively.

[@judewestburner]

Agreed. When I saw NT for the first time in a professional setting, it absolutely wowed me

[@cool3865]

whoa in 1996?? how old was that Aptiva? we bought the 1994 Aptiva with Windows 95 Beta and 134mhz chip, 1mb svga, and 8mb of ram, with a 4gb hdd

[@joaomarcelobadu]

@@cool3865 They were probably leftover production from other countries. Here in Brazil we were experiencing the reopening of the market for imports.

[@euromicelli5970]

47:20 “plug-ins to the one Windows process” - that’s a brilliant way to put it. I had never heard of anybody using that description but I love it.

[@tomaszoledzki]

Your videos are amazing. Thanks! Happy to see some day a vid on OpenStep, OPENSTEP, GNUStep, Pink, Taligent, Sun/HP/IBM/Apple/NeXT involvement and all that really complex history that eventually ended up with OS X Server 1.0 and finally with OS X/OS X Server 10.0.

[@JayRCela]

Excellent coverage of this lost part of Operating System development history, I was an early OS/2 fan and was discourged by all of the marketing blunders for what could have been truly great. Thank you, I enjoyed watching this.

[@stoneprevious4294]

Nearly an hour? What a treat! ❤

[@Satscape]

Not OS/2 Fanbase, but at the age of 56 and remembering things is becoming quite challenging these days, I have a vivid memory of lifting the big box product of OS/2 Warp off the shelf and purchasing it...installing it and thinking this will be BIG! It wasn't big. it was an alternative. That's what I read into the "/2" bit...it was the 2nd operating system...if you didn't like the first one, and I didn't and this still continues today. Hi, my name is Scott and I'm a LInux user, I haven't used Windows for 3 years 😁✌

[@myhappyabby]

The OS/2 community bled alot into Linux and BSD communities. You can still find a lot of artifacts we bought over. PE2LX cross contributed a good amount of code to 🍷 WINE

[@kevinm3586]

18:06 "early attempt human emulator". Excellent!

[@rashidisw]

That being said, it does performs a lot more convincing than the more recent ones such as Mark Z.

[@lsdowdle]

One particularly interesting detail you left out, that is brought to light in the book "Barbarians Lead By Bill Gates" is that Microsoft had completely disbanded the Windows development team after they started working with OS/2 as they saw OS/2 as the future... but then something unexpected happened. A intern wanted to work on Windows in their spare time to see if they could get it working in protected memory mode on a 386... and basically started a skunkworks project. That turned out to be a success and they did get Windows working with protected memory... and when Bill Gates found out about it... decided to revive Windows. So, if that intern hadn't have wanted to do that in their spare time, most likely, Windows might have stayed dead.

[@hyoenmadan]

Yes. @AnotherBoringTopic has covered this pretty well in their videos. Also, Windows/386, Windows "Enhanced Mode" and Windows 95 are proper OSs, not just "shells", as @RetroBytesUK says.

[@eriksiers]

@@lsdowdle That dirty S.O.B.

[@h1ghju1ce]

​@@hyoenmadan I'd disagree, win95 would boot from dos , and exit to dos when shutdown I'd call that a shell on top of dos

[@woodch]

41:40 - I was an NCR field tech from 2008 to 2012, and there were a few banks' ATMs I serviced that still ran OS/2. One of them was shockingly old-- had a 9", green monochrome CRT for the screen, and ran a text-only version of OS/2. I remember having to convert IP addresses to hexadecimal for it because that's how the networking worked in it.

[@marksterling8286]

I remember doing an server update project. Setting up 4 lotus notes servers on ibm model95s using os/2 warp connect with ibm token ring on micro channel cards, using netbios and netBui. I remember having some network issues on the first build and using my ibm premium support, the help desk person saying “I can’t help you, because it’s not an ibm problem” I remember daring them to tell me what part of the setup was not from ibm. It was very rapid for the hardware it went on. When I did my lotus notes super server 1 year later it was on NT4 with a compaq proliant 1500. With all the extra hardware and ram that was fast.

[@eriksiers]

@@marksterling8286 Modern techies: what's Lotus Notes? Or token ring? Or microchannel? Or NetBUOS/NetBEUI?

[@philpots48]

When I lived in NYC, I joined an OS/2 group, IBM let use their meeting space at their headquarters on 57th St. They put a layout of coffee, sandwiches and donuts for us.

