The history of OS/2

[@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.

[@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

[@chestermarcol3831]

Ran a transportation routing system, shared workstations, the works on OS/2 Warp Connect and it was fantastic. That thing ran for 8 years straight, with ZERO crashes. It was truly remarkable.

[@simplycircus]

OS/2 had a feature that could have killed Windows, but was killed by IBM. That feature allowed you to program applications in a way that you could, over the network, hand compute jobs from the workstation to a mainframe, and then get the compute results back seamlessly. This allowed you to use, say, an office full of 386sx's to out compute the 486DX's. And because it only off-loaded tasks that would take too long on the PC, it was hugely efficient. Barely noticeable impact on the mainframe for us. Why they didn't push this to the business world is beyond me.

[@thecollector6746]

I doubt that (at least as far as replacing Windows as the default desktop) Windows dominated back then for the same reason it dominates now...basically because it's a familiar enviroment that had the best productivy tools. I could see OS/2 if keeping the feature you describe eating NT's lunch on the backend server space.....but it never had a chance to suplant Windows in the end-user space.

[@xerzy]

You mean... distributed computing? Everyone had their own version of that at the time, and it's not like IBM's DSOM had any significant advantages over, say, Microsoft's DCOM, NeXT's PDO or the CORBA standard. It wasn't any more capable nor any more transparent. So it was kinda doomed from the start, and it couldn't have changed the world - just like the others didn't.

[@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.

[@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!

[@sparthir]

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

[@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.

[@stephenjacks8196]

Note the book "Showstopper" by Zachary; he was an OS/2 and NT Developer. He points out IBM abandoned OS/2 support during development,

[@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.

[@CatFace8885]

@@chestermarcol3831 We talking about what Windows NT became today in the form of Windows 11? Or Windows NT back then? Because I'd hardly call win11 remotely "good" lol

[@chestermarcol3831]

@@CatFace8885 - Back then.

[@rigues]

In the early 2000's I worked at a local Linux distro in Brazil, and one of our big projects was a contract with a large bank, Banrisul, to migrate their IT infrastructure, including ATMs, from OS/2 to Linux. We even managed to get Tux proudly displayed on the ATMs Home Screen!

[@pedrohqb]

Conectiva?

[@KOTYAR1]

Nice!

[@andrehinds568]

At the very end of the OS/2 Applications Group, I was at IBM as a contractor writing the user’s guide for the OS/2 word processor called Notesmith/2. There are a million stories in the naked city, and I have a dozen of them about OS/2 from the inside.

[@paulie-g]

You ought to write them up and publish, an inside view is always of great interest. I'm not aware of anyone from inside that group ever talking about their experience.

[@andrehinds568]

@@paulie-g I signed a Non-Disclosure in 1991 and couldn't even talk about WORKING for IBM for five years (it screwed up my resume awfully badly. I sincerely doubt IBM would sue me for talking about OS/2 now, but who wants to tickle that dragon?

[@paulie-g]

@@andrehinds568 Not being able to even mention working for an employer is one hardcore NDA (there are more hardcore ones, but not many). I doubt, having now licensed OS/2 away to Arca, IBM cares, but you also don't have great incentive to try your luck. Maybe find a way to do it anonymously someday? Just a suggestion in the interests of preserving history.

[@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.

[@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.

[@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.

[@digitastic]

favourite Saturday morning viewing as an adult - thanks, another great and highly informative bit of retro historical goodness.

[@stoneprevious4294]

Nearly an hour? What a treat! ❤

[@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.

[@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.

[@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.

[@fredskronk]

Sometime around 1996 a large Swedish PC Magazine bundled OS/2 Warp, with the magazine, for free. Tie CD:s. One for the OS and one for extra applications for internet etc. Only problem: it came with a note saying “after going through the install process you’ll get a message saying that it failed. This is not the case. The installation went through correctly but the wrong message is displayed.“ Well. I did not replace the installation of windows 95 on the family computer.

[@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.

[@makinbac0n]

Great video. Growing up in the early Windows and DOS days I always wondered what OS/2 was and why I never saw it. Thanks!

