I absolutely loved OS/2. It was an absolutely phenomenal operating system. I really wish that IBM had put more effort behind it. Today, if MS and IBM could actually cooperate with one another, it'd be great to get it open sourced.
Sadly, by the time OS/2 was really competitive, MS had taken the market, and there was little reason for most users to go buy another operating system when Win3 or Win95 came on their machines, and NT was shipping on workstations.
I wish I could find it but there was a article written by someone who I think had some connection to sales about how OS/2 was effectively "sold wrong" by IBM who just didn't seem to know how to sell software like OS/2.
I remember posting that article on a company intranet once and a bunch of former IBM sales folks (who now worked at the same company I did) chimed in to echo the idea that IBM had a neat product with OS/2 but as an organization had no idea what to do with it.
Not to say it would have overtaken Windows, but it also struggled because it was sold by a company who didn't know what to do with it.
I miss OS/2 a lot. For what it was at the time (intel, not ppc) it worked really well. When I was at Netscape, my build machine was OS/2 so I could do windows builds and still actually work. Machines then were much less capable than now, but I rarely had any bogging down of the system.
I did my first internship at Boca Raton in the OS/2 device driver support group. They announced OS/2 PPC while I was there, and also BeOS was dropped around the same time. Suffice it to say it was an exciting time for PPC hardware that I could never afford on my own (Windows 95 also came out that year, it was all so nuts).
I had a brush with the PS/2 and OS/2 back in the day. IBM offered the PS/2-based Personal/370 on the platform with a card that could execute S/370 SW. My team built the I/O channel card for connecting 3480 tapes and the like. It was funny seeing the fat bus and tag cables attached to a little box through an adapter pigtail.
To the nostalgics among us: what made OS/2 special? 32bit support?
I recall trying OS/2 2.0 or 2.1 back in the day, coming from a DOS/Win3.11 setup. It seemed to have the same basic features as DOS/Windows but wasn't properly compatible with my existing software. Admittedly, this was before I knew anything about programming. I discovered Linux not much later. It wasn't compatible with anything either, but seemed like a totally different and much more compelling proposition.
> To the nostalgics among us: what made OS/2 special?
I started out with OS/2 v1.1. It had threads, DLLs, multi-tasking, much larger memory space, and from v1.2 a somewhat decent filesystem. Coming from DOS 3.2/Win 2.0 this was an incredible leap, in particular the SDK was amazing compared to the ragtag assembly of info I was used to. The _delta_ between two systems haven't been this large ever since, and I think that is what contributes to the "magic" feeling.
Back in 1995 it was, to my knowledge, the only OS capable of sharing CD-ROM's on the network. Even MS-DOS and Windows 3.11 machines could access it.
It was also capable of sharing Mainframe printers using a real null-printer-driver, which was not possible on Windows NT3.51 or NT4.0. Windows always messed with the Mainframe codes that it could not understand.
It was also easy to set up OS/2 as a gateway between different network hardware and protocols (Token Ring to Ethernet, or NetBios to IPX/SPX, ...)
Multitasking, SOM (contrary to COM, it does implementation inheratance across languages, multiple inheritance and has meta-classes), object based desktop, Smalltalk for business application development (basically a similar role as VB and .NET have gotten latter on on Windows), Visual Age for C++ had a Smalltalk like experience (although ported to Windows as well).
However this also meant a more beefy hardware than the DOS/Windows 3.x combo.
Computers were far more crashy in those days, but OS/2 crashed far less often than Windows or even DOS did. And sometimes when a program crashed on OS/2, it only killed itself; it didn't take down the whole machine, so you had a chance to save your work in other programs before rebooting.
It also either was, or felt like it was, very very fast. Windows felt like a laggy VNC connection. GEM and the rest weren't much better speed-wise than GEOS on a Commodore 64.
I’m always curious how these projects come about and survive: why go to all of the effort to port for a dead-end product line? As technically sweet as it is? I imagine they would’ve found a decent market if they’d ported to Power Mac.