[@RetroBytesUK]

Part of me is kind of suprised that IBM was helpful to its own OS's user group. Its exactly the sort of thing they should have been doing, someone inside must have done alot of pushing to get that through their internal burocracy, or have been sufficiently high up.

[@der.Schtefan]

I opted for OS/2 and MS DOS dual boot instead of Win95 for my first PC, and was so happy using it.

[@NuculearFallout1]

Im fascinated by os/2 . Thanks for going so in depth on the topic! Highly appreciate a retro bytes deep dive ❤

[@RetroBytesUK]

If you can get an old IBM machine, you will prpbably have an easier time getting drivers.

[@EdgyNumber1]

​@@RetroBytesUKSymbian OS next 👍

[@RetroBytesUK]

@@EdgyNumber1 Now there is an interesting OS, I also have a few Psion devices so I could do its early years, I think I might still have some of the developer manuals for Epoch as it was then. I took the battery out of my Nokia N95, but I bet it would still work if I put one back in.

[@EdgyNumber1]

@@RetroBytesUK I've often said that Symbian was nowhere near as bad as people made out - especially after the re-skin. Nokia simply had the habit of underpowering and under-resourcing their handsets. Just look at their flagship phone specs, launched around the time of the first iPhone - night and day! Samsung's Omnia Symbian OS was much smoother, using a much faster processor, and the Pureview 808 was more user-friendly. All too little, too late.

[@dustinm2717]

​@@EdgyNumber1 i wish symbian was still around, it looked like especially in its later years it was actually a fully capable smartphone OS

[@CoachOta]

I recently spent 90 minutes watching the OS/2 video by Another Boring Topic and I'm happy to have spent the past hour watching this video too. I used OS/2 2.0 for a few months while in college and it was an amazing desktop operating system experience. While IBM made the student copy of OS/2 relatively low cost, there was no way I could afford to purchase OS/2 native word processors, spreadsheets, drawing and other applications. I ultimately went back to just running Windows 3.0 and then 3.1 which was good enough at the time.

[@judewestburner]

Are you sure you didn't watch the same video twice?? 😃😃😃

[@dmdnightfire]

I used OS/2 Warp 3 for a long time, faced driver issues and even got help from the OS/2 people inside IBM with drivers. REXX was absolutely awesome as I had interprocess communication between scripts running to process many tasks concurrently. It was the lack of support that eventually brought my use of OS/2 to an end. Forcing me to switch to NT. I have to say I am quite happy now using Linux but I wish OS/2 got the chance to continue to mature into the 21st century.

[@Plaprad]

Excellent video. I vaguely remember OS/2. I don't think I ever messed with it, but I remember the few ads there were for it. But I think I can shed some light on the college football thing. I too don't really care for sports. But I had a job in the late 90's working IT for a large-ish company. My manager was a cool dude and actually hung out with us. Someone mentioned that a game was sponsored by a tech firm, Cisco I think, and they thought it was weird. Our manager explained why it wasn't. Big sports games are expensive and on TV. Where do the higher ups want to be seen? Somewhere expensive and on TV. I found out our CEO had a box rented for the season for the local NFL team to take prospective clients to. So, you advertise a new, revolutionary, and cool sounding tech product at the game. Then Monday rolls around and the CEO walks into the IT dept. and tells them to "Take a look at this OS/2 thing. I've heard great things. From my research it's quite ." Kinda like how cartoons in the 80's were just toy commercials. Put the product in front of someone who doesn't actually know what it is (CEO's/Kids) so they'll bug the people who actually do things (Parents/IT departments) until they cave and go buy it for them.

isn't 'os half' ?

[@AROAH]

I played around with OS/2 for a few hours in a VM, a few years ago. It was a really neat OS, especially for the time. The web browser even still worked! Not even Internet Explorer 5 works without major third party patches. The cross-compatibility with Windows apps could have changed history if it was allowed to continue beyond the 16-bit era.

[@markusmontkowski6088]

Well it did work. There was the ODIN Project (OS/2 Does It Now) which added a a lot of Win32 APIs and a Win.exe loader which converted/loaded Windows NT/95 Programs on the fly to/as OS2 applications. Or as a company you could recompile your windows app as a "native" OS/2 app if you wanted to port it over. That is what VMWare used for their OS/2 version and later VirtualBox.

