The Fall of OS/2
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- Опубліковано 27 тра 2024
- IBM had unknowingly created a juggernaut when they allowed Bill Gates and Microsoft to control the PC operating system standard, first with DOS and then with Windows. Having lost control of the PC hardware standard, IBM was determined to regain control of the operating system standard.
Their weapon?
The OS/2 operating system, a powerful and feature packed operating system that best case should have had little trouble overcoming Windows, and worst case should have at least been able to carve out a profitable and sustainable market share. This is the story of how IBM's last attempt to keep a measure of control in the PC space...failed.
Note: the first part of OS/2’s story can be found in part 3 of the Rise and Fall of the IBM PC • The Rise and Fall of t...
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00:00:00 Intro
00:05:36 OS/2 1.3
00:11:42 Jim Cannavino
00:20:49 OS/2 2.0
00:26:36 Taligent
00:29:00 The Trojan Horse of Windows Compatibility
00:34:49 OS/2 2.1
00:42:00 OS/2 Warp 3
00:46:18 OS/2 Specific Publications
00:52:49 OS/2 Professional Warp 3 Coverage
01:01:05 The Warp Marketing Disaster
01:15:25 The OS/2 Implosion
01:23:37 OS/2 Warp PowerPC
01:25:27 OS/2 Warp 4
01:34:27 ArcaOS
01:36:04 Wrap-Up and Final Thoughts - Розваги
I shut down our last OS/2 Warp 4 deployment at the bank I worked at (was still using Token Ring!) back in 2011. Say what you will, that platform ran diligently forever without a hiccup.
I was just at a customer site in March. One of their server racks got my attention when I saw a server that still had a (5-1/4" tray-loading) CD-ROM drive. And then saw two others that still had floppy drives. One was running Windows XP, on a Pentium 4 CPU with 512MB RAM. Still running since its last reboot in 2018, on the network, and able to ping things. And of course it was for "security"... haha
...and I worked for an integrator that was called in to convert a bank running OS/2 and Token Ring to the new purchasing bank's system - which was garbage.We had converted a perfectly usable, stable, and clear system to an amalgamation of Windows 3.1, DOS, and Novell.
Printing was a nightmare. User experience was in the toilet compared to what those users were used to. We were despised when we'd come to convert their sections.
OS/2 had run everything from the teller's terminals to the ATM's to the back end servers. What a disgrace! So perfect for that system!
It was one of the reasons why I left that company; the level of incompetence and short sightedness... 😢 I have never seen the like since.
Was this bank in the Reading, PA area, by chance?
When I got my first job after college, the company was running OS/2 and Token Ring. It seems so long ago.
@Nick Wallette Kid, I have t-shirts that are older than those servers.
@@nickwallette6201 'tray loading' you mean those caddy things about ¼inch thick?
I worked on os2 warp in 1994. I was in testing. Management required that programmers fix bugs after hours and on weekends without pay. As a result, I was cornered and told about the really bad things that would happen to me if I continued to report bugs - which was why I was there. I was not the only one. So if you ever wondered why os2 had so many bugs, now you know.
Wow!
I was involved in testing of earlier versions, spent some time at the Austin lab for testing the national language versions of OS/2 1.2 extended edition. We quickly resorted to a planning which ensured we wouldn't submit any bugs after friday noon, to give the developers some time to deal with them while avoiding too much overflow into the weekend. Back then the standard was 'next day fix' for anything deemed critical, as we still had to work with overnight builds.
Later we did most of this testing from Europe, which ensured no new bug reports after friday noon due to being in a different time zone 6+ hours ahead of the developers in the USA.
@@c128stuffactually I heard a lot of people say that os2 1.x was actually a fairly decent operating system. It wasn't until 2.0 came out that they had some really serious problems. One of the really bad ones I remember is that the installation program would reformat your hard drive and erase everything on it without giving you any notice or warning. Another bug was called The lazy write bug which caused data that was intended to be written to the hard drive to be cached indefinitely instead. So nothing got written to the hard drive until you closed down the OS. But if the OS crashed, you lost every single thing you did after the OS was booted up. It crashed a lot.
@@n4mwd inittially 2.0 had quite a few bugs, 2.1 was quite an improvement in that. But then, 2.0 was quite a big change with lots of unproven code.
1.0, and to some extent 1.1 did also suffer from that. 1.2 was quite solid, 1.3 even more so.
Reminds me of people that wanted fewer Covid positive test results by doing less testing.
[IBM Employee for 27 years -- involved in PC from beginning] The Story line is accurate; Thank you for finding, Soyring, Black, and Mr. OS/2 .. When the 'almost illegal' theft of Word Perfect and 1-2-3 hit, the depth of the enemy's efforts were better known. Good Story line.. Thank you; brings back very accruate memories. //jim
I worked at Coca-Cola in atl during all of this. I started on the os2 train and ibm pushed me into the windows train with their lack of easy to use development tools. Msft was giving away Vb and ibm was still telling me that I need to go pay tons of money for c/c++ was the route to go. I moved on and finally gave up by the late 90s.
VisualREXX was the OS/2 development language instead of VB
I remember saving up for os/2 warp and then I guess it didn't keep working for me. And then in college, I could get NT 3.51 for either free or $99 (I forget). I also ended up installing Linux in dual boot with NT...
@@oidpolar6302 I don’t remember our ibm team ever mentioning rexx, but it’s been 30 years. I’d been looking at os2 for years at that point. According to Wikipedia, rexx didn’t show up until 1993.
@@WallaceBMcClure rexx is a scripting/programming language. i dont think it is directly comparible with vb.
This was one of IBM's greatest weaknesses, and AMD's. Intel does the same, and Nvidia, with many free tools, and sometimes even free consultants, to optimize software for the hardware, that excludes AMD. IBM and AMD both just don't see the path of adoption lies with encouraging external software development and getting users used to certain platforms. Linux developers are even more oblivious to this.
Great video! Here's a couple OS/2 related personal stories.
1) I was a CS Major at Georgia Tech from 1991-1995. I was asked by the Dean of the College of Computing to be involved in some event with industry professionals. At the time I was an OS2 user on my 386-DX40 and loved it over Windows. (Pretty sure this was in early 1995). Anyhow, during the luncheon, I'm sitting at a table with "somebody" from Microsoft, and I proceeded to rip on him over how crappy 3.1 was, how OS2 was so much more stable and ran faster and was preemptive multitasking, etc. It turns out I was talking to Jim Alchin (who was a senior engineer at MS at the time!)
2) After college I went to work for IBM Global Services in Atlanta, and my first assignment was to work downtown Atlanta for the team that was developing the scorekeeping software for the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. It was ALL done on OS/2! I was in heaven. (The same software was used for the 2000 Barcelona games). At that time, most desktop users inside of IBM were running OS/2, but literally 1/2 the people I worked came from Mainframe background, the other half came from PC background and boy those 2 groups did NOT mix! If the mainframe people used OS/2, they only used it to get a terminal window into the mainframe.
3) I remember the fiasco related to the Warp name. What a disaster! I actually attended the release event they had in Atlanta.
4) I'm convinced that Commodore's sales staff went to work at IBM after Commodore died... I apparently am a glutton for punishment because I went from C64-->Amiga-->OS/2 before finally throwing in the towel and going Windows 98 (yes I ran Warp 4.0 until 98).
5) After the 96 Olympics, management didn't know what to do with all of us Olympics people (suddenly having to find tasking for like 300 people). So, they told us all to go do training classes, just pick stuff and go... So I picked one class on OS/2 Presentation Manager programming (which I had been trying to learn on my own through books) and the following week was going to be on this new thing called Java. The OS/2 PM class was TOUGH and I worked all week in the class struggling to get really anything to really work. It was just horribly confusing and verbose to even just get a window to open and respond to the close button and such. The next week I took the Java class and in that 1 week I had written a GUI based chat client AND a chat server that could support multiple clients over a network connection. YEah I basically gave up on OS/2 development at that point. I still ran OS/2, but I did all my coding in Java at that point.
How did Jim take it?
@@b3ans4eva as I recall, he pretty much had a scowl on his face the whole time and got up and left as soon as the lunch’s was over.
I was a gt grad as well and at the warp launch event in atl. Iirc, it was at the fox theater. Did you know Greg Shaw? Good man. He worked at ibm global services on the coke account.
@@WallaceBMcClure doesn’t ring a bell but I was pretty much immediately shuttled down to ACOG on my first day so I didn’t meet many folks outside of the ACOG crew. Yeah the event was at the Fox.
@@mikekopack6441 I worked at Coca-Cola for a several years. I knew Greg because he was on the coke account from ibm.
I was a developer at a software company in Atlanta who built a Warehouse Management System on the platform written in C and Visual Rexx.
We could run a full system in just 8gb of memory that included a backend database, 2-3 dozen RFID terminals, a mainframe/midrange host connector, and a UI. The multitasking capabilities the OS offered ran circles around what a comparable Windows system would run at the time.
We were forced by our customers to convert the software to Windows and the hardware requirements nearly tripled.
@@chonchjohnch google "How a web design goes straight to hell", its a comic from the Oatmeal that basically sums all of that up.
"how you gonna do it?
You're gonna PS/2 it.
With the IBM PS/2"
Very reminded of that commercial from 1987
I spent a decade in the OS/2 ecosystem... 1994-2004. I was a DOS guy who only put up with Windows because you could, back then, always escape back to a DOS prompt. I got hired at a place already running OS/2 because their data needs were beyond what Windows could handle. We slowly put together several apps that integrated a POS system and telephony system with DB/2 that allowed customers to access with accounts over the phone, all networked together with a couple dozen franchises. More networking led us to pivot to also become an Internet Service Provider... originally all using OS/2 systems with more and more Slackware servers added over the years. I left in 2004, but still had an OS2 Warp 4 workstation at home until it got packed up into storage around 2010. I really miss those Warp systems... and I can't believe it's been over a decade since I used one.