(Also, was the x86 emulation implemented in-house? I wouldn’t be surprised if some niche small company had a x86 emulator for PPC product that they could be paid to port.)
The plan was for all operating systems on top of IBM's POWER/PPC hardware to be rehosted as "personalities" on top of the Workplace OS microkernel, but in the end, OS/2 was the only personality that saw any real work.
The Workplace OS would also have been used on Apple hardware as part of the abortive Taligent project.
(It also would have been used on x86 and other platforms, but they started with PPC)
In reality, in some ways we are there now. I'm wondering if we can say that the "workplace OS" can simply viewed as a hypervisor and the "personalities" that run on top it are simply VMs (perhaps being paravirtualized).
I think oddities like this were a consequence of a hardware world that was rocketing along the heart of Moore’s Law, alongside a software world that hadn’t matured past multi-year product cycles.
When OS/2 for PowerPC was set in motion, that Intel would “Make CISC
Great Again” with the Pentium was far from clear.
I remember that the "general consensus" was that RISC was gonna win, it was just a matter of when (and when it could be affordable). What was NOT certain was which RISC architecture would come out ahead, so there was a bunch of porting to "remove the risk" - later they would unport most everything and "remove the RISC".
Pentium shook that tree a bit, and Pentium II really razzle-dazzled it.
Well, the thing is that RISC did win. It is just that the RISC that won is the one that Intel baked into their x86 chips.
The Pentium introduced the idea of micro op codes though the Pentium Pro was the first chip to really run with it. The CISC x86 instructions were converted into simpler instructions internally. These micro op codes could be pipe-lined, executed in parallel, and executed out-of-order.
If the Pentium II really razzle-dazzled, it did it with RISC architecture at its core. The CISC instruction decoder added a bit of die size but that did not matter much and Intel had leading-edge manufacturing tech.
The internal parallelism was also put to good use by adding SIMD instructions (MMX). These first appeared in the Pentium MMX and Pentium II but the Pentium III did it much better and of course Intel has continued to add more powerful SIMD stuff over time.
RISC did not win only inside Intel chips of course. Every successful ISA since the 90's has been RISC including ARM and RISC-V. But even RISC chips feature some complex instructions these days.
I'd argue (to some extent) that the proliferation of SIMD instructions demonstrates that RISC did lose, not just the practical war, but also the conceptual one. i.e. we creates many many similiar instructions today, which seems to go against the ethos of RISC.
I'm not sure I agree with "dead end" outside of the benefit of hindsight, or maybe don't get the point you're making. Neither the PowerPC nor OS/2 were dead-end in 1995, and competition in the OS space was still happening. Why wouldn't IBM want to have PowerPC survive, let alone thrive, with OS options? And surely they'd have loved something to take on Microsoft at this point in history.
I remember at the time there was also going to be the wonderful new kernel that would allow OS/2 and MacOS to coexist on the same machine. As someone who had a Mac and an OS/2 machine side-by-side on his desk, this seemed like it could be a wonderful thing, but alas, it was never to come to be.
I was just a kid during the 1990s when all of this was happening, but a few years ago I remember reading about an IBM project named GUTS where one kernel would run multiple OS "personalities":
Microsoft technically delivered something very close to OS/2’s “Personalities” in Windows NT 4. They called it "Environment subsystems". Each subsystem could run applications written for different operating systems, the 3 available ones were Win32, OS/2 and POSIX. Then there was the "Integral subsystem", which operated system-specific functions on behalf of environment subsystems.
But every subsystem other than Win32 was kneecapped mostly due to politics and market positioning.
In late 90s Microsoft bought a company which had developed a more enhanced Unix subsystem and rebranded it as Interix and marketed as Windows Subsytem for Unix (SFU).
I believe the original WSL was a resurrection of SFU before WSL2 pivoted to a VM-based approach.
No, the original WSL was a weird new thing where NT kernel-level driver actually serviced Linux system calls.
IIRC, Interix still used same approach as original posix subsystem (and Windows and OS/2 subsystems) of providing the interface as DLL that ultimately your application would be linked against.
