LGR Tech Tales - IBM OS/2's Fight Against Windows

Scandisk

Cual es el ultimo ibm

I loved this video so much, I went out onto eBay and bought sealed boxed copies of OS/2 1.0 and 2.0 immediately.

Once Arca Noae finishes DTAudio, then ArcaOS may be the best way to build a modern DOS/Win3 machine.

It should be noted that Blue Lion was still in BETA when LGR made this video, however, there is now a fully updated and supported version of OS/2 available today called ArcaOS from Arca Noae LLC.

From an early M$ employee pointed out IBMs settlement with M$ over OS/2.
He said that when Bill Gates looked over the final contract, he added 11 commas which IBMs lawyers approved. (Bill Gates is the child of 2 successful lawyers.) When IBM sued Microsoft over OS/2, M$ Counsel noted that according to the contract M$ owned OS/2 and IBM was a licensee. That's why the token few million settlement.

Microsoft "ownership" of OS/2 allowed then to keep existing code for OS/2 3.0 which became Windows NT.

I love tech tales. Thanks

OS/2 on a 680000000000000000000000 happened in an alternative reality.

:)

Book "Showstopper" describes IBM insistence on its Presentation Manager which they demanded work on 286 cpus. That was stupid by the late 80s. Microsoft chose Windows as the graphical interface which IBM also chose for OS/2 2.0 +.

In that parallel world where Warp is king. There are people who believe the ex CEO of IBM made their grandmother's fertile again.

IBM needs to release this as open source

I worked at IBM in 1992 and saw first-hand how they screwed up any possible future for OS/2; first by neglecting driver support for third-party hardware and then by designing an object-oriented desktop metaphor where icons that represented files didn’t directly manipulate those files, so you could do things like move or delete the icons without moving or deleting the files which they represented. This caused enormous user confusion and frustration as well as high staff retraining costs, since other popular windowing operating systems such as Windows or MacOS didn’t operate that way

I remember seeing OS/2 on my local supermarket checkout register.

I was on the development and test team for OS2

Actually each one user running Windows watching this video is using the latest OS/2 10 (or 11) version
Because Windows NT the modern Win10-11 is based on is actually an modified OS/2 ;)
The NTFS filesystem is an modifier OS/2's HPFS
and so on

At the beginning when he makes that gag about “What if IBM won ?” I would like to live in that timeline

Whenever Bill gates says "X will be the future" what he's actually saying is "Hold my beer. I'm about to ruin this mans whole career"

I stil have an old video, probably 30 years old now on Bill saying "I believe OS/2 is platform for the nineties" - Not sure if keeping NT for being exposed or maybe he believed it would years to take off. Thanks for the video, great history!

Used OS/2 Warp to run a multiline Wildcat BBS. It was way better than using Dos with DESQview. Windows 95 brought the end to my BBS days as gaming languished on OS/2.

Huh, why did that one OS/2 screenshot have a MacOS 9 trash can?

Too little too late for the IBM behemoth, even though OS/2 Warp was good enough for my local circuit court clerk office. The cunning Bill Gates proved to be too smart. By the time IBM hurriedly came knocking as it looked for an OS for its new Personal Computer, Microsoft had already hired the guy who wrote 86-DOS, and Microsoft renamed it MS-DOS to license to IBM. If Big Blue had looked ahead to the ramifications of MS-DOS being licensed to companies that would make competitive PC-compatibles, Big Blue should have fought to buy Microsoft outright. Did any such negotiations occur?

Bill gates said it: the 80286 was "braindead". It was not worth developing an entire operating system around. IBM just forced it into being, despite programmer complaints. Microsoft did what they felt like, namely adding a few features from the 80286 to Windows as it made sense, but never fully embracing the CPU. It just had too many compromises, starting with general incompatibility with DOS and getting worse from there. That changed with the 80386, but by then IBM and Microsoft had gone separate ways.

I had one direct interaction with OS/2. In 1996 I worked for a salesforce automation company who had contracts in the US for some big name pharmaceutical companies. The reps had laptops, either Compaq LTE or Toshiba 410 models (I forget the letter suffixes for the Toshibas,) with Windows 3.11 and Xcellenet RemoteWare GUI shell. The RenoteWare servers ran on OS/2.

Microsoft started with the wrong foot with Quick and Dirty Operating System and kept the pace until today with barely working software full of bugs. They work the thing just enough to make it available and invest much more of their attention on aesthetics and useless features. At least with IBM, perhaps, this could've been different.

I installed OS/2 when it first came out. Ran it for 15-20 minutes, saw how mediocre it was and immediately uninstalled it and reverted to MS Windows

IBM was the Giant by then whereas Microsoft was the contender. Now, Microsoft is a Dragon, whereas IBM is just a shadow of its former self...

Every time I feel crazy enough to try installing this OS, I am reminded that it is the worst operating system ever crapped out.

As I recall, it didn’t seem that IBM even tried to defeat MS. Seemed more like they raised the white flag and betrayed OS/2 loyalists and fans.

Former sponsor of the IBM OS/2 Fiesta Bowl, thank God that only lasted a year.

I have several versions of OS/2 set up in virtual machines, they're a lot of fun to play with.

I never used OS/2, but professionally, I used IBM software in my career such as IBM DOORS, Synergy and Rational Suite for requirements, software release and project management. Their UIs have a strong link to OS/2's general operability. Their clunkiness was as infuriating as it was charming.

Very well written!

In the wim 3.1 days, os/2 was AMAZING! I could run multiple nodes of my bbs on the sane computer! My parents hated it because that meant scilent people kept calling out main phone number.

Be glad we're not using Warp 10. I've seen that episode of Voyager. It was awful.

I still have a copy in the original box.

I got Warp for free, I think it came with a monthly magazine.

Ps/2 are excellent computers, Os/2 is an excellent operating system. But IBM was ruined by their greed.

I’m watching this on my iOS/2 based Phone/2 by IBM

restart os 2. linux sucks

The original OS/2 2.0 promo has quite possibly the most interesting opening you could imagine a presentation having. It was a cartoon taking place in the old west and...it's hard to describe unless you watch. It's glorious.

I spent a butt-load of my career in IBM working on/with OS/2. This brings a tear to my eye...

Bill Gates is absolutely evil

I never knew why /2.
Though i know that 'DOS' in spanish means 'Two' .
So it's kinda funny.

OS/2 is one of the most important OSes dead than alive. Some of the OS/2 code still lies in Windows today.

My experience with OS2. With much anticipation, I installed it, ran it and 30 minutes later Dumped it. Pure waste of time and resources.

Too bad about os_2 they should have continued development

Still have my father’s OS/2 Warp boxed set. 😅 Quite the API architecture.

ArcsOs is still being developed and like eCommstation is used for very niche applications. I recently tried both and even installed Warp 4 in a VM. My first thought now, like back in the day, is why do I need thus when all of my software is Dos or Windows native. OS/2 compatibility with Dos and Windows is what killed it because nobody needed to develop software for it.