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

3 ай бұрын

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

3 ай бұрын

@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.

@YourIdeologyIsDelusional

3 ай бұрын

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

@freeculture

3 ай бұрын

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

@trannusaran6164

3 ай бұрын

yikes

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

3 ай бұрын

Dilbert is propably a manifestation of that period.

@sunnohh

3 ай бұрын

Luckily nothing has changed, 😂

@JuanPerez-cs1gx

3 ай бұрын

"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

3 ай бұрын

@@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

3 ай бұрын

@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.

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.

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

@peteblazar5515

3 ай бұрын

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

3 ай бұрын

High memory?

@peteblazar5515

3 ай бұрын

@@cheekybastard99 No, protected memories.

@PaulaBean

3 ай бұрын

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

3 ай бұрын

@@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.

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

3 ай бұрын

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

3 ай бұрын

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

3 ай бұрын

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

@brostenen

3 ай бұрын

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

3 ай бұрын

​​@@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.

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

3 ай бұрын

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.

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

2 ай бұрын

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.

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!

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

3 ай бұрын

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

Ай бұрын

@@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

Ай бұрын

@@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.

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

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

Nearly an hour? What a treat! ❤

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.

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.

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.

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!

@PedroHenriqueQuiteteBarreto

3 ай бұрын

Conectiva?

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

3 ай бұрын

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

3 ай бұрын

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

@cool3865

11 күн бұрын

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

11 күн бұрын

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

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

3 ай бұрын

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.

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

Algorithmic encouragement algorithm, engage. Thanks so much for putting so much time into these. You are one of my favorite creators on the KZreads 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).

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.

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!

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

@rashidisw

3 ай бұрын

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

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.

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

@RetroBytesUK

3 ай бұрын

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

@EdgyNumber1

3 ай бұрын

​@@RetroBytesUKSymbian OS next 👍

@RetroBytesUK

3 ай бұрын

@@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

3 ай бұрын

@@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

3 ай бұрын

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

isn't 'os half' ?

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

3 ай бұрын

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

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!

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

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

@RetroBytesUK

3 ай бұрын

Thanks

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

3 ай бұрын

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.

Really nice work on this video!

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.

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.

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

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

3 ай бұрын

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.

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

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

3 ай бұрын

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.

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

3 ай бұрын

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.

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.

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!

Excellent video! I enjoyed the memories very much! One thing you missed, at least in my experience as a software and hardware PC tech during this era, was the fact OS/2 Warp was not the only option for power users who needed more multitasking and more speed than Dos and Windows could provide. In fact, on that score it was rather late to the party. Many of the small businesses my company had under contract had long been using such applications as QEMM386 for memory management, Desqview for multi-tasking in MS-Dos, and Windows 3.x shell replacements like Norton Desktop for Windows, which made huge improvements to Windows’ resource management functions and thereby allowed it to run much longer between reboots, to the point that many users almost never needed to shut down Windows except at the end of the day. Norton Desktop also added context menus to desktop objects and included a massively improved file manager. Having Norton Desktop on top of Windows was a lot like having Windows 95 a few years early, and so for a lot of people who had already made accommodations for the shortcomings of Dos and Windows, OS/2 Warp didn’t offer as many compelling advantages as people today seem to think it did.

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

3 ай бұрын

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.

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.

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

3 ай бұрын

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

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.

Excellent video!

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.

Another amazing history lesson.

Good stuff, very much enjoy your content!

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

3 ай бұрын

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

Cheers for mentioning B5 :)

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.

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.

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

3 ай бұрын

Zip disk! Man I've forgotten about those.

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.

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

great video !!

Fantastic work sir! My mate Andrew uses OS/2!

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

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

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

3 ай бұрын

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

3 ай бұрын

@@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.

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

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

3 ай бұрын

Love that you ran a bulletin board systen on it.

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

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.

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

3 ай бұрын

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.

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...

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.

Team OS/2 represent, IBM "OS/2 Ambassador Gold" level. Anyone else go to the Indy 500 award festival in 1991?

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! 😂

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

3 ай бұрын

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

@craigreeves5319

3 ай бұрын

I agree but still that's what Toyota used.

Thanks!

Thanks 👍

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

I remember my Dad was an engineer at Caterpillar and they were always using OS/2. I was a big dork as a kid and found the idea of an OS most people had no idea existed cool.

Back in 1998 I worked for a one of the three big travel reservations companies. We were using a OS/2 computer at a print server.

I loved OS/2. I ran a 2-line Wildcat! BBS (3-line during the day while at work) under it in the early- to mid-90's, w/ a 500MB files section and 4x CD-ROMs, and it was splendid. Ah, those halcyon days of computers!

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.

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 ;-)

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 😂

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.

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.

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.

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

You are a cool guy; I always like to see your videos uploaded! Wish I had a friend like you interested on this stuff too. I actually tried OS2/Wrap on an 86Box Vm and loved it. It couldn't run Sim Tower tho, so it is a big no-no. And I ripped my hair trying to install sb16 drivers. But man, I had a blast and after having to format my computer I miss it.. I might try it again when I finish uni

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.

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.

*Excited gufffahing* Thank you so much!

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

I had a book about OS/2 programming but never had a chance to apply that knowledge

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.

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.

I want that 4 hour video on IBM marketing.

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