[@DavidLeighAlsace]

Excellent historical background. OS/2 vs. Windows was probably my first big taste of "technical religious wars". In our IT department at the time we were watching it closely. We were a mainframe shop and were simultaneously trying to move forward technically. I remember specifically that instead of the pseudo-repository that was and is the Windows Registry, with optional use by programs and the operating system and utilities, OS/2 had a real relational database for the registry and everything was hooked tightly to it. You changed something in the OS/2 registry and it was changed everywhere that it was relevant and didn't get corrupted or have flotsam and jetsam that accumulated. And YES, Rexx (though I knew it mostly in the mainframe context), was (and probably still is) an AMAZING scripting language.

[@cjmillsnun]

I was an OS/2 user back in the day at Uni. I got Warp 3 for next to nothing along with Smartsuite for OS/2. The shop I bought it from were just clearing it out as it had sat for ages.

[@RetroBytesUK]

Sounds like you got a really good deal. Cost was certainly part of OS/2 not taking off, as almost everyone had paid for DOS and Windows as part of the cost of buying their machine.

[@Spozza]

I was just hoping for a new RetroBytes doc - excellent!

[@2thinkcritically]

55:31 I guess the Union Flag in this video was supplied by the IBM Marketing Department as well 🤣 Still, a very informative and enjoyable video!

[@TouYubeTom]

was a hardcore os/2 nerd, running bulletin board systems (maximus via binkleyterm) 24/7 via analogue and later isdn dialins. you did tell the story well, respectul, and very interesting. thank you!

[@RetroBytesUK]

Love that you ran a bulletin board systen on it.

[@danielktdoranie]

I actually bought a copy of “OS/2 Warp 4 Connect” and then I got into Linux and never looked back

[@TekTherapy]

Now i just wanna have the old OS/2 Warp magazine in hand with the Warp Cover CD. I spent so many hours on. Feels like yesterday! Thanks for the amazing Video!

[@ElectronicRapscallion]

Loved the video! I would watch a 4 hour video on IBM marketing. I'm not sure what that says about me :)

[@Sim-rh4tj]

I had OS/2 on my office machine for a few years. I remember it didn't have TCP/IP and having to pay extra for a set of floppies. The shell was interesting, and was good at running DOS and Windows 😐

[@hyoenmadan]

Yes, IBM has this habit to charge for modules which other OS vendors, even MS, included in the OS free of charge. It even happened as late as OS/2 4.0 Aurora, the last IBM offficial release. You had to pay annually this "Software Choice" subscription to have access to feature updates and things like newer revisions of the Internet Browser, updates to the Multimedia component... AND THE FSCKING USB STACK goddamn.

[@garrytuohy9267]

I remember seeing a huge Billboard advertising "OS/2 Warp" in the middle of Manchester in the mid-90's. It still sticks in my mind because of how novel it was.

[@WoodsPrecisionArms]

Running more than one dos application at once was a really big deal and can’t be understated

[@kevinL5425]

I used OS/2 with a REXX script to communicate with a zyxel modem. It utilized the caller ID and other phone voice call support in the modem to do things like play different “leave a message” recordings for different calling numbers, maintain a list of spam phone numbers to ignore and not let leave a message, and even audibly say things like “Your Mom is calling” based on the caller ID so I didn’t have to look at the phone. Ah the good old days!

[@dave2132]

OS/2 was awesome. A few things I remember about OS/2 was the thirty floppy installation near the end. OS/2 really was a better DOS than DOS and Windows than Windows because, IIRC, multitasking in OS/2 was preemptive while Windows apps multitasking was cooperative. A poorly behaving Windows app could slow down and completely hang the system. When the Microsoft Windows for Workgroups 3.1.1 upgrade was released, it completely broke Windows compatibility with OS/2 despite it containing "minor improvements, mainly printer updates." I remember Chicago Bulls coach Phil Jackson in full-page magazine ads for OS/2. Always thought that was strange. Stardock Systems released "Object Desktop" originally for OS/2, which is now ported to Windows. OS/2 was great.

[@gstcomputing65]

OS/2 1.x was very unfriendly and a pain in butt to install, use and do anything productive. However, 2.0 was almost a masterpiece. IBM released version 3 & 4, but they really weren't major kernel enhancements from 2.0. However, IBM never really had a chance. No PC manufacturer wanted to preload or write drivers for an OS written by their biggest competitor.