They were really good systems.
in italy the os/2 system have been for decades the center for the functioning of the national railway system (25.000 km!)both for the technical and administrative part, os2 systems were found on the engines of the trains to manage the stations and the entire road traffic system up to the interface of ticket vending machines
In Brazil it controlled the ATM network (like Bancomat) for the biggest Brazilian bank. It was present in all POS, I believe up to at least 2003/4
Same here in NYC, the entire MetroCard system has been run on OS/2 since it was introduced in 1995. And will probably be around for a few more years because people don’t like changes to how they pay 😂
IBM should have advertised it with "even Italians didn't manage to break it" 😂
@@ViniciusProvenzanonot only Brazil, it was all over the world.
Terrific video! Thanks!
I went from my brother's Amiga 500 to the PC when I entered the University somewhere in 1990 and had to work with MS-DOS / Windows apps. Something I considered a step back compared to the Amiga. Then I stumbled upon OS/2 Warp 3.0 and Warp 4.0 ... It really was a fantastic OS. I remembered showing a friend how I could play DOOM in an OS/2 window whilst at the same time run MS-Word and MS-Excel and switch from one another in just 8Mo of RAM!
After the downfall of OS/2, I reluctantly switched back to Windows, 2000 first, XP next... until I met Ubuntu Linux 5.04 Hoary Hedgehog in 2005 ... since then I never left Linux ... writing this comment on my 12 years old PC running Ubuntu 22.04.3 LTS in its MATE flavor.
I still own the boxes and original copies of my OS/2 Warp 3.0 and 4.0 ... because like my first girlfriend, I'll never forget them.
I had a similar journey. Amiga at Home and sun in the engineering computer lab at school. When pushed to adopt a windows box for word I bought os2warp and used WordPerfect. Warp had some quirks for a home user but was far and away better than Win95. How they could get around prosecution for sabotaging the use of their software on other platforms I never understood
Windows 95 has the superior Doom 95 version, WinQuake (Jan 1997) and GLQuake (Jan 1997).
I remember that OS/2 being very stable. I've seen OS/2 running ATM machines and industrial applications.
It's amazing how efficient operating systems and applications were designed back in those days. OS/2 2.1 runs on 8MB of RAM? OMG!
IBM screwed up big time with OS/2.
They could have owned mobile with motorola a decade before Palm and RIM. So sad. Imagine OS/2 on ARM in like 1993.
I had Warp 3.0 on an Escom box that had 4MB of RAM. Win 3.1 flew on it but Warp was unusable. You needed a minimum of 8MB just to open windows on the desktop but the sweet spot was a then hefty 20MB. 4MB set me back £85 at a computer fair so equipping my box with that amount of RAM would have cost as much as a new computer. I'm not that surprised OS/2 never took off. It was ahead of its time in resource requirements.
Automated Teller Machine machines
@@egbront1506 Windows 3.1 was 16 bit not 32 bit like OS/2. Should have tried Netscape as you had to install the 32 bit extension in Win 3.1. Lot of ppl seem to have forgotten that Windows NT was developed on OS/2 hence why there was an OS/2 directory under C:\Windows.
Yes at the same time people struggled to run OS2 warp on 4MB memory, Microsoft were promising the future Windows 95 that ranon 4MB ... it too wasn't that useable on 4MB.
Love the Commodore reference. No company squandered opportunity like commodore.
alright, sleep can be saved for another time, now to watch a 1 and a half hour documentary on a failed OS
I was an OS/2 early adopter - and fan - starting at version 2.0 in 1992. At the time it ran DOS applications much better than Windows did. I believe IBM was simply unable to overcome their own corporate group-think when the time came to appeal to the public at large rather than huge mega-corporations that bought mainframes. Some have famously said it would take IBM six months to ship an empty box. Inertia is a beast to overcome.
I worked for a large corporation in the 80's and the mandate was that everything computer related had to be IBM - even if a vastly superior product at a fraction of the price was available from a different vendor. Key IT management were hired in from IBM as well. I witnessed first hand the junk - total garbage, exorbitantly priced - that IBM pushed off on them. DisplayWrite, Displaywriters, PC's with Microchannel, $10k laser printer (forget the model) competing with HP LaserJet II, 5520 Office System, and more I can't remember offhand.
Former IBM programmer Rich Seidner actually said that they found it would take them *9* months to ship an empty box.
@@KameraShy The irony is that IBM also allowed low-cost clones to ensure the success of the platform, so much so as to ensure someone other than Intel could make PC compatible CPUs!
IBM didn't do a good job marketing the OS and alot of customers were afraid of compatibility issues as everyone still used Windows applications.
I’ve heard 9 months to ship an empty box. Eight months and three weeks for the lawyers to sign off on the contract guaranteeing that the box actually is empty.
Sounds remarkably like the 90s Amiga scene. All these advanced features no one else had, squandered by an incompetent parent company that ensured their own products were out-competed and eventually obsolete.
A few extra things contributed to OS/2 Warp's downfall. Mentioned is the PowerPC version, and this is often overlooked but it did have a significant impact on OS/2. IBM had bet big on the PowerPC chip, some at IBM honestly thought it could bring some control of the higher end PC market back to IBM (they hadn't learned their lesson with MCA). They knew the PowerPC systems would need an OS, and so a lot of money was spent to bring OS/2 over to the PowerPC. It wasn't just a straight port, but more of a ground-up rewrite of much of the OS. They reworked OS/2 to run on a Microkernel running on a PowerPC architecture, and my recollection is that there was some talk about in the future it would be possible for IBM to write a microkernel for other architectures and then run OS/2 on it. In the end customers had very little interest in their PowerPC line of systems and it was one of those projects that didn't make a lot of sense to do. Unfortunately they had spent a lot of money on the project, if they had put those resources into the Intel version of OS/2 it might have resulted in a different outcome.
Regarding the issue with the Synchronous Input Queue on Warp 3, this was actually fixed in Warp 3's Fixpak 17 (and all later fixpaks included the fix), although you had to turn the fix on with a line in the config.sys file. Of course the fix was carried on to Warp 4. Fixpaks were (are still) free to download from IBM and various other locations.
As for Warp 4 it had a pile of features that were not mentioned in your video which put it ahead of pretty much everything else available at the time. It was the first major OS to include Java integrated in the OS (you could just double click a Java application and it would run) and the just-in-time compiler that IBM had written was extremely well optimized, it could run Java apps quicker and smoother then Windows 95. It included a software implementation of OpenGL. The voice control mentioned was actually the full version of IBM's VoiceType software which - at the time - was the leading voice recognition software on the market. Voicetype worked quite well. On the dictation side without voice training it was only about 70% accurate, however with training it could get up to about 95% accuracy (at least for English, I never tried it with other languages). You did have to have a brief pause between words, but considering this was 1996 when it came out it was certainly impressive. The other thing neat about VoiceType is it could work with any OS/2 application, even if the application had never been designed with VoiceType in mind. The Voice Navigation side was neat, but I found it more of a gimmick. You could say things like "Jump to yahoo" and it would launch Netscape and go to the Yahoo home page. You could also set up macros and say something like "Send email to Bob" and it would launch your email application, compose a new email, and pull Bob from your address book. You could then say "Begin Dictation" and go into dictating your email. A lot of things were quicker to just use the mouse, but I did hear that quite a few people with disabilities which prevented them from using a mouse/keyboard were actually able to use OS/2 with VoiceType, so in that respect it was well ahead of its time.
Not aimed at the consumer desktop, but there were a few other releases. OS/2 Warp Server Version 4 (which came out after Warp 3 and was based on its code base - yes, more of the confusing version numbering schemes!), and later Warp Server for eBusiness (which was based on the Warp 4 code base). Then of course the Convenience Packages that IBM put out as their final versions of the line - essentially bundling all the bug fixes and product additions they'd put together over the years into a final release before the official IBM retirement.
I remember a lot of the tech magazines hailing PowerPC as an evolution across the boards and then admitting that it mostly became a Mac platform shift.
@@DanielleWhite It was an evolution across the board. Atari, Commodore and Sharp also had plans to migrate to PPC meaning PPC would have become a point where all these system became similar at the hardware architecture level. Yet Atari and Commodore went bankrupt before that and Sharp lost interest in having its own computer platform this along with IBM giving its own PPC workstation a lacklustre launch meant the PPC failed to become the common architecture.
One nit: it's not true that no one was interested in PowerPC systems. Apple had much success with it and IBM had and still have OS400 and AIX machines with PowerPC. I think they're up to version 10 of the chip.
The downfall of OS/2 is OS/2. It was terrible. I supported it professionally in corporate environments where it could be fairly good. Where it really shined is interoperability with IBM mainframe ecosystems. Every place I supported OS/2 had an IBM mainframe and 2 of them had token ring networks. But all of them had the IBM mainframe imagining system. It worked very well with it, while the windows system was clunky. You could call up a document from the mainframe terminal and it would open the scanned document on a 2nd monitor attached to the PS/2 machine.
As a general desktop, it was terrible. It was confusing. It was SLOW as all hell. It booted slowly, it opened applications slowly, it scrolled slowly. The "object oriented" stuff was just dumb and confusing for most users. Nobody wanted to copy an icon and then edit its properties.