[@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!

[@dakralex]

I love the fun and great narrative you present in your video, it gives a good picture about the hard- and software you're talking about without getting bored. I would love if you could do videos like your "About X11" video for other software projects like GNU, Linux, GCC, and more as there is not that many about it on the Internet as far as I can tell.

[@JureRepinc]

Same here, would love a video like this about GNU/Linux and FOSS and software that truly respects the user and user rights.

[@DocMacLovin]

Great video. I was an OS/2 dev back in the days and loved OS/2. Everything you present is correct. Ah .... memories.

[@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.

[@LeonZetekoff]

Team OS/2 Worked for a document imaging Company in boca raton. We developed TWAIN for OS/2 and tried for years to get ibm to buy it. The local ibmers wanted it but couldn't sell it upstream. We also developed barcode anywhere which could detect a barcode anywhere on a page at any angle and was trained in the shipping industry. Also ibm bought that from us as our barcode detection was far superior to ibms. We also had forms processing as well which was used in voting applications.

[@myhappyabby]

I pushed IBM a lot to buy your code. I (and my clients) really appreciated those TWAIN drivers. IBM was completely ignorant about driver software back then.

[@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?

[@williambrasky3891]

Algorithmic encouragement algorithm, engage. Thanks so much for putting so much time into these. You are one of my favorite creators on the KZbins and my number one favorite for retro computing/ computing history. You’re the Curious Marc of software! (with production quality up closer to Ahoy compared to Curious Marc {no shade}. Though that might just be the bass-ey British accent benefit taking).

[@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.

[@ElectronicRapscallion]

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

[@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!

[@Ezyasnos]

This video is solid gold! So well informed, well presented, and easy to understand.

[@EannaButler]

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

[@marksterling8286]

Hi. I also remember having our ibm account manager pushing hard for us to get a Remote Desktop monitoring system tivoli TME10 and we got a 6month license to run and and see its returns. The Tme console could only run on os/2 warp connect with a very beefy pc. My boss was quite keen we do this so I ordered the new pc and ibm sent some technical guys to install os/2warp and setup the tme10 console. 3 days later they got it up and running only crashing every 3 hours or so. The other down side was the pc it was monitoring were mostly windows 3 and 3.1 machines with likely only 8mb of ram (a decent spec at the time) our fault calls went up 400% due to the monitor client taking much needed ram on the windows pc. The trial was cut short after 4 weeks not 6months. 1 week of the four was them trying to install the console. I loved ibm warp it was technically better, the trouble was the ibm company and some of the people.

[@RetroBytesUK]

When I was at ICL we had Tovoli, mostly monitoring our NT, and OS/2 servers and the Token Ring network. It was supposed to monitor our Mitel phone system, but that part never worked even once.

[@osholio]

I ran OS/2 well into the Windows NT era, probably longer than I should have. I was writing VB6 code a lot and did that under OS/2 because it genuinely was a 'better Windows than Windows', so running it at home was a no-brainer. I even have the original OS/2 version of Galactic Civilisations from Stardock (as there were no other games available to speak of). Eventually, of course, Windows NT 4 was simply the better option and I never used it again, though I did find by boxed copy of Warp 4.0 recently. Good times, for a while.

[@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.

[@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.

[@Spozza]

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

[@slightlyevolved]

One thing I think gets overlooked is right in the names. As stated, OS/2 was an operating system, prior to this, the likes of MS-DOS and Apple ProDOS were just that, DISK Operating Systems. They were mostly there to facilitate manipulation of files and launching applications. Later on, yeah, there was more overlap, but I think half of that added functionality was to facilitate the use of Windows, making the combination of Dos+Windows a full OS. Meanwhile , the likes of the Mac, Amiga Workbench, plus much of the prior mainframe and minicomputer systems were full on OSs. The main differentiation being how software interacted with the hardware. DOS systems usually were bare metal (BIOS calls not withstanding) while full OS systems had APIs and hardware abstraction that the software interacted with instead.