[@hyoenmadan]

Actually lack of OS/2 drivers was a major reason for OEMs to not include an OS/2 offer in their products. And this incredibly is also an IBM fail, not Microsoft's. Basically they have a habit to sell you stuff which should be in the OS for free, such as the Network Stack and the Multimedia components. And they also price their development kits as if them were a luxury item. Develop applications was terribly expensive for OS/2. And writing Drivers for OS/2 was even worse. Lots of hardware from the era came from Taiwan, from cards to chips, which would never pay a dime for something MS catered them and even offered them free of charge dev kits with their bulk licenses (just as it was later with the MSDN program). With no drivers for most of home cheap commodity hardware, OEMs wouldn't dare to invoke MS's wrath on them for something which wouldn't work with their offers anyways.

[@peterynari]

@@hyoenmadan You're looking at that from a modern perspective. Although you're correct that initial development kits for OS/2 were expensive (this was corrected later), multimedia components were bundled in OS/2 from 2.0 onwards. 1.x versions of OS/2 have no multimedia to speak of, but this is similar to Windows at the time. It was also standard for networking not to be bundled until the mid nineties, and having Warp 3 include a web browser and free dialup capability was at the time revolutionary. It's more accurate to say that IBM refused to admit what Microsoft has since had to do at times : if even reducing the price of a development kit isn't enough, you need to pay someone to write drivers, or write them yourself to capture and maintain the market. If you compare OS/2 to NT, which is really its closest equivalent, whilst the driver model was better in some ways, availability of drivers was way below that of 3.x and later 9x.

[@austfox2170]

BP Australia were running OS/2 in their service stations during the 90's. The PC would communicate with the bowsers (dedicated ISA card) and the registers (serial port), and provided pricing and barcode data, and received and stored every sale. Hard drive backup was to Zip Disk. It was rock solid and ran 24/7 for many years without a reboot.

[@shadow7037932]

Zip disk! Man I've forgotten about those.

[@jakublulek3261]

Little personal story: 1995 was the year my father decided to return from exile in the UK back to former Eastern Bloc (my Scottish mom hated it and it almost detroyed my parent's marriage but eventually, she got used to it), and he wanted a computer to start his business. He was also a rabid Acorn/RISC OS fanboy and "never Microsoft or Apple OS", so he went with an IBM computer and OS/2, just to avoid both of them. And he stuck with it for a number of years, somehow using it (and couple others) to built his book printing company into a modest and prosperous operation. And when it became clear OS/2 is no longer viable, he finally switched to Mac OS (which he hated less than Windows, plus Apple made some slick commercial printers/publishing software). It was my mom, who bought our first Windows PC in 2006 and donated our Iyonix PC to charity, who pretty much ended dad's reign of anti-Microsoft terror.

[@henrymach]

I used OS/2 Warp, which I installed using 31 floppy disks. And I loved it

[@pixelfingers]

Thumbnail’s good btw, video appeared at the top of my feed and it really popped out at me.

[@andythekitsune]

"basketball enthusiast and early attempt at a human emulator" wins line of the day for me

[@MsLisaN]

I ran IBM's OS/2 for many years. Best OS ever. I'm quite certain it's the only Object-Oriented OS. None of the easy hacks were even possible on OS/2. It holds a special place in my memories. I still run it from time to time in a virtualbox.

[@johnvanwinkle4351]

I liked OS/2 because of its greater stability than Windows. Especially version 4.5. Lots a shame IBM didn’t open source the consumer version for active development.

[@MatthewWaltonWalton]

I knew when I clicked on this video you'd give us a highly entertainingly narrated account of IBM's absolute messup and I was not remotely disappointed.

[@aurelienregat-barrel9217]

"technically better does not always win" that's exactly how a guy who played a key role in BeOS development summarized me what he learned from that adventure (of competing against Microsoft in the OS market).

[@lauram5905]

There's a companion series on youtube documenting the early years of Windows (v1 and v2) that shows the insane juggling act Microsoft's engineers had to pull off in the face of IBM's..... unique approach to engineering OS/2. The chief example being 386 support. IBM really slept on it in favor of a 286 foundation, while a couple of oracles at MS predicted what it could enable for Windows if they targeted for it.