You also had to want OS2. Almost no vendors outside of IBM sold PCs defaulting to OS/2. They all came with DOS/Windows for "free" by embedding the cost into the cost of the PC.
OS/2 domain networking was pretty good. I'll give you that. Especially if you had to integrate a mainframe system.
@@tolkienfan1972 Yeah, but they weren't compatible machines. One place I worked had 2 of the IBM PPC machines sitting in open cubicles that I never once saw turned on. I was in the IT dept and I had no idea why they were there or even what software they ran.
In my experience, the PPC chips were no faster than Intel's offerings at the time.
I remember installing the OS - from floppy - as a young computer technician in the early 90's. It felt soo cool to be running a full 32 bit operating system, and it was so stable.
Then I realized there were no applications that I wanted on it.
I uninstalled it, went back to DOS/Windows 3.0, and never looked back.
Yep, same here. People choose software then OS. Sad but true.
Haha ha you nailed it. LoL. Great OS but no native applications. Kinda like BlackBerry when they came out with their new awesome QNX OS. It was ahead of its time but DOA with no apps.
@@jonfreeman9682 Balmer was right: applications drive adoption.
@@danielclawson2099 Funny how this is what killed Windows Phone.
Dang. This was the best hour and a half on UA-cam this week and probably for a few to come. Monumental effort on your part.
I really appreciate the compliment, glad you enjoyed the video!
The reason that Windows NT could not be "upgraded" to OS/2 is because OS/2 did not support NTFS (Windows NT file system). Only a clean installation would work, because you would get the option to format the drive or partition to HPFS (the OS/2 file system), which of course means you lose any data stored on the partition.
No, the reason why you can't upgrade Windows NT to OS/2 is, because Windows NT doesn't run inside a VM86 machine. But Windows 3.1 and its Win16 application do so.
All your content is great. I need more of the Windows saga.
Rise of Windows part 2 is the next video on my list, I should hopefully be recording the audio in the next couple weeks.
Fantastic news
@@AnotherBoringTopic yay
@@AnotherBoringTopic 😍😍😍😍
I was one of those zealots for OS/2, and was a member of the Canopus forum. Due to the members there, it was one of the most intellectually stimulating groups I've ever experienced. Yes, I ran into the broken Warp install but made it through. OS/2 was so good at speed, capability, and stability. Even as enthused as I was, watching IBM make mistake after mistake made me realize that it was not a long term solution. Without trying to appear dramatic, it was a sad sad day when I had to install my first version of Windows and feel like I'd gone 5 years back into the past.
Correct! You were moving back 5-years. Windows didn't get it right until Windows 7 and it clearly smoked Apple OS 10X variants! We would have been at Windows 10 level before the turn of the century with OS2. Currently I'm extremely impressed with Windows 11, but we would have had that by the year 2000 had OS2 been the standard. Currently run Android 12 & 13 on my current devices and amazed at how narrow and proprietary Apple's OS is. I can do so much but I still think even now that OS2 would be even more flexible!
Or like Lego Technics to ratty Lincoln Logs.
@@allenmorseiii295 macOS X+ has been better then windows in nearly every regard. It uses UNIX as its core and can run reliably for months at a time without a reboot
@@allenmorseiii295 Windows 7 didn't exactly "smoke" Mac OS X variants. When Steve Jobs showed off a beta release of Mac OS X and joked, "This _is_ Longhorn," that pretty much said it all.
But, since you mention it, imagine if you'd installed NeXTSTEP instead of Windows. Sure, NeXTSTEP died due to lack of uptake, but it was miles ahead of any desktop OS when it was around--so much so that Mac OS X was still ahead of the pack when it came out, despite being warmed-over NeXTSTEP.
That's not to say that Dave Cutler isn't a brilliant engineer. VMS was an extremely well designed operating system, and much of it carried over to the design of Windows NT.
Years ago I was a system engineer for BeOS, I urged the CEO (Jean) to keep with the hardware side of things, even though the other engineers seen it as a dead end. I often would quip if Apple can do it, so can we but unlike Apple we wouldn't have to be strictly vertical integration, we could still do retail since work was already mostly completed for a x86 build, it wouldn't be wasted resources. Finally Jean gave me permission to pursue that ends, I came up with a few systems namely by Gateway since Gayeway, Inc as a company loved the idea of moving away from Windows but didn't want to risk their relationship with Microsoft. This was 1998 remind you, and so work was done to successfully boot BeOS on a Destination workstation.. the target system. Ultimately the business side of things fell apart and we couldn't come to an agreement but I think such systems might have saved the company.. especially since the retail market required so much support. It wasn't like today when so much stuff is kind of universally plug and play. The hours upon hours of writting drivers from sketchy documentation, to hours upon hours debugging buggy hardware. It's a whole different world in that respects today. It's still not a joy ride, but it's a lot easier.
Wow, you were an actual BeOS engineer?! That's awesome and thanks so much for sharing some of your memories! BeOS is one of those systems that frequently gets overlooked, but deserves a lot more attention and recognition. I am definitely covering it at some point...just not sure when yet.
So I have to ask...do you run Haiku at all? And do you still have a BeBox (I assume you had one when you worked for BeOS)?
@Another Boring Topic Yeah I was really, really young too. Fresh out of high school with a knack for assembly. My primary job was getting hardware to work with the OS. It was a lot of work but I loved hardware and the OS enough to tough it out until bankruptcy.
@Another Boring Topic Hey, I love your videos by the way, anything but boring. I am nerdy like that, I find your knowledge impressive and enjoying. Thank you for doing it.
Thank you very much for the compliment, I really appreciate it!
As a younger person (early 20s) interested in the history retro pcs. I have loved messing around with beos in a vm (and hope one day to get a bebox). Thank you for your work on BeOS even through it never made mainstream people still love it today (Haiku being a great example of this)
I recently moved and have been unpacking boxes. How funny tonight I came across Volume 0, Number 0 from November 1992 of OS2 Professional magazine - and lo and behold the publisher was Edwin Black. I though his name was familiar when you brought him up in your video!
That’s awesome!
As a programmer I used OS/2 in several applications and loved it. Too bad it lost against Windows, it was truly better in every way.
did you not watch the video? btw you can still use it.
@@BenState yeah but it's just better to run Linux nowadays
Apparently you never sat down with a normal computer use and then tried to convince them OS/2 was better. The first thing you would have had to do was convince to buy a new CD ROM. Whereas every CD ROM sold for PCs had drivers disks that came with them or were detected automatically in Windows 95, OS/2 supported a limited number of CD ROM drives.
Then you would have had to convince them to buy a new PC because their existing PC didn't have enough RAM or HD space and was too slow anyway. After spending a couple grand on a new PC and another 100 bucks or more on OS/2, the new PC would be slower than the old PC. OS/2 was ungodly slow on the same hardware.
OS/2 had its strengths, particularly in a corporate environment with IBM mainframes. But outside of a corporate environment married to IBM MF technology, there was never even a single compelling reason to use OS/2.
The message que was a disaster and retarded decision
Was OS/2 easy to program on? If so, what IDE did you use? I heard it was easier, and that it's multi-threading capabilities was easy to understand.
OS/2 for PPC was actually one of the childs from the failed Taligent project venture with Apple. It is based in IBMs version of Mach kernel for their AIX OS. Like Windows NT, it was also built from the ground to support multiple personalities( which one of them was meant to be MacOS (Toolbox API plus SystemOS) and separated and protected application usermode "boxes" just like with MS NTkernel...
In other words... Basically IBM had for some time their own NT version of OS/2 (if we take in account that MS NT got their kernel not from in-home Microsoft programmers, but from DEC PRISM project, which basically means the upcoming version of VMS which also never was to be). They, also just like NT in their early days of RISC compatibility, had a firmware to tightly match with their OS, in part also thanks to Motorola and Apple efforts, called OpenFirmware (MS NT firmware was called ARC, which interestingly was also used by SGI machines, highly modified and big endian, so it can't run NT). Thanks to Mach/AIX heritage, it also had a more robust filesystem, called JFS, comparable and even superior to NTFS, which didn't catch in stability and feature list up to Win2k3/Vista shipped version of the filesystem.
It's only downplay? The lack of a "plug and play" ready hardware configuration manager, and still relying on cryptic static text config files for configuration. This also plagued OS/2 all the way to Warp 4 (Both Merlin and Aurora). This makes these OSs pretty brittle to changes in hardware and broad support of cheap hardware.
In any case, this should have been the real successor of Warp 3. Probably with Warp for PPC IBM again had the keys to rematch Microsoft and Windows NT (Even the upcoming at time Windows 2000). But again, IBM just threw the gold key to the trash. Is a shame Warp for PPC core source code (kernel/drivers/os module libraries etc) got lost in time. Who know and maybe Arca would have done better with them IBM never did.
I was so looking forward to Taligent running on Mach
Microsoft hired these programmers, so they were inhome Microsoft programmers.
I started with OS/2 2.1 (an ungodly number of floppies), and remember getting a free beta of Warp 3. The CD was stenciled with something like "Arrive in Chicago ahead of schedule", with "Chicago" being the development codename for Windows 95. I bought both Warp 3 and Warp 4 first for the stability. And then, with Warp 3, the WPS really came into it's own. The UI did a remarkably good job of getting out of your way and letting you get your work done. I still have a copy of Lotus SmartSuite for OS/2 around here somewhere.
The funny thing is that I've spent most of my professional life as a programmer. At work, I've had to run the Windows flavor of the day (never 95 or 98, it's always been one of the NT-derived systems for us). It wasn't until XP came along that I thought Microsoft was even in the same neighborhood as OS/2 was 10 years earlier.
