OS/2 is 20 years old - dead but still walking

IF OUR CALENDARS serve us right, April 2007 means twenty years have passed since the initial "Microsoft-IBM OS/2 1.0" announcement. But the story of OS/2 is not always told right.

Once upon a time, Bill Nichols wrote, "Linux gets all the press, Microsoft gets all the hate mail, OS/2 gets ignored. But somehow, OS/2 users keep on running this relatively unknown and little respected system. Why? 'Success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan." A statement with which I agree completely.

In this anniversary, I'd like to shed some light about my first-hand experience with this legendary OS, especially since I see many attempts at history re-writing and over-simplification, when people compress OS/2's two decades into a single paragraph. An OS/2 user named Roger Perkins wrote to OS/2 newsgroups exactly ten years ago: "Here's to OS/2's 10th Anniversary on April 2nd! No OS has ever died so many times!."

The 16-bit, 1.x versions of OS/2 that came out of Microsoft, put plainly, sucked. Its DOS support was dubbed the "penalty box" as it ran DOS applications more restricted and less reliably than under plain DOS. It never achieved critical mass, and the user interface was ugly - as ugly as Windows 3.x and its predecessors. But plenty of recent articles do not make this distinction, and pretend there was a very big black hole between 1992 and 1997, and that Microsoft co-developed OS/2, then switched to Windows, and OS/2 flopped in the hands of IBM. That is one big understatement, as OS/2 was radically improved as soon as Microsoft departed the ship and it enjoyed moderate success for more than half a decade in the hands of IBM.

The golden years (mid-1993 to mid-1996)
The Window (cough!) of opportunity for IBM's 32-bit OS/2 span from 1993 until mid-1995. Back then, the 16-bit Windows 3.x running on top of DOS was a joke from a stability and multitasking point of view. NT was still in its early stages and its user interface was as boring and uninspiring as Microsoft's own 16-bit OS/2 1.x failure. It wouldn't be until 1996 that Windows NT got a real chance, by switching to the more flashy Win95 GUI.

By April 1992, the "new" all-IBM, 32-bit flavour of OS/2 - the 32-bit GPI was coded by Micrografx and added later - was impressive when compared to the dullness of 16-bit windows on top of DOS or even the previous 16-bit OS/2 1.x versions co-developed with Redmondia.

OS/2 2.0's pre-emptive multitasking ran circles around Windows 3.x's "cooperative" multitasking, which sometimes felt more like task-switching. I remember how the BBS scene was orgasmic about OS/2 2.0's ability to run several instances of DOS-based BBS software at once and reliably, each serving an independent phone line. In that sense, OS/2 was "a better DOS than DOS" and it certainly was "a better Windows than Windows" (3.1), since it ran Windows sessions in separate "DOS virtual machines". Thus if one 16-bit Windows application crashed, it just brought down that particular VM, not the entire OS. Thus, OS/2 protected misbehaving 16-bit Windows applications from each other.

The graphical desktop, the Workplace Shell, was totally object-oriented and consistent once you learned to right-click - a totally foreign concept for Windows 3.1 users - and to "drag and drop", only today are environments like the open source desktop Gnome used on Linux and OpenSolaris beginning to approach the power and beauty of what a bunch of IBMers developed on their own to replace Microsoft's original dull 16-bit GUI... and all this was back in 1992.

Big Blue's software division perfected and polished the OS/2 2.0 code over the years, and thus OS/2 2.1 was born. The next step was "Warp", or OS/2 3.0 released back in 1994, which brought down the memory requirements so it could boot on as little as 4MB ram - eight was recommended. Warp added multimedia and was the first OS to come with TCP/IP and a web browser. 1995 brought "Warp Connect", a version of OS/2 with LAN Networking and file/printer sharing, which IBM had been selling as a separate add-on until then.

With the Windows 95 release back in late August of that year, Microsoft embarked on a PR blitz such as never before seen, which included "convincing" hardware OEMs not to preload "that other OS". Even IBM's own PC Division reluctantly agreed to preload OS/2 Warp on a line of its Aptiva desktops, but guess what? It was offered in a "dual boot" setup, alongside Windows, so buyers had to choose at the initial power-up whether to run one or the other. Would the Apple of today pre-load OS-X only alongside Vista, instead of promoting its own OS? Clearly, IBM's other divisions were sabotaging the software division's strategy, all for the short-term interest, in other words, Microsoft's advertising dollars.