[@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

[@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.

[@nathana.7473]

Good boiling down of technical details! Some points of correction and/or discussion on historical points: 7:05 - This makes it sound like IBM wholly owned OS/2 since its inception & maybe just contracted some of the development work to MS, and were hoping to get the whole PC market to pivot to licensing their OSes from them instead of from MS. In actuality, my understanding is that the JDA allowed for both MS and IBM to sell OS/2 licenses. Both companies in fact had their own separate "branded" releases for OS/2 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, and 1.3. IBM's releases and Microsoft's releases were even ever so slightly different, not just in branding but also in terms of bundled software and utilities. So they each kind of had their own "distributions" of OS/2. In addition, Microsoft was both very free and very happy to do bulk licensing deals to customize OS/2 for a given system vendor's hardware...much like they did with customized editions of MS-DOS. So at least from an outside customer's perspective, this was a situation that looked almost no different from Microsoft MS-DOS vs. IBM PC-DOS. Perhaps the point you're trying to get across is that since the JDA likely gave both IBM and Microsoft roughly equal amounts of skin in the game, maybe a copy sold by Microsoft would still involve royalties being split between MS and IBM for that copy, and thus copies of OS/2 shipped on non-IBM PCs would no longer result in IBM earning $0.00 from the sale of that PC, even if it was the MS "version" of OS/2 that shipped and not the IBM one. I don't know what the revenue- or profit-sharing agreement was like, so that might be the case. I'd be interested to know for sure. 17:25 - Arguably MS has (for the most part) had an exceptional relationship with most of their third-party developers; I don't know of too many that would describe their relationship with MS as overly antagonistic. Certainly not in the same way that (for example) Apple's contemporary developer relations is going these days! There are some famous exceptions, of course, when it comes to some specific developers (*cough*LOTUS*cough*), and maybe that's where you were going with this? Speaking of which... 22:00 - I'd love to have your source for this. As far as I've ever been able to find, this urban myth about a second, secret set of API calls that only MS knew about & leveraged to make their applications better in some vague way compared to their competitors who were selling into the same market (e.g. office suite) is exactly that: a myth. 24:28 - Presentation Manager is NOT gone at this point. This is a HUGE pet peeve of mine, and you are hardly the first person to make this mistake. Presentation Manager ("PM") is NOT the shell for the OS/2 GUI. PM *is* the OS/2 GUI subsystem itself. Think of it more like X11 (though it's not client/server architected the way X is, naturally). When you write graphical apps for OS/2, you are making calls into PM APIs. This continued to be true in the 32-bit OS/2 era. People conflate PM with the shell all the time for some reason, though. Workplace Shell/WPS did not replace PM; WPS replaced Desktop Manager (kinda-sorta looking and feeling like a proto-"Program Manager" from Win3, which makes sense since Win3 and Program Manager shipped later). Both Desktop Manager and WPS are themselves PM "apps" or "processes".

[@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.

[@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.

[@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.

[@ACCPhil]

In the early 90s, I was writing loads of C and C++ code. I'd tried coding on early versions of Windows and found it painful. Then I got hold of a copy of OS/2 2.0 and I remember being blown away by how much better it was to develop on.

[@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.

[@gaxiola1701]

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?? 😃😃😃

[@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.

[@MikeHeath]

I had a high school teacher that ran OS/2. One of the best teachers I ever had. That was my first introduction to OS/2. I learned a little Rexx on it. I loved OS/2. I went to Comdex with some friends and one of us won a free copy of OS/2 Warp. Sadly, I don't think it was every really used as we all moved on to Windows 95 by that point.

[@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.

[@kevinL5425]

I was running OS/2 since 1.0 because our company wanted someone familiar with it. In 1994 a new boss told me I had to switch to Windows 3. I suggested we wait until Windows 95 came out in a few months so I would have something with similar capabilities to what I was used to. His response was to yell and scream at me that I had to do what he said. In 2024 I still run OS/2 in a VM on my machine, just so I can say I am still running OS/2 30 years after that boss was fired.