But at home, I moved from Warp to Slackware, then to MacOS during their brief open period, and then back to various flavors of Linux. As far as I can remember, the last version of Windows I ever bought was NT 3.51 (got it for a song as a student, and then got a free upgrade to NT 4 when it became available).
Oh, and a brief comment about Warp 4's voice entry. If I remember correctly (and this was around 30 years ago, so memory may be a bit foggy), my copy of Warp 4 actually came with a headset/boom mic. in the box. The voice control and dictation software itself was an OS/2 port of Dragon Dictate. It wasn't smart enough to parse continual language: you had to do split.. second.. pauses.. between.. words.. to get it to understand what you were saying. But, once you got used to it (and it got used to you: there was a significant training regimen), it worked remarkably well. Even more so due to what we'd think of today as the incredibly limited hardware available at the time.
Good times, man.
Yes, 22 floppies if I recall correctly. Then the update to 2.11 took another 20 floppies and had to be installed sequentially. 😅
There is more. Windows NT was new OS/2 on development. It still have OS/2 API inside ntoskernel32 (called "Native API").
From what I remember early Windows XP (before around the time SP2, which came out in 2004) was very unstable, on my PC at that time (a Pentium III which dual booted Windows 98SE and XP) it was less stable than Windows 98SE. From what I heared it w
This was a blast from the past. I attended a Warp launch party at Comdex in LV in what must have been 1994. It was a huge event with unlimited open bar and a top notch buffet. It had entertainers like Danny Gans and a band (don't remember who). And I got so stinking drunk that I almost got on stage with the band.
At the time I worked for a company that was under the thumb of IBM and they twisted our bean counters to commit to OS/2 across the board and my job at the time was to develop desktop and laptop hw/sw configurations for all our workstations and to recommend the applications to be used on this machines. it was not an easy time.
From my viewpoint they lost it on the apps. With MS office on the rise, their stability and ubiquitousness, Ami pro and 123 wysigig really just didn't cut it.
It was an interesting time and i feel lucky to have been part of such a revolutionary time and to eventually see the internet come to be.
"From my viewpoint they lost it on the apps. With MS office on the rise, their stability and ubiquitousness, Ami pro and 123 wysigig "
This is my take as well. The desire for OS/2 to succeed (and hate for MS) was there. But lack of support was far too much hassle, eventually we all gave up on it.
IBM forgot that creating a computer system grows, or falls, like a spiral.
The more software there is for a platform, the more users want to use that platform
The more users buy software for a platform, the more software gets written for that platform.
Without that initial investment, without that hook of good home and business software to run on an OS/2 system, IBM didn't give users a reason to sign on, and thus didn't give the software companies a market to develop for.
And so, the death spiral sets in. Less users? Less software. Less software? Less users.
Windows became popular from about 1990 onwards because, on the 386 chip, it could multitask existing DOS applications. This didn’t require developers to change their code in any way. This broke the chicken-and-egg situation, where developers wouldn’t write Windows apps because the customers weren’t buying Windows. Once there was a decent installed base of Windows machines, it did indeed become worthwhile to develop apps specifically for it.
History repeats, and Microsoft is the new IBM. We saw this with Windows Phone versus Android, and again with Windows-on-ARM, which is an ongoing trainwreck because of the exact same chicken-and-egg problem. And no reason for the customers to build up an installed base to attract the developers.
Ha ha, I used to go to those comdex shows in las Vegas. I worked for a Minolta dealership in Florida, the largest independently owned Minolta dealership in the world ( IYKUK).
They wouldn't commit to barcodeing inventory because it would " cost too much" but they would send 2 of us to Vegas once a year and lay ¼ of the service department off for 3 months every October.
Most staff had been on a 4 year wage freeze and management took a 2% pay cut but they still sent us to comdex.
Ohh, the booze did flow freely!
Fantastic video. I was a (lonely) OS/2 1.x fan. It was the first "real OS" I could afford to run at home, back when I had a 286 PC. I even liked its unusual 16-bit architecture, though it turned out to be a dead end. By the time I could afford a 32-bit PC, commercial PC Unix was available, and Linux soon after. And since Unix/Linux was what I really wanted, 32-bit OS/2 was never very interesting to me.
I briefly used OS/2 while working in IT at American Express in the early 90s.. But, like you, I preferred a POSIX system so was running Linux by something like ‘95… I remember spending hours to get X Windows running and think I burned up one video card in the process…
At work we ran a lot of DOS MS Mail MTAs, all of which required dedicated hardware. I hit on the idea of using Compaq Prosignia 300s to run 4x MTA per box under OS/2 Warp. These worked fine for a while but then started crashing and Microsoft's recommendation was to use Windows NT instead as it would be more reliable and wouldn't have the same issue. It was at this point I discovered 1) the same crash occurred and 2) the OS/2 MTA software was the same executable as the NT binary...
Excellent presentation, and re-iterating what Edwin Black said at the end, in 1993 IBM's OS/2 2.1 we had a stable 32-bit preemptive multitasking / multithreading OS (I believe the multitasking was on another level compared to Windows NT, making it ideal for realtime apps), which Microsoft only truly matched for consumers on October 25th, 2001, with the launch of Windows XP, where I must say that it is _pathetic_ that Microsoft, in all the years since, couldn't have found a way to allow for natural language file names, as available with OS/2's HPFS, where we have to remove everyday characters, such as colon ':' and question mark '?', purely because these are a legacy from MS-DOS, which for most users is _bananas_ , who don't even know what a command prompt is!
For those that haven't seen it, I highly recommend David Barnes's presentation from the 1993 HAL-PC OS/2 [2.1] NT Shootout, which I reckon is quite possibly the most enthusiastic tech demo *EVER* ! ua-cam.com/video/-DAojx2Hgec/v-deo.html (I skipped to this point in the video).
Those characters cause problems in other OSs as well, and the use of escape sequences introduces its own problems. *Nix systems just have to put up with it, and the security flaws that are risked by not properly catching them, for that benefit.
Excellent channel and series 👍🏿
Note: 33:16 The *Fiesta Bowl* was held annually in _Tempe, Arizona_ during this time, and has been held in nearby Glendale, AZ since 2007. It has never been held in Austin, TX
I used OS/2 for the better part of a decade. The voice dictation in Merlin actually worked pretty well, but you needed probably an extra 8-16 MB of RAM for the system as a whole usable with dictation activated. The voice macros were fun, but the biggest issue was that it could not really “discover” very many actions. So you had to manually record the actions and the voice command. I set up a number of OS/2 systems for physicians who would use it to dictate notes during an exam and to manage patient photos taken with specialized optical devices. Windows was not yet up to the standard of multitasking and reliability required in a medical environment at that time.
You’re dead on. I managed to get 32mb at the time. Made a big difference.
Thank you. I was remembering that it did work, but couldn't remember the restriction. Memory.
it worked much better with a high-end sound card (Turtle Beach) along with that extra SRAM and RAM in the x86 days.
Lotus Notes pushed me into OS/2 and then I became one of the OS/2 "go to" guy with a BBS group because the BBS Sys Admins loved that OS/2 ran multiple DOS sessions. The OS/2 thing died out around the same time as the BBS era.
here in germany the BBS "scene" was wordly KILLED BY CORRUPT POLITICIANS AND POLICE with falsified evidence.
had AlphaBOX/OS2 thus time as a multiline bbs (plain OS/2 software!!!) and it runs like a dream in that time. those with megaST's looked with love at os/2 platform, but they had their equip.
in short: it was a massive attack against the freedom to do your own speech and they wanted to control all and everything - AND THEY DO IT IN ALL TERMS
forget SSL, VPN and all other BS which tells you "get it - it is safe against.." bla blubb and so on.
You will it learn when you build your own squid proxy for a viruswall to filter content.
MailBOX underlies postsecret and that is a law - and we know what laws for political parties are: most time in history a thing which must be destroyed to get the finger in the pocket and printing the big money. In other meaning: when you trust a politician you are an idiot just like einstein
I used VoiceType for everything in Warp 4. I moved windows around, I dictated my college papers, heck, I even made it dial up for me to get online. I spent so loing making sure my voice model was great and did all the training for it. Worked really well, esp for the time. I think I even moved my voice model over to an Aptiva when we upgraded the family machine. I was one of those who moved to BeOS shortly afterwards, however I still have a LOT of OS/2 gear here. Great video!
A couple of things from my experience. I started using OS/2 2.0 back in my college days. OS/2 2.0 was terrible. I went through many levels of support at IBM going over the issues. Eventually, we had a call with some very high level people at IBM. They asked what I wanted to do, so I quoted their EULA about providing a working copy of software and the remedies. I got them to give me a copy of OS/2 2.1 to replace 2.0. Things got much better after that. IBM had this program where they would distribute CD-ROMs of sample OS/2 apps and tools on a regular basis to universities. I talked the Dean of the Computer Science program into requesting these CD-ROMs. They got them and held one for me. The rest went out to students and teaching staff and were gone very quickly. I bought every version (After 2.1) of OS/2 until IBM pulled it from the market.
We used OS2 to run multiple television transmitter monitoring programs on a micro channel with a 386, and Warp to run a recording system for NPR distributed radio shows. OS2 worked great.
When IBM bought Redhat Corp. I thought that this was the worst thing that could of happened to Redhat as a company. It turns out I was wrong. And the blunder of leadership continues at IBM. Redhat has announced that the company will lay off about 4% of it's workforce. While parts of the company have decided to Unionize against IBM. All of this is being done while not one of the IBM upper management has (or will) take a pay cut to save this one time profitable company. I HATE IBM !!!