OS/2 and the Press - a rocky relationship
At a time when Windows 3.x running on top of MS-DOS was the corporate standard, very few hacks wished to spend a day installing IBM's 32-bit OS/2 from diskettes. Those that did either had underpowered machines - RAM was as expensive as gold at the time - or video cards not supported by IBM's drivers - an Achilles' heel which wouldn't be eliminated until very late in the OS-wars, when Scitech Software developed Display Doctor for OS/2, universal video drivers, and IBM licensed that code. Mistakes and inaccuracies when reviewing OS/2 were frequent, and "lack of applications" was a common cliche - which would in turn put OS/2 users up in arms, writing to the publications and pointing out about little-known tiny software vendors who offered 32-bit OS/2 PM apps.

In short, the trade press never gave IBM's "new" 32-bit OS/2 a chance, even while it had easily a three-year lead on Windows. The Vole kept promising vapourware, and some rags ran "Windows 4.0 exclusive screenshots" near two years before any Windows 95 shipped out of Redmondia. In that meantime, FUD was rampant. Nicholas Petreley wrote in his "Down to the wire" column at Infoworld back in January, 1996: "Product most likely to be discontinued: IBM will abandon OS/2 Warp several more times this year. Well, to be honest, that probably won't happen. But it's the national pastime of the trade press to predict OS/2's demise, and I understand I could lose my Clark Kent press hat if I don't cooperate."

Another glaring example which still fresh in my memory was an article incorrectly claiming that OS/2, unlike Windows 95, "did not support long filenames". It's no wonder that some OS/2 users back then referred to a certain print media empire as "Ziff-Gates".

In a rare case of honesty in the middle of the OS/2-vs-Windows wars, Nick Petreley ended his comment on IBM's OS/2 and the media by saying, "Speaking of which, OS/2 gained hundreds of new applications last year. The trade press continues to perpetuate the Microsoft prosperity myth and talk about how OS/2 flopped as a consumer product, but companies such as Stardock Systems, (maker of several hot OS/2 applications, including some OS/2 games that have outsold DOS games), cried about it all the way to the bank in 1995". But that initial inertia wasn't enough to keep the train moving, specially uphill. IBM made one terrible mistake by spreading resources too thinly and attempting to port OS/2 from x86 to the PowerPC in the middle of the fight with Microsoft. That effort proved being lethal to the PSP - Personal Software Products - division at IBM.

Fall from grace within IBM
An IBMer who should remain nameless, but who worked at the AIX division, once admitted to this scribbler - back then just a computer geek - "I will never promote OS/2. Why would I tell someone he can run DB2 or Oracle 7 for OS/2 in a beige box, if I could convince him to buy a RS/6000? My job is to sell Aix and RS/6000s". By then I realized that OS/2 faced an uphill battle, even internally. Big Blue's own PC division was notorious for even refusing to install OS/2 - IBM's own OS - at some point, much to the dismay of IBMers at the Boca Raton and later Austin TX software unit. Additionally, you could get conflicting messages from the same company, one salesman would talk to you about "open standards", while on the other hand, Jeff Papows' Lotus CEO at the time, got in bed with Microsoft and integrated Microsoft's Internet Explorer with Notes, thus making porting of the Notes client to other platforms even more difficult.

After the OS/2 for PowerPC fiasco, the software division was on its own. Lou Gerstner "de-emphasized" OS/2, it meant that OS/2 was from then on "just another IBM OS", not promoted by IBM as a whole more than any other of its offerings. In other words, the IBM software division - or the remmants of it - had to "pay its own way" moving forward. Contrast that with the huge cash cow that the Evil Empire had thanks to the DOS and Office preload agreements with OEMs, the so-called "Windows tax".

During the mid- to late-90s, John Soyring was one of the few IBMers who had a vision, was able to look at the "big picture" and fought the big uphill battle internally - I know it because I then exchanged messages with him on a weekly basis - and he even had the courage to take the stand at the DOJ-vs-Microsoft trial last decade and talk about how Independent Software Vendors were reluctant to port their applications to OS/2 due to fear of "reprisals" or discrimination from the Redmond Juggernaut. The rest within IBM were pretty spineless, trying to continue with business as usual and caring only for their own division's next-quarter sales outlook. In that sense, OS/2 lost any real chance of winning the internal fight within IBM the moment "Blue Ninja" - Lee Reiswig - left the software division.

