Remember OS/2? Promoted as the successor to DOS in the late 1980’s and

early 1990’s, the product wound up losing out to Windows and then slowly fading away.

This article recounts what happened and summarizes OS/2 today.

In the mid-1980’s, IBM and its partner Microsoft faced a

challenge. While basking in the industry dominance of DOS, they knew

they needed a more modern, robust operating system going forward. They

wanted a system with a graphical user interface, preemptive

multitasking, standardized API’s, networking support, and a more robust

filesystem to support larger disks. They

also wanted to eliminate direct hardware calls to the BIOS by

applications.

The OS would control interfaces to all program services.

IBM and Microsoft signed a joint development agreement in 1985 to

co-develop this DOS successor. Operating System/2 came out two years

later. But all was not happy in

OS/2 land. The team initially targeted the 286

processor for compatibility, but this was a mistake with the 386 coming

out in 1985. This meant that OS/2 ran in 16-bit protected mode when it

ideally

should have used the 386’s flat memory model and other advanced

386 features. The GUI, called the Presentation

Manager, wasn’t released until over a

year after the base product. Drivers

were few. You couldn’t even find many printer drivers. Performance was

abysmal.

Meanwhile, Windows, Microsoft’s simple add-on graphical face to DOS,

sold

millions of copies. Windows 3.0 and 3.1 were easy to use and 100%

compatible with the huge base of DOS software. Microsoft shifted

its focus to Windows. By 1990 it abandoned OS/2 to IBM, throwing

Windows

3.x and OS/2 into direct competition.

IBM fought back with a major OS/2 release in 1992. Version 2.0 featured

a fully object-oriented interface called the Workplace Shell. It

also had a

32 bit API (with some 16-bit internals). IBM marketed the

new OS/2 as “A better DOS than DOS

and a better Windows than Windows,”

but most users didn’t see why they should buy it. Windows came

bundled with new PCs. OS/2 required an additional purchase.

Consumers stuck with Windows.

In 1994, IBM released OS/2 3.0, called Warp. Warp had better

networking, hardware, and

multimedia support. It came with the IBM Works office suite. In 1996

IBM released Warp 4, with speech recognition,

Java, and a personal version of Lotus Notes.

Computer professionals considered OS/2 Warp technically

superior to Windows 3.1 — and even to Windows 95. IBM sold millions of

OS/2 licenses into large IT organizations, especially in the banking,

finance,

and insurance industries. Many companies used it as a base for

dedicated

applications. But

the product never even got a toehold with the public. With new

PCs bundling Windows, consumers saw no need to buy OS/2.

Get Warped, Baby (Courtesy: Wikipedia)

IBM Drops OS/2



With Windows 95’s success, IBM knew they had lost the battle for the

consumer desktop. The company laid off 95% of the OS/2 project

team and announced that Warp 4 would be the final major release.

Yet IBM didn’t stop selling and supporting OS/2 until a

decade later, in 2006. (Support continues even today for certain IT

contracts.)

ATM Running Warp (Courtesy: Wikipedia)

Corporations with large OS/2 projects, including embedded and dedicated

apps,

continued using OS/2 for years after IBM “stabilized” (froze) the

product at Warp 4.

But with desupport in 2006, users understood they needed to act.

Some asked IBM to continue OS/2 development and support. But IBM had

already made the decision to write off OS/2 a decade earlier. Tens

of thousands signed petitions for IBM to

open source the product. IBM was unable to do so due

to OS/2 code developed, owned or patented by

other companies (such as Microsoft). IBM did open source OS/2’s scripting

language, Object Rexx. Today it’s known as Open Object Rexx and is supported

by the Rexx Lanuage Association. ooRexx today runs on Windows, Linux, and Unix and is a useful and competitive scripting lanuage.

Some users decided that if IBM could not open source OS/2, they would

develop the equivalent themselves. The osFree

project aimed to create an open source OS compatible with Warp 4. The

project appears to have stalled out in the alpha phase.

A commercial company called Serenity Systems International stepped

forward to sell a licensed and updated version of OS/2 called eComStation

(“eCS”). It’s

been successful for them: they released their first

version in 2001, and their most recent version 2.1 in May 2011. eCS

offers a good stable

of free applications.

eComStation Screenshot (Courtesy: Wikipedia)

Some companies preserve their OS/2 code investment by

virtualization. Virtual PC,

VirtualBox, and similar products can host OS/2 or eCS as guests. (There

are some complexities

in virtualizing some OS/2 versions so users need to do their homework

before jumping in.)

The Future

So what does the future hold? The OS/2 — eCS community remains active.

Visit it at web sites like OS/2

World, OS/2 Org, and OS2 Voice. OS/2 users have tons of

free code to download from websites like the Hobbes Project and others.

The annual Warpstock

conference still meets as do other Warp events.

The OS/2 community supports products like those offered by Serenity

Systems. Whether it can also

produce an open source OS/2 like osFree is an open question but one

that appears increasingly unlikely.

While OS/2 and eCS comprise a healthy niche, it’s

unlikely that they will expand beyond their current user base. The

technology that made OS/2 cutting-edge in the mid-1990’s is today

mainstream. There are many popular free

competitors

to niche commercial systems like OS/2 — including many Linux and BSD

distributions. As the

world

moves to 64-bit computing and newer hardware, companies using

OS/2 will likely move to newer

platforms as their applications age.

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Howard Fosdick (President, FCI) is an independent consultant who

supports databases and operating systems. He consults for vendors

as an industry analyst. Read his other articles here.