Meh. Redhat has always been working at cross purposes in the Linux community. It still is under IBM. Lennart Poettering and his SystemD is evedence to that. Let IBM slowly kill off this cancer to Linux.
The IBM stupidity continues in the next generation with the decision to (essentially) kill CentOS. Long live Rocky and Alma Linux!
Tech layoffs in United States are not limited to IBM.
14:16 never understood that phrase "his rise was meteoric". Every meteorite I have ever seen has came down in a ball of fire just to crash into the ground :p
Ah, but like a meteorite, a meteoric rise is bright and fast.
Awesome video - I still weep.
I remember cloning the floppy disks for version 2.0 back in high school on the schools 286 PCs. My 386-25NC with 4 megabytes of memory where really not up for the task. Its successor a Cyrix 6x86 with 32 megabytes of memory ran it like dream.
I remember that my university put up a pallet with boxes of OS/2 2.1 for Windows, for anyone to grab. I guess it was stock remainders, as Warp 3.0 came out soon after. Never used that one much, but version 4 quickly became my workhorse. It was about that time I joined the Danish OS/2 Usergroup and actually got access to most of the available IBM programs for OS/2, including the server 4.5 (Aurora) with the new 32-bit kernel (Until now the kernel had included some segments of 16-bit code) supporting 64 processors.
From there I jumped ship to eComstation (Ran fine on both desktop and laptop), which can be described as an OS/2 4.52 bundled with a new installer (very similar to the SUSE installer), new drivers like Daniela Engerts wonderfull IDE DASD driver package, the SNAP Graphics drivers (Based om the IBM GRADD video driver framework) and misc desktop enhancements like xworkplace (Renamed to eCenter) and various programs like a smartported OpenOffice.
My guess is that ArcaOS is quite the same.
Christmas holiday 2007 I jumped ship to openSUSE, which I now use for everything today. I must still have the eComstation CDs and ISOs hidden somewhere and the CDs I got hold of in my OS/2 Usergroup days.
I remember IBM very shortly tried to sell OS/2 as the ultimate Java-platform - IMO yet another mistake.
That Lotus refused to support OS/2 with Smartsuite did not help much, When they finally launched an OS/2 version of Smartsuite it was smartported and it took a while before it became stable. Especially Word Pro crashed a lot with larger files (Filesizes which Ami pro had no problem handling).
I remember a quote from one of the Lotus directors which supposedly said that not any of Lotus's market researchs showed a need for an OS/2 version of Smartsuite, so he wished people would stop asking for it.
Another quote is supposedly from William Henry Gates III, who seemingly once said that the only sleepless night he had was the night before the launch of IBM OS/2 Warp 3.0.
In the late 80ies I was into development of a SCADA system which needed preemptive multitasking and a GUI, so OS/2 was an obvious choice from a technical viewpoint - no Windows NT or Linux back then. PC Unix like SCO would have been too exotic for our customer. It worked well, but in hindsight it was painful to depend on an underdog of an OS. I ended up porting parts of the system to Windows NT - from "Microsoft Developer Network" I had some special documentation and tools for that purpose.
Great video! My only experience with OS/2 when I spent 6 months in 1996 at a small and long ago acquired salesforce automation company in eastern Pennsylvania. I was on the helpdesk for their contract with a big pharmaceutical firm. Though the salesforce automation system was an inhouse DB and UI they used XcelleNet RemoteWare on Win 3.1 as the GUI (and for email and expense reports) and the servers were OS/2 as were some workstations we used to diagnose user issues. As i recall they had four servers and somewhere between 50 and 100 modems.
It was also the only job where I used Macs all the time. The call logging software was homebrew, written in 4D. Tht clients were various Quadra models that by then were a few years old and all connected via PhoneNet strung throughout the cube farm and into the drop ceiling. One occasion oops I made when logging calls with those Macs was finding the home row by feeling for the bumps. Because I otherwise used PC keyboards I automatically felt got them on the F and J keys but those Mac keyboards had them one key further from center. I suspect you can imagine the gibberish that occasionally resulted.
After that job I was hired as a junior sysadmin by a university that was mostly on OpenVMS (and continued into the 2000s; got to play with a GS1280,) with a few flavors of Unix. I later moved up Linux which I do run on my personal desktop but I am far from suggesting that to others for the reasons you understand too well.
I worked with OS/2 in the mid-to-late 1990's. Not sure which version but I think it was Warp. From a user's perspective, I thought that having to manually install TCP/IP support at a time when Windows 3.11 ,and then Windows 95, had TCP/IP baked in while the Internet was starting to have major mainstream acceptance was a big reason that users bypassed OS/2.
I recall a friend in IT telling me that back in the day. He couldn't believe how easy it was to setup.
You have it backwards. OS/2 2.x made you buy TCP/IP separately, but at least you could (not an option for consumer Windows). Warp had the TCP/IP stack built in. Meanwhile Bill Gates was calling the Internet a fad.
I was one of the OS/2 loyalist home users in the 90's. As a member of the Triangle OS/2 User Group, I remember asking why OS/2 wasn't going to support Win 95 apps, I was told it was simply that IBM wasn't interested in OS/2 anymore since they were moving away from being a hardware and software company to being a service company. They couldn't make enough money on OS/2 since once you set it up, it just ran forever. Selling a service contract for support of NT was far more lucrative since you had to have techs on site for the constant maintenance. Looking at IBM today the hardware and software divisions are gone and all they do is consulting work now, it was prophetic advice in 1996....
In the mid 90's I recommended and deployed PC hardware and several copies of OS/2 Warp 4 to a customer who owned a trucking company. I had preinstalled his OS and programs and was hoping to spend about a few hours onsite tweaking his network connectivity and adding passwords and such. The customer had read or heard about the voice control feature so I I went ahead installed and setup the voice control feature on the front desk PC. This was a became cumbersome and time consuming as I'd not done it before and had to read through the instructions and setup. After about an additional hour of working with the client, setting up the voice command software and recording the voice prompts to open a few programs and "print" the current document, we found out that this only worked for the ONE user voice you set the whole thing up on. The voice recordings didn't work for anyone else. I should have known, but it didn't occur to me until we actually tested it. Disappointing to say the least, after explaining how "cool this could be" to have it fail. Oh, and 3 months later we went back and installed Windows NT because the new version of his $10,000 trucking software didn't work in OS/2. It was my 1st big IT consulting failure... pretty crushing. I don't think I ever recommended an IBM product again.
Great video. I was a user of RiscOS back at this time (perhaps less niche in the UK than the US), though the whole OS/2 vs Windows thing was always fascinating. Love the amount of research you put into this. Keep it up!
Oh wow. Yes RISCOS! Warp came on my first PC. Preferred RiscOs 😂
#archimedesforthewin
Closing out with an editorial from OS/2 professional was a really nice, poetic touch. I come away from this thinking about the whole story as a tragedy - where many people with good intentions, skills and hard work fail to achieve what rightfully they should have in light of external circumstances, many of which were themselves not maliciously created, but rather the product of not understanding the situation.
Wish you had a wider audience, my man. I've been waiting for a video of this caliber on OS/2 for a good while. Great content.
Thank you very much for the kind words, and I’m very glad you enjoyed the video!
Time will bring it.
Videos like this will cause his audience to grow.
@@AnotherBoringTopic real great work, BUT please more pointage in presentation. (more timespace in terms, views and so on)
so it comes to more than just a daytona 500 (rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrooooooooooooooooaaaaaaar) machine gun.
_" give the time for the listeners - you take the time for the audience too "_
I ran DRDOS till OS/2 was giving away 2.1 (I think) to try and get people to buy 3.0. I ran a two line BBS on OS/2 and a friend had the same set up (sw and everything) except on windows. I could go away on holidays and come back to a running system. He ended up putting a timer on his system that powered down and up once a day to keep his system up most of the time. Windows with two lines operating slowed down a lot, OS/2 with a second line did not slow down at all.... then I wanted to start playing around with networking... I could get an ethernet card for $50 (at the time) but IBM wanted $300 or more for the drivers to make it work.... A friend at work said maybe try Linux.... for me, that was the day OS/2 died. A few years later, my wife got a windows machine. Sometime later, I started getting really gross emails from a bunch of odd people. When I looked at the headers, it was from that windows computer... it was sending email from everyone on her email list to everyone else on it.... for me, that was the day Windows died. I put Linux on her computer and 5 minutes later she was off, almost no training needed. That was years ago now.
Started as a systems programmer on IBM mainframes, and my first PC development was helping write an OS/2 app we used internally to ease the operator workload.
Thanks for the trip down memory lane.
I worked for IBM as a field engineer during the time of OS/2 and I always knew in my heart that Windows NT would end up being the dominant force and OS/2 would be a footnote in history.
Ahhh the long awaited OS/2 video! Thanks buddy!
While I appreciate the passion of Mr. Black, and sympathize with wanting the company behind software you want to do well... I can also understand IBM's ire. Maybe sabotaging his publication was a little much, but... I am reminded of today's many loudmouths criticizing software developers today. Mostly in the video game space, but also operating systems.
Constructive criticism is one thing... being a backseat driver who gets angry when their "genius" ideas aren't taken up is another. I can't imagine many companies who would appreciate a supposed "supporter" demanding massive, sweeping internal structural changes and being a fanboy to the point of hostility and derision. OS/2 was failing for many reasons... many institutional, but also some technical. It's very easy from the outside to tell an organization what is going wrong... it is another thing to take the correct actions to right the ship.