[@MrMarkpitcher]

OS/2 was mindblowing. On my homebrew 386-40 (with a whopping 4 megs of memory, lol) I could run a two-line BBS in the background, while playing DOOM or working on an essay -- and it was rock stable, something that Microsoft couldn't manage for another decade on 10x the hardware resources. I moved the BBS to a SCO-XENIX box so I could offer UUCP file transfers, USENET and email, and then shortly afterwards tried out a UNIX clone by some Finnish kid which basically ended the OS wars for me. So glad I was able to experience that little bit of computing history first hand.

[@_iarna_]

I ran a Warp desktop circa 1995, it was actually pretty great. The "object shell" was a truly fascinating approach to a desktop environment, and preemptive multitasking with Windows was awesome. (One must remember that Win '95 barely shipped in 1995 at all.) Although using REXX for shell automation was very weird coming from Unix.

[@bigdrew565]

A little historical perspective: My neighborhood in Newburgh NY was at one point populated by a good amount of IBMers who worked on the Poughkeepsie and Armonk campuses. Right around the launch of OS/2 Warp was when the wheels started to fall off for them and corporate started firing and transferring them wholesale after everything went bellyup when the Personal Systems division got disbanded.

[@Somelucky]

I did phone support for IBM in 1996-1998. Specifically, it was for OS/2 Warp and related products. The number of times someone bought the "wrong" version and was compensated the full install version must have been high. I was very impressed with OS/2 running on my workstation, but obviously there was more functionality in the Windows emulation. There was an OS/2 version of Quake made that got a lot of play. My last year there I worked a 3rd shift job 10pm-7am just waiting by the phone. There was a lot of time to kill figuring out how to access a proxy to get out to the Internet.

[@EannaButler]

54:42 - OS2 Fiesta Bowl... Player there named "Gamble". Didn't win at that table IBM! Doh! Great upload as ever. Thanks 👍

[@Chiberia]

'murica here - the Fiesta Bowl is one of many bowls at the end of the season. It used to be that there was only one bowl (the Rose Bowl) that was the championship. Then all the leagues decided if they weren't the best two teams, they'd have their own bowls at the end of the year with the best two teams in the league - this added about a dozen new bowls, including the Fiesta Bowl, which were always sponsored. Nowadays, there are so many bowls that literally any team with a winning record will be in one at the end of the year - the running joke my team is whether we'll be in "Ted's Used Tire Bowl" this year.

[@travismatheson2884]

I was a Apple user throughout the early 90's as my school was all Apple Macs (another example of a competent marketing at least in Australia, sell your machines to education, the students will need to get the same machines) but in 1995 I got my first PC. DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.11 was my first experience and I learnt DOS and how it ticked. I still have the install floppy discs for that Then along came Windows 95, a PC OS that promised me all of the joy of the UI I knew, along with compatibility I needed. I installed it and ran it for 2 weeks. (most of that time was playing "Hover 3D" IIRC) I had to uninstall it because it was not that, it was not that at all. A friend of mine suggested that I give OS/2 Warp a go and I did. I had a dual boot, OS/2 Warp as my primary OS and a DOS/Windows 3.11 for a few games and apps that didn't work. Ran that until Windows 98 came along Oh, and I saw OS/2 Warp running on ATMs as well, as recently as 2012. Westpac for those Aussies in the room

[@paxsevenfour]

I really wanted to love OS/2. It was such a solid OS with a lot of advanced features albeit tricky to install on commodity hardware. Microsoft really did IBM dirty and tried to do the same to Linux vendors by backing the SCO lawsuits. The late 90’s to early 2000’s was a chaotic timeframe to be starting a career as a software engineer.

[@Ev1lHaX0r]

My Uncle was one of those few that had paid for OS/2 for home. I remember being a kid and just being entertained by the GUI alone on a 286. It took five minutes to boot.

[@CTCTraining1]

I remember it being great because finance would never query purchase orders for IBM equipment or software because it was intended for business use (no ‘fun’ to be had there) but if you tried to buy from other smaller companies or anything from Microsoft then it needed a War & Peace length justification.

[@shadowinthevoid]

Great video. I knew very little about OS/2 beforehand so it was intersting to see what I missed out on. I've always wished we had got to see a proper multitasking DOS and it looks like we sort of got that from OS/2 in a way.