One of the original design requirements for NT was that it be portable between different CPU architectures, it was one of the driving forces behind its creation.
So much so in fact, Microsoft developed NT 3.1 first on non-x86 architectures (i860 and MIPS), then later ported to x86, to ensure no x86 specific code made it in.
"Windows NT 3.1 was released for Intel x86 PC compatible and PC-98 platforms, and for DEC Alpha and ARC-compliant MIPS platforms. Windows NT 3.51 added support for the PowerPC processor in 1995"...
NT is a pretty interesting bit of PC history, I can highly recommend the book "Show Stopper!" by G. Pascal Zachary that recounts its development, and also dives a bit into why making the OS portable across CPU architectures was so important to the team at the time.
Something I didn't realize until recently was that the original MIPS version of Windows NT was Big Endian. I'd always heard it said that WinNT was strictly, 100%, absolutely always little endian, and the fact that every CPU that got a port (or was going to get a port) was either little or bi endian confirmed this.
Well, it is true, but Windows did run BE on the original MIPS R3000 platform. And only on the R3K[0]. The CPU architecture flag is still defined on modern Windows as IMAGE_FILE_MACHINE_R3000BE. There's an early test build of Win3.1 + GDI somewhere that runs on this platform.
The actual first release of WinNT 3.1 only supported MIPS R4000 and higher, I think. In little endian mode.
[0] I know the Xbox used a modified NT kernel, I've seen claims that the Xbox 360 also was, which would make it the second NT system to run big endian. Not familiar enough with sources better than wikipedia to trust that it actually was.
I believe you're correct - Xbox runs a modified Windows 20000, and subsequent versions I'm not certain on but I know it basically stands up a modified Hyper-V and the parent partition is the interface OS with games booting whatever kernel they were built for inside a VM
One of my first job out of school was as a sales support for the then bleeding edge NT 3.1 MIPS box for a company in Canada. Fond memories of loading stacks of 1.44 floppy disks for NT 3.1 and mangling ARC paths (Advanced RISC Computing, boot firmware). This was pre-internet and documentation was often hard to come by, incomplete etc.
I remember demoing the machines to astonished clients by running a stupid number of Clock apps on the desktop without a hitch.
My first real job out of school was supporting Windows NT on Dec Alpha for a company in Canada.
Things were so weird and wonderful back then. You could get GCC from Microsoft for Windows NT 3.1 for Alpha (crazy). And when Windows NT 4.0 came out there was the FX32 subsystem that ran X86 apps on Alpha (very similar to Apple Rosetta but much earlier).
I did not realize Canada was such a hotbed of Windows NT RISC.
Interesting historical note: the main reason PuTTy exists is because its author was given a Windows NT on alpha workstation and there was no native terminal emulator for it that he needed to connect to other equipment. IIRC, PuTTy still supported alpha into the 2000s until the build machine he had failed.
Yes and no. It was a permanent delete, no visible GUI with deleted files. But there was an actual UNDELETE command that could be used to recover files (or not)
> What could have been. If the respective parties... on the PPC 615, OS/2
There was never a chance at that time because x86 chips were produced in such volumes that PowerPC chips couldn't compete price-wise. Also, OS/2 became an instant outsider once Windows 95 was released. Two underdogs don't make a winner. The article says it all:
"The OS was clearly unfinished and not entirely stable. Worst of all, there were about zero applications. Because OS/2 PPC was never truly in use, PowerPC versions of OS/2 applications were never sold."
What numbers? As much as I hated Windows 3.x (which is why I upgraded from DOS to Linux, not to Windows 95, and never looked back) it did not occur to me that many by 1995 did not have some Windows 3.x installed, as it was required for so much software (even some games).
Still don't support the claim that people were mainly updating from DOS without Windows 3.x. Anecdotally I still think almost everyone using DOS by 1995 had Windows 3.x installed as well. Not necessarily a copy of Windows that was the result of Microsoft selling a copy of course.