Again, I assume no actual malice on his part. Never attribute to malice, which can be better be explained by... well, you know the saying. Maybe he should have applied to work at IBM and help fix their problems. Could he have gotten through the first interview? Who knows. What I do know is, large organizations are slow to move, and that is true for anyone. It's just a law of the universe. I doubt they were unaware of the deficiencies, and having someone who supposedly wanted them to succeed, lambasting them with insults and quips from the outside was never going to be welcomed and embraced. That is not a wise, or mature, course of action. Bullying rarely works, even if you believe yourself to be "right" or even "ideologically pure."
LOL so yeah this guy goes on to list other rabble rousing he's done... he's a rabble rouser journalist, not a technician. He was passionate about the technology, but also very interested in becoming "the voice for truth" or something. Whatever, that's fine. His beef on the Warp editorial seems to be sour grapes about... not having enough press access? 😏 I know BS when I smell it, mate...
"Don't get angry, get even - stick with OS/2." 😂 Again, spoken like a true, hyper-emotionally invested person. This is like the adult version of arguing about sports teams, or whether Genesis or Super Nintendo is better. So silly.
"No TCP/IP and no local networking, though it seemed to have a way of accessing Compuserve via modem." Kinda obvious... all connecting to Compuserve required was a working serial port driver and a terminal emulator. No TCP/IP or network stack involved.
I was running Linux around 1993 ;-) As a teenager, I taught it to myself, but yeah... I mean, you had to know what you were doing (or know how to find and understand copious amounts of text-based documentation), if you wanted to do word processing... hello TeX!
I was a tech working for an IBM PC/PS/2 dealership in the late 80's-early 90's. I was made aware of IBM's internal tensions between the powerful "big iron" divisions and the lowly small systems people. From what I could tell, it was all about the internecine warfare between the mainframe guys, the minicomputer division (AS/400 et al) and the microcomputer initiatives. Now, my shop was actually a subsidiary of the local IBM AS/400 agency (technically frowned upon by IBM, but this is Bermuda).
I therefore got to see that the upstart PC division from the get-go was seen as, first, a silly annoyance that drained funds from the more 'serious' divisions, and as it gained traction in offices, as a bit of a threat to the mainframes and minicomputer sales as users were now able to do word processing and increasingly sophisticated spreadsheets without begging for time on the million dollar dinosaurs in the basement. My dad is a great example of that; he worked in a law firm, and wanted a system that simply notified him and his staff when certain business deadlines came due. He approached the IT manager requesting such a system, very simple to implement, but was given a host of stupid excuses why it would tie up so many resources and time and... My dad simply got a wobbly Wang PC (it was a Wang shop) and did it all on Lotus 123, no minicomputer required.
The PC and later PS/2s were seen as little more than somewhat more intelligent terminals for the bigger iron systems, evidenced by the number of terminal emulation hardware and software suites available.
I used to work with OS/2 on a PC card inside an AS/400. Skills I will *never* use again.
I never heard about Wang PCs until a UA-cam video essay about Wang by Asianometry . Look it up, it is interesting.
I was a developer at that time (mid of 1990:th) and gave up on OS/2 after a hardware update that killed the installation and almost made me lose my all my SW files on the same disk. A hard lesson learned, and I started backup my files. I managed to install on another hard disk, and managed to copy all my files over to some kind of FAT file system. At that time Windows NT 3.51 was much more stable, a really good development machine.
I have been tearing through your videos since seeing the RYAD, and I just gotta say that they're great. Good production, clear narratives, your effort and attention to detail and love of the material come through clearly.
I totally agree!
Some divisions at IBM must've been internally pushing the use of OS/2 to some degree through the 1990s, because we had it installed on our machine through most of the decade, and I specifically remember my dad running work applications through it.
My father had Warp 3 dual booting with Windows 95 on our home machine at least as late as 1996-1997. He used to run an application called X-server, which I think was doing terminal emulation. Since he did allot of software testing for their mainframes, my guess is that somebody at IBM internally developed a solution for his team and they continued to milk it until they were 100% sure that the OS was dead. I also remember him using Web Explorer at certain points, and connecting through some kind of dialup service that IBM internally provided to employees for work-at-home use.
I remember occasionally using OS/2 as a kid. I was about five years old at the time he installed it on that machine, about 8 or 9 when we took it out of rotation as the "main home computer". I was very interested in computers as a young kid. On our dual booting machine it was like an alternate universe: most software that I would've used as a young kid ran off of Windows 95, but there was this other operating system always sitting there, begging to be explored. I remember playing the pack-in mahjong game pretty often (it had an editor where you could make your own boards) and trying to run Windows 3.1 from it (though my dad had stripped out most of the applications to save memory since we had windows 95 anyway.)
We had a few more advanced pieces of software, like a video player, an application which allowed for multiple desktops, some sound editing software, a MIDI arranger, a tape backup system, and a few other things. Our printer had driver support through OS/2, but I don't think he ever got the scanner to work. Aside from the pack-ins of mahjong, solitaire and 3d chess, I don't believe we had any OS/2 native games.
There was a copy of Warp 4 in the house. It sat in a closet for years. I think my dad got it with the intention of upgrading, but by the time he would've gotten around to it the platform was pretty much dead, so it never happened. I got as far as getting it installed once on a late 90s PC as a teenager, just out of sheer curiosity about what it was, but it wasn't very interesting to me once I finally got it working. We didn't really have any applications for it. I have no idea what happened to that CD.
The X server would have been the terminal part of the X window system (X11 for short) used on unix mainframes and graphical terminals industry wide. The application running on the mainframe would act as a client to the X server running on the terminal to direct its IO to.
That was one of the most thoroughly researched, well-presented videos I’ve watched on the history of any OS! Bravo!
Thank you so much, glad you enjoyed it!
I worked for IBM in those days. Warp was way superior to Windows but it required a really powerful PC and nobody wanted to buy a new PC just so they could start with Warp.
This! I remember when IBM said OS2 needed 4MB of memory. I was working on a computer company and the average new PC sold to our customers had a megabyte of memory. And these were already expensive. The servers running the business software we sold had two, four or in extreme cases 8 megabytes of memory and using UNIX they served served up to sixteen concurrent users running software like our business software and WordPerfect using serial terminals. Yes WP ran on UNIX and worked fine on a VT52 terminal. And here IBM was telling us that every machine running OS2 needed as much or more hardware than the servers our customers were running. Yea, not going to happen any time soon.
Also if you wanted to have a GUI the premium product was Apple MAC. Compared to Mac OS both Windows and OS2 felt like cheap knockoffs. Now I know Mac OS at the time didn't really support true multitasking, but from a suability standpoint they were just to far beyond what MS and IBM had it wasn't even funny.
Technical superiority was not something that 99% of the potential users really could see. The user experience was really all that most people cared about. And there Apple had both MS and IBM beat. Ever since the Lisa Apple had been working on the user experience and had a design guide that told developers just how to design a user interface for their programs that would make it easy to use and directly recognizable for a Mac user. Meanwhile Windows and to a degree OS2 applications were all built and designed as if they were made by blind monkeys.
Now this may make it sound as if I am a Apple shill, but I'm really not. I just recognize that Apple had a way superior user experience at the time, and for most users the user experience is really the most important part.
I ran the freeware os/2 workplace shell on top of windows 3.1. It was pretty cool to have right click functionality
I used OS/2 2.1 to 4.0. I can tell you, the VoiceType dictation and voice control worked pretty darn well. Even more so when you consider the HW of the era.
You had to train it to your voice, but you could launch apps, move and resize windows, launch macros that acted as automations. Ultimately, it was gimmicky, but it did work.
Dictation had accuracy in the low 90% range I believe.
Java was atrocious on the system. I tried a Java version of a Corel(I believe) word processor. No good. Netscape was okay.
It was my last version before switching to NT 4.0.
The ViaVoice Engine is the only one which works pretty fine at the market - afterwards named "Dragon Natural Speaking".
But the training was hard of it - there went many time on between 1st install and useable for production. Take a sharp look at google - could be a pirated copy in their robotbin with externalized fingerprint from the persons ? I did not read about a deal between google an ibm in that case - and the word in those socalled Linuxworld has IBM & Oracle. Those "Community" is everytime peed' when big blue stops their doings
_" dont bite the hand which feeds or the Sportsball will be you, communist "_
it is on your own to echange the french illness against the right terms of reality, of course it is science fiction about the reality - patric steward knows borgs and saw how they overwhelm germany more than 30 years ago too.
Remind the section about computer history: ibm harddisks build in the soviet repubblic... a fact which is the same history why those bloody war in europe ehm USSR went into mental hospital since many centuries.
I close it with a " when the Tea OneOHone say to an idiot to call the insurance then it could be named in science fiction 'speak with your hand' " - could this be the reason why in the USSR the Phones stand all on the right by thoser leftists - to grab the air mabe ? 🤪
P.S.: who laughs pays the round - i going to shoot some euros just like in a western. i'm looking forward if the "1/10th" falls in my language: _" mal schauen, wann der groschen fällt bei dem frittenkopp aus der irrenanstalt - aber ich befürchte, daß mal wieder die Atombomben in Sodom & Gormorra einschlagen müssen, bevor die endlich mal ruhe geben - naja zumindestens für eine kurze zeit "_
Wow, very nice video... I'm old enough to remember all this first-hand. For whatever it's worth, absolutely easy to sub to your channel for this, thank you for doing it!
Appreciate the sub, glad you enjoyed the video!