[@Foritus]

As someone who was always OS/2-curious this was really interesting, thank you 💖 Also it's a little ironic that Microsoft is essentially doing the same thing with the WSL and Android subsystems on Windows, maybe with less immediately catastrophic results but still 🙂

[@mwojcik2]

A couple of years ago I gave my last still-shrink-wrapped boxes of OS/2 Warp 4 and IBM VisualAge C++ for OS/2 to a neighbor when I was cleaning out the basement. I used pretty much every version of OS/2 and did a fair bit of software development for it. OS/2 was my daily driver for years on my work "office" machine (my dev systems by that point were all UNIX workstations), until it became too difficult to get the stuff the company made me use running adequately under it. Ah, nostalgia.

[@RetroBytesUK]

I never did get to use VisualAge saddly, the only c I complied for OS/2 was using watcom c on a NT 3.51 workstation. As that was the only compillier work had licensed for OS/2, I also used the same compiler to build for Netware server.

[@jirkasvitil2762]

Another amazing history lesson.

[@jacoblister]

SCADA engineering company I worked for used OS/2 as their 90's era PC master station platform

[@rebeccaschade3987]

Heya. OS/2 "fan" here. I mean, I used OS/2 Warp 3 on my 486 back in the day, and it was amazing. I'm running OS/2 Warp 3 on my Pentium Pro retro system today, and OS/2 absolutely flies on a system like that.

[@marc49lewis]

Still running eComStation on my bulletin board system. Pretty much rock-solid. 20+ years now starting with Warp 4.5 upgraded to ECS.

[@brostenen]

No operating system on X86, woke the feeling of: This is awesomme, when using first time. As OS2 did, when I used it for the first time. It was version before warp. It was that demo that came with a computer magazine. Possible version 2.1 that I installed.

[@x_voxelle_x]

"We don't want a four hour video on 'IBM Can't Market'." I mean... I would.

[@riseofthethorax]

Micro channel had a unique strength, evidently the bus-was like a lan, and each card had the potential to be more than$ just a coproccessor.

[@Robeight]

IBM where spot on about Microsoft not documenting things. Its at the top of my list of things I dont like about using Microsux products.

[@RetroBytesUK]

Apparently there would be massive blocks of ASM without a single comment, that would do somthing very significant in the OS. Also I'm told they where not keen on any function sanitising its inputs, so when stuff went wrong faults would casscade through the system with little clue as to where the fault started. Or at least that what a few IBM devs said. Its hard to know the exact truth, but we can get the ought shape of what the truth is.

[@belstar1128]

microsoft became like ibm both started out well but got bad because many people are practically forced to use their stuff so they don't need to put much effort in their new products if they fail it doesn't matter

[@gn0st1c]

@50:00 "except there is a but here and it's a big but and I cannot lie, even though you other os2 fans may choose to deny" .. made my day! thank you! :D

[@Naedlus]

And now, I'm starting to think that Microsoft licensing the Rolling Stones for Windows 95 was more than just the start button, but actually flexing on IBM for their short-sightedness

[@nazteeb]

Fab nostalgic trip thanks. Firmly DOS & WINdows myself but fantastic to hear about the OS2 side.

[@jonanderson4805]

I use to do tech support at IBM... for a short time we had to use OS/2... major issue was that one of the databases we had to access was so old we had to run it inside an emulator that was windows only. So we were forced to run a windows emulator... so that we could open up the emulator to open the database.... We were so thrilled when they told us we could go back to running windows ;-)

[@JonathanMcCormack]

My wife used to work for IBM, up to 1998 when she left they were still having it as the standard install on their internal laptops and desktops. Most of the staff by then wanted Windows instead.

[@kienanvella]

Growing up, all the machines at home ran OS/2 Warp 4 or eCommStation until about 2003 when we got a singular windows machine. We also had an OS/2 Warp server machine my dad ran his business on. Using OS/2 and eventually windows at home, and Macs at school made groking Linux easy for me.