Additionally, while this is US-centric, there were still many households in the mid-1990s whose first computers were PCs running Windows 95, just in time for the World Wide Web to be widely available, which created demand for personal computers. Additionally, this was during the time when Apple was struggling; its Performa lineup geared toward home users was not in the best of shape in 1995 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Macintosh_5200_LC). By the time Steve Jobs returned and Apple released the first iMac (1998), it was just about time for Windows 98.
Being at the right age when Windows 95 came out, I didn't really know that there was a "Windows" prior to 95. My dad's computer ran DOS and used something called Powermenu as an organiser for executing programs. I think I had to run Wolfenstein in a tiny window for it to be fast enough to be playable, and may have, at one point, deleted one of the required DOS system files in order to try to tweak the life out of it to try to get it playable full screen. I think that was a 286. More years ago than I care to admit.
Apple somehow managed to claw it's way to releavance from a weaker position in 1998 (with PoserPC!) So if they had their act together they could have done better in the early 90s.
hey squandered their early lead in the US among consumers and education and also ignored the international market.
Not gonna lie Wintel was a formidable force. Microsoft was ruthless in cornering the market.
But technically, OS/2 and MacOS gave Windows a run for it's money, arguably superior on some respects, and you could say the same for PowerPC and Intel.
‘SteveB went on the road to see the top weeklies, industry analysts and business press this week to give our systems strategy. The meetings included demos of Windows 3.1 (pen and multimedia included), Windows NT, OS/2 2.0 including a performance comparison to Windows and a “bad app” that corrupted other applications and crashed the system. It was a very valuable trip and needs to be repeated by other MS executives throughout the next month so we hit all the publications and analysts.’
‘The demos of OS/2 were excellent. Crashing the system had the intended effect – to FUD OS/2 2.0. People paid attention to this demo and were often surprised to our favor. Steve positioned it as -- OS/2 is not "bad" but that from a performance and "robustness" standpoint, it is NOT better than Windows’
"I have written a PM app that hangs the system (sometimes quite graphically)."
I absolutely loved OS/2. It was an absolutely phenomenal operating system. I really wish that IBM had put more effort behind it. Today, if MS and IBM could actually cooperate with one another, it'd be great to get it open sourced.
Sadly, by the time OS/2 was really competitive, MS had taken the market, and there was little reason for most users to go buy another operating system when Win3 or Win95 came on their machines, and NT was shipping on workstations.
I wish I could find it but there was a article written by someone who I think had some connection to sales about how OS/2 was effectively "sold wrong" by IBM who just didn't seem to know how to sell software like OS/2.
I remember posting that article on a company intranet once and a bunch of former IBM sales folks (who now worked at the same company I did) chimed in to echo the idea that IBM had a neat product with OS/2 but as an organization had no idea what to do with it.
Not to say it would have overtaken Windows, but it also struggled because it was sold by a company who didn't know what to do with it.
I miss OS/2 a lot. For what it was at the time (intel, not ppc) it worked really well. When I was at Netscape, my build machine was OS/2 so I could do windows builds and still actually work. Machines then were much less capable than now, but I rarely had any bogging down of the system.
I did my first internship at Boca Raton in the OS/2 device driver support group. They announced OS/2 PPC while I was there, and also BeOS was dropped around the same time. Suffice it to say it was an exciting time for PPC hardware that I could never afford on my own (Windows 95 also came out that year, it was all so nuts).
I had a brush with the PS/2 and OS/2 back in the day. IBM offered the PS/2-based Personal/370 on the platform with a card that could execute S/370 SW. My team built the I/O channel card for connecting 3480 tapes and the like. It was funny seeing the fat bus and tag cables attached to a little box through an adapter pigtail.
To the nostalgics among us: what made OS/2 special? 32bit support?
I recall trying OS/2 2.0 or 2.1 back in the day, coming from a DOS/Win3.11 setup. It seemed to have the same basic features as DOS/Windows but wasn't properly compatible with my existing software. Admittedly, this was before I knew anything about programming. I discovered Linux not much later. It wasn't compatible with anything either, but seemed like a totally different and much more compelling proposition.