I wasn't even going to watch this episode of Another Boring Topic, because I saw that the sequel to MS Windows series had dropped. But I took a chance, and am glad did.
Fascinating insight into Big Blue's legendary incompetence from mammoth corporate bureaucracy to catastrophic marketing blunders. A well-laid out synopsis of how and why OS/2 failed, despite its promising technology. 🖥️
I bought 2.1, Warp, and Merlin. I thought the voice recognition in Merlin worked pretty well. When I called support for help with one of the ridiculous patches for Merlin, I eventually got a director on the phone because, apparently, he was the only guy left who knew the answer to my question at the time, as the techs were all gone. Until that moment, I had no idea IBM had abandoned the product. At the time, I didn't think much of the call. Knowing what I do now, I can't believe a director got on the phone to help some kid with a product.
Microsoft did some underhanded stuff to try and kill OS/2 2.1
Back in college I ran OS/2 2.1 and had MS Word 6.0 for Windows installed. When using Word, I always had _strange_ problems, but all other (non-Microsoft) applications worked flawlessly. I called Microsoft support and they told me that Word is not compatible with OS/2. I assured him that it *is* Windows, just running under OS/2. He said something strange. He said something like, "Ya, but it is not _supposed_ to work well under OS/2".
I told a computer science major, genius, hacker guy I knew, and he "disassembled" the Word code and found numerous places where code was looking to see if it was running on OS/2 and, if so, do things differently. He concluded MS checked for OS/2 and intentionally make it run poorly if found.
This is just pain to see.
The constant mistakes they made is just unbelievable...
Sadly that is ibm
Thank you for the “reminder”!
OS/2 was the last reliable and efficient desktop system I have used (maybe today’s LINUX systems are comparable).
I managed a software development environment for mainframe programs running on OS/2 (after the split with Microsoft) on PS/2 machines.
While Windows 1:11:24 could run for as much as a week before crashing or grinding to a halt, the only times I needed to restart OS/2 was when I needed to plug in a new expansion card - as much as 7 months at a time. Native tasks always ran fast and Windows task crashes never took down the OS.
When Windows NT came out, I was given a new machine with double the CPU speed and double the RAM - and everything ran slower than half the speed as on OS/2.
Liked and subscribed. Incredibly well done video. UA-cam and the rest of us are lucky to have you here.
The book "Showstopper" contains a lot of details about the development of os/2 (by Microsoft). The fact is that the architecture of os/2 was outdated when they started to design Windows NT with Dave Cutler.
The book also describes how initially NT was intended to be the foundation for NT OS/2 or Portable OS/2 giving NT an OS/2 personally. When Microsoft saw the success of Windows 3.0, Gates and Ballmer secretly directed Cutler and his team to shift their focus on Windows while officially saying they were still working on the OS/2 personality to keep IBM happy. Only later in 1990 they confessed the true nature of NT to IBM which was the final straw for them.
The switch to the new microphone was as abrupt as the new OS2 Warp renaming! In a matter of two seconds I went from TOS to TNG, I was thrown out of 1994 into present day. I don't want "New Coke!" but the new mic sounds fine and soon I knew, I finally loved Big Brother.
Great video. I'm glad you put up a screen message stating that you made a microphone change, that was so abrupt that I thought I was possibly having a stroke.`
I tried to make the transition as seamless as possible but unfortunately just could not make it work out.
I actually considered re-recording what I did using the old mic (it actually was a fairly new mic itself, only a couple months old) but I had already put several weeks of work into editing that I didn’t want to throw away. Lessons learned, and the next video should sound much better from start to finish.
Thanks for watching and for your patience with my mic struggles :)
In 1996, I wanted to switch to OS/2 Warp for running SAS. Everyone I talked to at IBM flatly told me not to because of the culture behind its development. That says everything about the platform.
Even though I have not watched it yet I can say for sure this day just got better with a new video by Another Boring Topic. Please keep the faith in your work and do not stop bringing videos whether it's new topics as well as finishing any incomplete series.
Appreciate the kind words! Not to worry, all series will eventually be wrapped up and I have dozens more computing history topics that I want to cover
I was working in the it department at the head office for a large steel company, i we had a bunch of lotus notes servers that ram on os/2 servers. I remember updating the ibm model 95 servers with token ring networking cards and using netBui and netbios network protocols. It was ibm top to toe. By 1996 I had moved the servers onto windows nt server with compaq proliant on 100mb/s Ethernet on TCP/IP and os/2 was gone
Lotus Notes kept OS/2 around for a lot longer than it would have stuck around otherwise. Even when the desktop clients moved to windows, the Lotus Notes server stayed OS/2 for much longer.
@@martinlebl631 totally agree, when I upgraded the notes servers we kept them on os/2 mainly because our clients were still them using mostly netBui and netbios protocols but also it was ibm hardware (model 95) ibm software (lotus notes owned by ibm) ibm network protocols (token ring netBui & netbios) so the thinking went must be ibm os. Nt3.51 made some headway but once nt4 came out we were off to the races.
I had a friend that worked at a retail bank os/2 got a longer life because of bank systems especially ATMs
I was one of those early adopters of OS/2 and couldn't have foreseen how things would eventually turn out. I never know the entire story until watching your video. Excellent work sir.
In 1995I was working at GBM an IBM Alliance company for Central America, In Panamà, I used My Acer 486 with and SCSI Drive a Sound Blaster 16 and a regular microphone to dictate to my computer many documents using Voice Type on Warp 4 with more than 90% accuracy it was very funny to use and very productive.
I like you're content. I miss OS/2- I was a junior IT nothing at GE during this time. Loved OS/2, but could see that Windows would take over.
I loved OS/2 and wanted to get into programming. I went to the computer store and found that an IDE/compiler for OS/2 cost, I think, 3 or 4 hundred dollars where I could get a Borland kit for DOS and Windows for $99. That was it, I switched to MS. I never understood why they didn't just give it away.
Same here. I got to play with OS/2 Warp in the late 90's because a friend, who wasn't all that interested in computers but had plenty of cash to throw away with frivolous things, bought it mostly because "it was WAY more expensive than the competition so it had to be better, right?" but after failing to install it on his PC for, like 2-3 times, he let me have my time with it. And just after a few hours playing with it I could tell it was a superior product compared to what I was used to in DOS/Windows 3.11 but OTOH there was no software for it anywhere, not even via "sneakernet" and the box I was holding in my hands had a stupidly expensive price tag in it... And as such, it remained mostly as a curiosity for me.
Very interesting video. I used OS/2 in my office PC -- software developer at IBM in the 90s, retired 1998. I still have the Warp 4 install CDs, so I'm thinking of digging them up out their storage box and see if they still work, just for grins.
I worked briefly with Jim Cannavino when he was a young field engineer in Chicago, about 1970. I was a new hire at RTP and inherited a part of the OS/360 Communications Task from someone who had left the company. It was full of bugs. When Cannavino tested it for installation for the customer, it crashed. He detected that I was a rookie out of my depth, and it was an urgent problem, so he came to RTP and tutored me in debugging. It was valuable education.
OS/2 had a lot of corporate success. I worked in the IT dept of several very large companies which used OS/2. Where it really shined is integration with IBM mainframe systems. Also the IBM mainframe imaging software for handling things like scanned documents. It worked seamlessly under OS2. Mainframe printing and terminal emulation was seamless and worked extremely well. Over the network updates worked extremely well.
Warp 4's voice navigation and dictation was actually very good, as long as you had pumped some extra memory into your system. Similar software for Win9x paled in comparison, performance-wise.
The only problem was that after a bit, the novelty wore off. I can navigate with a keyboard and track point faster than I can tell the computer verbally. And, quite frankly, I can type better, streaming thoughts from brain to fingers faster than brain to mouth. Plus, in a small office environment, people talking to their computers gets a bit noisy and you become very self-conscious about what you are doing.
In my case, it didn't help that I tended to have CPU intensive things going on in the background... in fact, I used to bounce between three very powerful Warp 4 workstations and a Slackware Linux workstation as I would tie them up compiling, doing SQL and debugging/testing our telephony apps and internet servers... so it wasn't practical to switch my mic on/off as I jumped system to system, which already tended to be pretty busy and didn't need to add to the CPU load.
Did development under OS/2 2.0 - what an amazing platform! Way ahead of its time with true real time multi-tasking and multi-threading. Windows 9x was pathetic hot garbage by comparison. Imagine if they had given it away (ideally open sourced) with cheap development tools and and sold support instead, how things would have changed.
Love this series so far. Thank you so much. Please don't make us wait another year for part 3!
OS/2 was effectively dead by the time I was old enough to purchase my own computer (1996). I kept an eye out for it to become something that I could use instead of Win95/98, but it never got there and now I know why.
You are spot on with Pop_OS. I have a System76 Lemur Pro laptop and have endured several updates that broke things, particularly the sound.
Great video. OS/2 was a good operating system but it NEVER was for the masses. 99% of users never needed what OS2 provided - even in corporate environments. In the late 90s, I used it an insurance company on a few machines that ran some internal, custom written software that had issues that were solved by OS/2. Eventually, they just moved it to Windows NT due to the lack of available support for such a small user base within the company. Ironically, this was also the last time I saw use of the Lotus Smart Suite, eventually owned by IBM.
No “apparently” about it, PC/GEOS from Geoworks is incredibly fast and efficient! It runs acceptably on an 8088, and runs well on an 8086 or better. I used it for most of the second half of the 90s and early 2000s.
Before there was OS/2 there was Desqview, a true multi-tasking, windowed operating system. I used it ca. 1992 on a 386 laptop with 2 or 4 meg. RAM and it ran DOS apps. beautifully. Never crashed or locked. But never advanced past the character-based windowed interface to a GUI.