[@MicrophonicFool]

Hi from a former (failed) OS/2 fanboy. I joined a regional government in 1992 where they had both a old System/38 and 2 newish AS/400s. We needed what was essentially an SNA gateway for Finance desktop computers to talk directly with the AS/400 without always requiring a green-screen terminal application and requiring Token Ring at the time. We were also obligated to run some Provincial Government software which they decided to build in OS/2 v1.3 quickly migrated when 2.1 was released. I very much wanted OS/2 to have longevity given how much effort was going into implementing it for the sake of the mainframes. The removal of 16-bit API was the nail in the coffin for us. That Provincial app I mentioned was 16-bit through and through and no one seemed to want to re-write it. Once Windows NT 3.5 came out, it quickly ruined everything we had been doing in OS/2. I still had a computer with OS/2 Warp on it for a few years. Everything IBM does is just a little so queer. One could tell OS/2 held promise, but few of those promises ever came to be.

[@The_Boctor]

During the Win3.x segment, the phrase "a linked list of pointers" incurred two cache misses in my brain.

[@mack.attack]

Basically at that time in the 90s, the Orange, Sugar, Fiesta, and Cotton Bowl games were the college (American) football national championships. 3 of the games would be the champions of their regions playing each other but 1 game would be the 2 top ranked teams playing for the national championship and which bowl that was rotated thru. The Fiesta Bowl was not the national championship for any of the years IBM sponsored it. (It did have a 6-8% viewership according to Nielsen, so I guess it's something?) The Fiesta Bowl was the National Championship Game for 1996, when....Tostitos had taken the sponsor role from IBM 😂 College football is indeed pretty big here, the big games regularly get 80000+ in attendance and are nationally broadcast which granted is nothing compared to soccer attendance numbers anywhere but here but hey what we got is what we got 😂

[@northof-62]

After I built my first PC, a friend pushed OS/2 on me as he hated MS. And I ended up dual booting, and later even quadruple booting Warp 3 with Win95, OS/2, DOS/Win3 and Linux. OS/2's Boot Manager took care of things. I loved the Work Place Shell's customizabilitiy, being object oriented. And I gathered quite a few applications for the OS too; PMView, Embellish, PM Mail, PMNews, Lotus Smart Suite, Opera web browser, IBM Works and Star Office among others. Sad to see the the end Hobbes OS/2 archive.

[@charlesswansonii9319]

Oh, IBM. You thought you'd open the door to the future of computing with OS/2. BUT in hindsight you should have opened some "Windows". ... ... I'll get me coat.

[@charlesswansonii9319]

Also, no mention of the AARD code fiasco? For shame.

[@LordHog]

Nice video on OS/2. I still have a few boxes copies of OS/2 in my garage. Best part of the video is the explanation of American football. Classic lol

[@edfromnc7660]

At the OS/2 User Group I was told that IBM wasn't a PC a manufacturer(they were among the biggest at the time) or just a chip maker (also one of the biggest at the time) or a software company (again.. at the time) they were a service company selling solutions. They realized that selling an OS/2 solution got them the initial set up and not much follow up sales, but WIndows was a cash cow for service calls.

[@tolkienfan1972]

I used OS/2 Warp on a development workstation for years. It was amazing. I always preferred it to windows. It was rock solid. The scripting was SO much better than windows batch files. And it ran better. Smooth and snappy. Such a shame

[@robertsteinbach7325]

I used the OS/2 server because Lotus Notes version 3 ran on OS/2 and Windows NT and the Windows NT server was new at the time and the pre-Warp OS/2 server was proven stable. Many BBS servers ran OS/2 to run multiple DOS sessions and Windows 3.1 didn't do that. Windows 3.1 and earlier was a GUI on top of DOS.

[@Avo7bProject]

In 1997, I had a contract at an IBM campus to inventory all of the laptops and OS configs in one of their buildings. OS/2 was clearly on the downslide, even within IBM itself at that site. Rough guess I'd say 80% Windows 95 or NT on people's laptops and desktops. I didn't learn much about OS/2... Just turn on a machine and observe what it was running, then shut it off. At the end of day, type up my findings into a Lotus Notes database.

[@Divefire]

What I take away from this, is that the IBM lawyer division should have been replaced with a team of todlers. Excellent video!