[@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.

[@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

[@cebruthius]

@@h1ghju1ce Except it wasn't. It used DOS more like a bootloader, and then "swallowed" the DOS stuff for compatibility reasons and co-operated with it, but didn't depend on them. Wikipedia: MS-DOS itself is demoted to a compatibility layer for 16-bit device drivers.[19] ... Keeping MS-DOS in memory allows Windows 95 to use DOS device drivers when suitable Windows drivers are unavailable.

[@OldGregg79]

56:01 I remember getting that OS/2 cover disc back in the day and it not working, thinking it was just my PC. I didn’t realise that it didn’t work for anybody else! 🤦 Great content this, my favorite channel that also depressingly reminds me of how old I am! 😂

[@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.

[@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.

[@l3xforever]

31:50 I may have trouble hearing it, but so does auto subtitles apparently. 2.1 codename was Borg, 2.0 was Crusader. 3.0 was Warp.

[@silmarian]

I was a desktop tech support wonk in a major corporation that ran OS/2 back in the day in part because IBM Global Services ran IT. I don't remember a lot of the issues back in the day, but what I do remember was having to figure out kludges to get anything working. Os/2 and Token Ring in 1997 or so was just so hard to keep running and god help you if you wanted to set up a new computer.

[@willemvdk4886]

Your videos are so good every single time. Good work, respect!

[@RetroBytesUK]

Thanks

[@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

[@kevinL5425]

I used OS/2 to run a popular gopher server in the mid 1990s on my office IBM PS/2 model 60. It happily ran unnoticed in the background while I continued to do normal work stuff in the foreground. I also used a great native OS/2 word processor called “Describe” for editing our department newsletters, ran the occasional windows or multiple dos programs with full compatibility. It was great!

[@CraigReeves]

I had a contract with Toyota in the late 90's they only used IBM machines with that wonderful MCA and OS/2. They also used Token Ring networks. All because they were more reliable.

[@kurtwinter4422]

MCA, OS/2 good, Token Ring bad, mkay. Supporting Token Ring was a nightmare.

[@reevesinnovate]

I agree but still that's what Toyota used.

[@pixelfingers]

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

[@rastersoft]

I used for a long time Warp and Warp 4, and it was great, as you say. The problem with the Presentation Manager queue was fixed in a fixpack: it basically checked if an application stopped responding, and stole the focus.

[@kpfaulkner]

Thanks!

[@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.

[@woodch]

Also posting to say "hi" in the comments as an OS/2 fan. Not a CURRENT fan, mind you, but I did install it and run it on my 386DX40 for a while back in the 90's, and the experience was mostly positive. I think I only went back to DOS/Windows because most games simply ran better in an either pure DOS or Windows environment at the time, and I didn't have the luxury of space to have multiple OSes installed at the time. But OS/2 ran my BBS communications software perfectly, and I was even able to run a 2-line BBS from work under OS/2 perfectly. What a memory!

[@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.

[@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.

[@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.

[@mahiru20ten]

There are several college football playoff games in the United States. Fiesta Bowl is just one of them. There are others like Rose Bowl, Orange Bowl, Sugar Bowl, Cotton Bowl and Peach Bowl. The six that I just mention now determine the teams that play in the final College Football Playoff National Championship game. There are also "invitational" post-season bowl games such as Gator Bowl, Sun Bowl and Citrus Bowl.

[@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

[@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.

[@BlueBarnTech]

I absolutely loved OS/2 Warp. Not really sure why though :). I worked at Elek-Tek in the 90s and we had a "software cage" that we could check out software to try out. I remember taking Warp home and having a great time with it for a few months. Thanks for the walk through history...

isn't 'os half' ?

[@rondobrondo]

@27:30, I forgot how much of an influence that Pantone had on early color profile standardization. That's an interesting topic on its own. Not really the most influential of all time of course, but still pretty interesting

[@Wampa842]

I'm a fairly young whippersnapper, and I've used OS/2. Not out of choice of course. I used to work at a European factory belonging to a big American tech corporation, and one of the assembly machines there used OS/2, probably to this day. It had a single coaxial thin ethernet connection and we had to load the tooling programs using three inch floppy disks. I won't name names, but you would be shocked.