@23:00 I was a home user of OS/2. Workplace Shell was an absolute pleasure to use. It was extremely forward looking as described in this video. I still miss it in so many ways.
It was the mouse handling that doomed OS/2 on the desktop. Bill Gates obsessed over making sure that the Windows mouse pointer responded no matter how overloaded the system got or how badly a program behaved. OS/2 had a synchronous input mouse queue which meant that one misbehaving app could slow down the mouse for the whole system. I was a big fan of OS/2 as a developer but that one flaw - an occasionally unresponsive mouse - was too off-putting for my non-developer colleagues. Windows 95 locked up all the time, but at least you could move the pointer around even if it didn't do anything.
Edit: Thanks for the Canopus shoutout. I have fond memories of the Barkto flamewars.
This obsession paid off (at least until and including Windows XP), because one could move the cursor to another window, or click the window close button to end a misbehaving app. This must have saved the day for s great many people. Maybe it also got something to do with how in SysInternals Process Explorer on Windows XP, I could elevate the Firefox Plugin Container sub-process for the Flash plugin to prioritise UA-cam playback over all other apps and I/O on hardware that had become fairly limited towards 2014-2016.
Congrats on this excellent video! The amount of research needed for achieving such a long and comprehensive work is surely daunting. I couldn't stop watching because the story is so good. Just one question: Did you consider producing several shorter videos instead of a long one?
I’m very glad you enjoyed it, thanks for taking the time to leave a comment! 😃
I did consider breaking it into two videos, however I decided against it because I wanted to tell the entirety of the OS/2 story post JDA collapse, not tell only part of it and have yet another one of my series hanging out there waiting to be finished 😜
@@AnotherBoringTopic Thank YOU for taking the time to make the video! :D
I love your videos, it's a complete mystery to me why you don't get more views, quality content like that is incredibly rare on youtube. I watched the IBM 3 part series twice, it's just soo good.
Appreciate the compliment! It’s always great to hear that people are enjoying these oddball deep excursions into obscure tech history :)
Unexpectedly fantastic video. Great job 👏
Haven't finished watching it yet, but I remember bits and pieces (even though I'm just up to the Taligent part of the video.)
I ran OS/2 on my personal machine. Heck, I multi-booted DOS, OS/2, Windows (3.1 under dos, and later 95,) even BeOS (and briefly a very early text only Slackware that had ... nothing really compatible I could use.) Absolutely loved OS/2, did what I could to try to get other people interested in it, but ... yeah, not many apps available didn't help.
There were some good ones - and one company that was just a go-to for me, Stardock Software. I didn't run OS/2 without their Object Desktop (FAR different from the software... suite, I suppose, of the same name they have now for Windows,) played Galactic Civilizations and Avarice from them - they were a frequent stop to see what was new.
It was just frustrating as hell watching IBM fight with itself. They were supposed to introduce gaming support, as I recall (joysticks and various APIs) - they got them ready or nearly ready, then said "nope." We kept hearing both about misinformation from Microsoft and fighting from the IBM PC division who just wanted Windows because marketshare or something.. Ran it as long as I could, but USB was kind of what killed it for me. (I seem to recall something about IBM wanting to have people pay for a different edition that ran - I want to say $500 or so, just for that, and was a *bear* to get at the time.)
Lots of "if only...."
I pretty much only used OS/2 warp 3 blue spine for playing Stardock's GalCiv 2. I remember the game had a rather cool AI. In one game I had pirates attack one of my planets and I didn't notice it. A couple of the nearby aliens did though. They went and took care of the pirates for me. I did notice them heading to that planet and thought they were going there to attack it. So I sent some ships there. By the time my ships got there it was all over. The pirates were destroyed and the alien's ships were already heading back home. I was told at CompUSA that OS/2 didn't have any support. So I didn't use it for much of anything else. I also booted into Windows 95 my main OS, Dos 6.22, and Slackware Linux (3.0 or 3.2) with UMSDos support. Slackware Linux I did some rather goofy things with it. I did use it to play some rather speed sentitive msdos games under DosEmu. Took notes in the Joe Editor. Did all of this without a gui running. Just switched back and forth in Linux virtual terminals. One time I dialed up my ISP and set Linux to ping my internet connection to keep it alive. Went to the library to do some research. When I was ready, I went over to the card catalog terminal. I knew of a computer system in another city that the sysop had misconfigured a unix console web browser. It allowed you to make telnet connections. So I just used the library menus to navigate to that computer. Then I telneted into my computer back at home running Linux. Logged in and fired up Joe. Took some quick notes. Saved the file and exited Joe. Then issued the command to disconnect my computer from the internet. Hit the escape key to kill the now dead telnet connection. Then returned the terminal to the library's card catalog and left.
Oh man... OS/2 is the best example how sometimes not the best player wins, but the one who can sell himself best. It was 32bit, DOS and Windows 16 bit compatible and more stable then not only Windows 95, but Windows Me. All of that already in 1992. And that object-oriented architecture was clearly visible even in the basic interface - there were no 'shortcuts' like in Windows but 'shadows'. It worked like shortcut, but deleting the source meant also deleting all shadows. (You could just delete the program and the shadow icon on the desktop would automatically disappear too). All of that in early 90s....
Not only IBM effed it up massively, even to this day they will not release the source-code. It was one of the most spectacular failures in history of computing. Basically a coach having the best football player in the world but not letting him play nor letting him go to play for another club. And now the football player is way too old to matter anyway.
Unfortunately, IBM will probably never be able to release the source for OS/2, because there's parts they don't own the rights to -- for just one example, HPFS, which is still Microsoft's.
@@Ice_Karma
_"IBM will probably never be able to release the source for OS/2, because there's parts they don't own the rights to -- for just one example, HPFS, which is still Microsoft's."_
The owned parts could be released.
Like the Doom (1993) source code with no licensed audio engine code.
At this point, who cares...
Best wishes.
@@ajax700 Unfortunately, unlike the Doom example, or Mozilla, I believe some of the code that IBM doesn't own the rights to themselves is involved in _booting_ the operating system, which would make it useless, in practical terms, unless you just wanted to study the code. Maybe that's enough -- I guess it depends on what people would want to _do_ with that code.
@@Ice_Karma
So they own nothing!? ha.
Like Larry Ellison (Oracle) said, they used commodity CPUs, commodity hardware, used others software.
It would be an anomaly if they had not lost the control of the Ibm-PC "platform"!
Best wishes.
BV is Dutch for LLC. Mensys is a Dutch software reseller we did business with early this century. I was surprised to hear their name here.
Thank you!! I had been waiting for this one!
IBM's OS/2 Warp 3 campaign was huge in Brazil as well, so I bought for my mother's computer (I used Linux on my own machines) in the hope that Wordperfect would be more stable than in Windows. Brazil had just changed the currency to "R$" after the CD-ROMs had been pressed, but I thought that would be easy to fix, After all, I had written a few operating systems myself. Eventually I gave up and had to call technical support for the only time in my life. The guy gave me the number of a BBS and the very odd name of a utility I had to download and run. This patched the OS/2 binaries directly! Were they going to wait for every single buyer in Brazil to call and give these arcane instructions over the phone? How much was this going to cost them compared to including an extra leaflet in the package explaining the same thing?
Another great documentary. Your channel is a gem.
15 minutes into watching, will probably watch it over several days but great video as usual! And glad to see many are watching too!
I still have all of my copies of OS/2 related magazines and journals, including OS/2 Professional
Im going to buy a copy of Arca OS just so I can run Win3.1 apps on modern hardware. Thats amazing!
A Windows APIs translator / emulator like WINE seems like a much better idea.
I doubt ArcaOS has good and extended modern hardware support, but I'm totally ignorant.
Best wishes.
It all makes sense now... I remember that I did install OS/2 on my machine around 1992, but I eventually got rid of it because there was no software available. The reason I wanted OS/2 on my machine was that it was the only way to benefit from the whole memory I had on it: 8MB, as I was quite annoyed of the way this extra-memory was used by Windows. The very notion of upper-memory was really complicated to go around. Windows was still at that time a GUI on top of DOS, while OS/2 was a full OS. And Windows 3.1 used to crash a lot. But this was where the industry was heading and software was plentiful. But still, I regret that OS/2 was such a loner, because really the difference was striking. Back then Windows had a terrible amateurish look, while OS/2 looked so polished. Everything changed with Window 95, even though for those who remember, the DOS architecture was still there... IRQ anyone? When your network card could not work because it shared the same IRQ as your sound card??? As a professional, I really had a hard time to understand how laymen could work on these machines... The terrible and dreadful config.sys file.
Ergo IBM really could have slayed Microsoft but administrative incompetence killed them.
Honestly, windows 98SE was pretty damned solid even though it had the old DOS code base.
I was always fascinated with OS/2 though
@@JustinEdwords I agree about the solidity of Windows 98SE. I remember that sometime after 98SE came out, Microsoft found a bug where the system would crash after 49.5 days, when an internal time-keeping value measuring "clock ticks since boot" would roll over, causing time to appear to warp backwards, and lots of bad things to happen to drivers that weren't expecting it. The bug wasn't new to 98SE, though: it had been there since Windows 95, but it took until WIndows 98SE to actually get a machine to _stay up_ for that long! (Interestingly enough, around the same time, it was discovered that many drivers for Linux had a similar bug, but around 495 days instead. To this day, there's still an option in the Linux kernel configuration which will boot the kernel with the internal time set to "five minutes until rollover".)