The decline
Eventually, IBM proceeded to throw the towel in the desktop-OS wars. OS/2 Warp 4.0 was the last desktop release and saw the light of day in November 1996. By then Microsoft's NT 4.0 workstation would start capitalising on the end users' familiarity with the Win95/98 GUI, and coupled with NT's more stable kernel, would prove to be a too enticing migration option for most corporations.

IBM's software division had fallen from grace and was renamed the "Network Computing" division. IBM as a whole embraced Java and the then-new "Network Computing" mantra - at the time peddled by Oracle among others as the next Holy Grail - and decided it would convert OS/2 as some sort of "interim" OS to run the Java middleware layer, thus discouraging any OS/2 development. This effectively killed OS/2 by cutting off its legs. The other IBM divisions - like Lotus for instance - helped the Vole an awful lot, first by doing full-page ads in printed magazines touting "Lotus apps on NT 4.0 Workstation", and then delaying and shipping totally buggy OS/2 versions of Lotus Smartsuite, which were not a native version but ports from the Windows versions code base, recompiled using IBM's own "Open32" libraries which translated Win32 api calls to OS/2's own.

The 'dead' OS keeps walking, even in 2007
There is an OS/2 box plugged at my home LAN: it runs as a NFS server and is used for ocassional web browsing, picture resizing with PMView - one of the best but least known graphics viewers out there, available for Windows and OS/2 - and document-editing with OpenOffice/2. The dual-PIII cpus running at 650MHz make it too slow to be used for "modern" cpu-intensive operations like MPEG video editing and the like. It sits there plugged into an APC UPS, and last time I checked its uptime before powering it down, it ran for fifteen months without a reboot.

Six years ago I predicted - so far my only Nostradamus-esque claim to fame - that the impending wave of Open Source software would prove to be a lifesaver for OS/2. It was, and still is. Today, if you look in the right OS/2 user circles at some dark corners of the Interweb, you will find news about the release of Firefox 2.0.0.2 for the elderly OS, or the Samba server in its latest version 3.0. Yet all this happens despite, not thanks to, IBM - for whose execs the mere mention of OS/2 is a stain, a disgusting memory of the company's own defeat and internal incompetence.

Serenity Systems today continues developing and selling its own rebranded version of OS/2 dubbed " eComstation" with version 2.0 currently in beta testing - beta 4 has been just released, and it can boot from JFS partitions for the first time, shocker! A group of code hackers is also busy trying to add decent ACPI and dual-core support. In the end, OS/2's "frozen API" - IBM hasn't changed an API since it virtually froze development in late 1999 after the last "Warp Server for e-Business" release, has proved a good antidote against software bloat: just compare OS/2's memory requirements for a functional, operational web browsing, e-mail and Office use, with Vista's footprint.

Conclusion
The press will say that OS/2 turns 20 years old this April. Don't believe us. For those who have used OS/2 for years, the real "/2" OS was born in April 1992 and came from Big Blue's now gone and forgotten labs at Boca Raton, Florida. Sadly, a few years later it would be condemned to death by a combination of an agressive competitor with a "preloads cash cow" and little regard for antitrust laws, and a mix of incompetence and neglect by its parent corporation, too afraid to fight the desktop-OS wars and bet the company on it.

Yet despite IBM, die-hard OS/2 users and programmers still refuse to let it rot. There must be something good about it, then. Shame on IBM for not open sourcing the kernel - even if it means dropping the parts co-owned by the Vole - and leaving it as an interesting toy for geeks and embedded system builders to play with. Most of the OS/2 user base, like this scribbler, have moved on to greener pastures for the daily work - my notebooks run Linux, for instance - but some of us can't help but look at those still-running OS/2 systems, complete with a functional desktop, web browser and productivity apps, and sigh with a mix of melancholy and admiration. µ

L'INQs
eComstation - Today's rebadged OS/2
Developers petition IBM to open source OS/2
2005: IBM "posts funeral notice for OS/2"
OS/2, the little engine that could
Alive in Russia - Screenshots
1997: OS/2 wins Infoworld's "Readers' Choice" awards, saga...
"OS/2 lacks long filenames support" -not!- Microsoft-watching journalism
Microsoft Exec: OEMs Must Not Install Linux Besides Windows
Did Microsoft want to 'whack' Dell over its Linux dealings?

See also:
OS/2 museum opens up