[@richchinnici6182]

In the early to mid 90s, OS/2 also had a niche for use in applications requiring something like real-time capabilities, or at least close to it. One of those was in package sortation systems in warehouses and distributing centers, which is where I was first exposed to OS/2 (v2.0). It ran the software fairly well, though did suffer some instabilities. Once upgraded to v2.11, it was quite stable and robust and ran at our distribution centers into the early 2000s.

[@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!

[@jacoblister]

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

[@peteblazar5515]

What I remember in time of release OS/2 Warp with bigger memory requirements there was fire in major factory for memory packaging material. It stopped decline memory prices almost for two years.

[@sinoperture]

I think from an earthquake and ram prices sky rocketed. I had 16MB in my 486 that I got as a gift from a friends dad. That was when I knew I could go to OS/2 and did so with 2.1 at the time. I could go online at 14.4K and not lose carrier and multitask and it wasn't slow due to having 16MB of RAM which was double what was really needed and 4 times more than most people could get or afford in those days.

[@peteblazar5515]

@@sinoperture Most machines those days had 4MB RAM, OS/2 needed 8MB. Due two year pause of Moore Law it was easier win for Windows. Higher price of OS/2 didn't help too.

[@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.

[@GeoffSeeley]

Great content! While I never had the opportunity to use or code for OS/2, I did know it had actual multitasking as opposed to the early Windows and MacOS not-really-multitasking OSs. I did however learn and code ARexx on AmigaOS (a proper multitasking OS) but I never knew the tie in from the IBM world.

[@hmichaelkraut7968]

Love your videos and sense of humor. Thanks so much!

[@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.

[@nazteeb]

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

[@Paul29Esx]

I was building OS2 branch servers for a retail bank in 99. It was very customised though, but it just worked rock solid. There were stories the company had to pay IBM for new hardware drivers whenever the servers got updated

[@EVPaddy]

As I remember it, the Warp moniker came only with version 3, not beofre?

[@marc49lewis]

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

[@PBGetson]

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.

[@TrueThanny]

28:45 The "Warp" name was with version 3.0, not 2.1.

[@eric_d]

I always wanted to try OS/2. I picked up a copy of Warp 4 at a computer show many years back for $10. Got home, super excited to check it out, only to find out it was a time bombed alpha release that had already expired, so I returned it the next day. I did install OS/2 in a VM a year or 2 ago, but never really looked into it. These days I usually use Debian whenever I can, and Windoze 10 whenever I have to.

[@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 ;-)

[@MikeinVirginia1]

In 1995 l worked in a US-based Ericsson division. I was in a software development group. We liked OS/2 as it facilitated running multiple applications in separate windows and was fast when used in this way. But the LAN group for the plant was pushing Windows NT. Our group had it's own little LAN, but eventually we had to use the corporate LAN (for obvious reasons) and give up OS/2. 😢

[@rickharold7884]

Ah memory Lane. We started out installShield on windows 2. Which I thought was awesome because of abstracted video cards drivers with api. video cards at the time was a nightmare. We supported os2 when it came out. It actually was a better operating system. Nice apis. but working with IBM was very difficult and Microsoft was so aggressive and moving quickly. Microsoft also embraced and helped us develop the products actively. Windows 95 was the revolutionary finishing touch. Thanks for the video Awesome

[@Electronics-Rocks]

I loved OS/2 warp & used it. I started using OS/2 as maintaining university systems who used OS/2! Until like you said win 95 came along but Win95 did crash more. I still have my launch development books for 95. I lost the cool boxes as the books I kept as they were put on a book shelf. The IBM speech recognition had two versions one using any sound card & a lot more expensive version with their own card. These DSP chips ended up being used on military products which worked well. Maybe not as good as our versions today but was used in loads of medical & legal sites especially in X-ray departments. Where money is not a problem. I still have the DSP if you want pictures