> To the nostalgics among us: what made OS/2 special?
I started out with OS/2 v1.1. It had threads, DLLs, multi-tasking, much larger memory space, and from v1.2 a somewhat decent filesystem. Coming from DOS 3.2/Win 2.0 this was an incredible leap, in particular the SDK was amazing compared to the ragtag assembly of info I was used to. The _delta_ between two systems haven't been this large ever since, and I think that is what contributes to the "magic" feeling.
Back in 1995 it was, to my knowledge, the only OS capable of sharing CD-ROM's on the network. Even MS-DOS and Windows 3.11 machines could access it.
It was also capable of sharing Mainframe printers using a real null-printer-driver, which was not possible on Windows NT3.51 or NT4.0. Windows always messed with the Mainframe codes that it could not understand.
It was also easy to set up OS/2 as a gateway between different network hardware and protocols (Token Ring to Ethernet, or NetBios to IPX/SPX, ...)
It had REXX!
Multitasking, SOM (contrary to COM, it does implementation inheratance across languages, multiple inheritance and has meta-classes), object based desktop, Smalltalk for business application development (basically a similar role as VB and .NET have gotten latter on on Windows), Visual Age for C++ had a Smalltalk like experience (although ported to Windows as well).
However this also meant a more beefy hardware than the DOS/Windows 3.x combo.
Stability.
Computers were far more crashy in those days, but OS/2 crashed far less often than Windows or even DOS did. And sometimes when a program crashed on OS/2, it only killed itself; it didn't take down the whole machine, so you had a chance to save your work in other programs before rebooting.
It also either was, or felt like it was, very very fast. Windows felt like a laggy VNC connection. GEM and the rest weren't much better speed-wise than GEOS on a Commodore 64.
Nortel Meridian PBX systems ran OS/2 Warp on a PowerPC processor.. those systems were rarely rebooted. I bet there are many still running.
I’m always curious how these projects come about and survive: why go to all of the effort to port for a dead-end product line? As technically sweet as it is? I imagine they would’ve found a decent market if they’d ported to Power Mac.
(Also, was the x86 emulation implemented in-house? I wouldn’t be surprised if some niche small company had a x86 emulator for PPC product that they could be paid to port.)
The plan was for all operating systems on top of IBM's POWER/PPC hardware to be rehosted as "personalities" on top of the Workplace OS microkernel, but in the end, OS/2 was the only personality that saw any real work.
The Workplace OS would also have been used on Apple hardware as part of the abortive Taligent project.
(It also would have been used on x86 and other platforms, but they started with PPC)
In reality, in some ways we are there now. I'm wondering if we can say that the "workplace OS" can simply viewed as a hypervisor and the "personalities" that run on top it are simply VMs (perhaps being paravirtualized).
I think oddities like this were a consequence of a hardware world that was rocketing along the heart of Moore’s Law, alongside a software world that hadn’t matured past multi-year product cycles.
When OS/2 for PowerPC was set in motion, that Intel would “Make CISC Great Again” with the Pentium was far from clear.
I remember that the "general consensus" was that RISC was gonna win, it was just a matter of when (and when it could be affordable). What was NOT certain was which RISC architecture would come out ahead, so there was a bunch of porting to "remove the risk" - later they would unport most everything and "remove the RISC".
Pentium shook that tree a bit, and Pentium II really razzle-dazzled it.
Well, the thing is that RISC did win. It is just that the RISC that won is the one that Intel baked into their x86 chips.
The Pentium introduced the idea of micro op codes though the Pentium Pro was the first chip to really run with it. The CISC x86 instructions were converted into simpler instructions internally. These micro op codes could be pipe-lined, executed in parallel, and executed out-of-order.
If the Pentium II really razzle-dazzled, it did it with RISC architecture at its core. The CISC instruction decoder added a bit of die size but that did not matter much and Intel had leading-edge manufacturing tech.
The internal parallelism was also put to good use by adding SIMD instructions (MMX). These first appeared in the Pentium MMX and Pentium II but the Pentium III did it much better and of course Intel has continued to add more powerful SIMD stuff over time.