[@BollingHolt]

Summer 1993, I was 12 and an apprentice at a local computer store. I remember seeing an OS/2 poster that said the the NT in Windows NT stood for "nice try" LOL. I had copies of OS/2 2.0, 2.1, and even bought OS/2 Warp 3.0 when it came out. Unfortunately, my 486DX-33 only had four megs of RAM which wasn't enough to run it well AT ALL. I always liked OS/2, and I think I'm going to install it on one of my retro rigs. I have an IBM EduQuest 486/100 which may be a prime machine for it ;)

[@RojamZane]

I believe the UK Barclays Bank may have been users of OS/2... I recall going in and the personal banking advisors all had PCs running a GUI to do all of the banking for you. It at the time wasn't Windows, of that I'm sure. Later, at work I was working for "This is not just any retailer, but a Major Store retailer", our ISP (In-Store Processor) non-POS was using OS/2 (as we did in technical support too), but with some Windows on-top. The staff payroll & scheduling system was native OS/2. Later, the switch to NT started as an eventual replacement to all the OS/2 OS going full Windows across the board, including POS.

[@RandomBitzzz]

I was an OS/2 user for years, starting with 2.something then upgrading to Warp. I was pretty impressed with the bundled apps with Warp, and even surfed the internet with the OS. I guess I had a soft spot for non MS OSs, as I was also a Netware admin for well over a decade. That's another OS that was technically superior to MS Windows Server. But a combination of poor marketing, bad business decisions, and sometimes having features that were too forwarding thinking hurt it... much like OS/2's story. My employer also used to run PBX (and/or voicemail) systems that ran on OS/2, along with some crazy big Xerox machine that had an OS/2 box off to the side that did some sort of magic that I was never privy to. These systems weren't part of my department, but I would have loved to poke around at them.

[@Elkarlo77]

I was one of the lucky OS/2 Warp users which had a PC which worked with the Warp demo supplied on a Magazin in Germany. It was great. Then i upgraded my 486 to a Pentium... and i had to switch to Windows 95 to have a working GUI OS as this copy wouldn't run on the new PC. And i kept most of the parts like NIC and Soundcard. That was the End of my OS/2 experience. We called it OS 1/2 as only 50% of the PC would run it.

[@Ice_Karma]

40:04 "[...] that, to be honest, isn't very good at recognizing speech." It's _hard_ to wreck a nice beach! 🤣

[@P-B-G_YT]

I had some experience with an earlier version of OS/2. I wanted and received for Christmas a boxed version of OS/2 Warp for Windows when it came out and ran it for a while. I was using it on a system with a 386-40 with 8mb ram and a 200mb hard drive. One thing I could recall doing was I could run multiple dos windows and would run a couple copies of a dial-up BBS and have chats with users from a local log-in. I also remember having a few dozen windows all playing solitaire by themselves at one time.

[@Lofote]

OS/2 was a minor step for me always. I mean, yes, it had protected mode. But by the time OS/2 Warp 3.0 was out, Windows NT also had it, but in a much more robust way. Because OS/2 misses one critical thing, which is in the internet time that came the essential thing: security. On OS/2 just like on Win9x or any non NT-version of Windows everyone is the admin of the system. Any process can alter the system however it wanted. Windows NT had the concept of admin vs user since day #1, it is literally built into the core of the operating system. OS/2 should have added that already in day #1.

[@hyoenmadan]

Well, NT took that from DEC Prism thanks to Dave Cutler working for them. And actually IBM had it on Taligent OS (later known as OS/2 for PPC), which inherited it from IBM AIX. But due many screws from IBM themselves this never came to be.

[@paul_boddie]

@@hyoenmadan You mean VMS, I'm sure. PRISM was the RISC processor effort that was cancelled.

[@beefgoat80]

Ooh, this is gonna be a good one. My dad so wanted OS/2 to beat Windows. My father hated Bill Gates. He gave me a copy of OS/2 Warp in high school. I loved it. But I went from Windows 3.11 straight to OS/2 Warp. All I really cared about at the time was that most of my favorite games still worked on OS/2.

[@EVPaddy]

Certified OS/2 Engineer here ^^ … still switched the company I worked for then to NT 4.0. Why? They were using only the 5250 emulation natively, everything else was in Windows emulation and it was a PITA.

[@TrueThanny]

I still use REXX regularly, even though my only remaining OS/2 installation is in a VM that I fire up infrequently. It's far from the fastest interpreted language, but I've still never encountered another language that makes parsing text easier. The PARSE command itself is just absurdly useful, allowing one to write a single line of code that can often only be replicated with a couple dozen lines of code in any other language. Not counting regular expressions, which are far less readable and readily writable to anyone who doesn't spend hours per day using them.