RISC did not win only inside Intel chips of course. Every successful ISA since the 90's has been RISC including ARM and RISC-V. But even RISC chips feature some complex instructions these days.
I'd argue (to some extent) that the proliferation of SIMD instructions demonstrates that RISC did lose, not just the practical war, but also the conceptual one. i.e. we creates many many similiar instructions today, which seems to go against the ethos of RISC.
I'm not sure I agree with "dead end" outside of the benefit of hindsight, or maybe don't get the point you're making. Neither the PowerPC nor OS/2 were dead-end in 1995, and competition in the OS space was still happening. Why wouldn't IBM want to have PowerPC survive, let alone thrive, with OS options? And surely they'd have loved something to take on Microsoft at this point in history.
I believe the Support Elements for some IBM zSeries mainframes were ThinkPad laptops with PowerPC CPUs running OS/2.
There was definitely VirtualPC for PowerPC Macs, I used it to run TurboTax way back in the day.
I remember at the time there was also going to be the wonderful new kernel that would allow OS/2 and MacOS to coexist on the same machine. As someone who had a Mac and an OS/2 machine side-by-side on his desk, this seemed like it could be a wonderful thing, but alas, it was never to come to be.
I was just a kid during the 1990s when all of this was happening, but a few years ago I remember reading about an IBM project named GUTS where one kernel would run multiple OS "personalities":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workplace_OS
The 1990s were quite a time for personal and workstation computing.
This was the same design goal that Windows NT had. In fact, it launched with Win32 (Windows), OS/2, and POSIX (UNIX).
I think the OS/2 subsystem was 16-bit OS/2 1.x so nobody cared and the POSIX subsystem was just compliant enough to win government contracts.
This design is why we have the "Windows Subsystem for Linux" (a name everybody hates) because "Windows Subsystems" were already a thing in Windows.
Docker, Distrobox, and even Flatpak are one kernel with multiple "personalities" but they are all still Linux I guess.
You can also argue have this on our desktops today with things like KVM in Linux and Hyper-V in Windows.
Microsoft technically delivered something very close to OS/2’s “Personalities” in Windows NT 4. They called it "Environment subsystems". Each subsystem could run applications written for different operating systems, the 3 available ones were Win32, OS/2 and POSIX. Then there was the "Integral subsystem", which operated system-specific functions on behalf of environment subsystems.
But every subsystem other than Win32 was kneecapped mostly due to politics and market positioning.
In late 90s Microsoft bought a company which had developed a more enhanced Unix subsystem and rebranded it as Interix and marketed as Windows Subsytem for Unix (SFU).
I believe the original WSL was a resurrection of SFU before WSL2 pivoted to a VM-based approach.
No, the original WSL was a weird new thing where NT kernel-level driver actually serviced Linux system calls.
IIRC, Interix still used same approach as original posix subsystem (and Windows and OS/2 subsystems) of providing the interface as DLL that ultimately your application would be linked against.
Didn’t know that OS/2 had a PowerPC port, but more surprisingly, Windows NT also had a PowerPC port. Never heard of those.
One of the original design requirements for NT was that it be portable between different CPU architectures, it was one of the driving forces behind its creation.
So much so in fact, Microsoft developed NT 3.1 first on non-x86 architectures (i860 and MIPS), then later ported to x86, to ensure no x86 specific code made it in.
NT supported quite a few architectures:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT#Supported_platforms
"Windows NT 3.1 was released for Intel x86 PC compatible and PC-98 platforms, and for DEC Alpha and ARC-compliant MIPS platforms. Windows NT 3.51 added support for the PowerPC processor in 1995"...
NT is a pretty interesting bit of PC history, I can highly recommend the book "Show Stopper!" by G. Pascal Zachary that recounts its development, and also dives a bit into why making the OS portable across CPU architectures was so important to the team at the time.
Something I didn't realize until recently was that the original MIPS version of Windows NT was Big Endian. I'd always heard it said that WinNT was strictly, 100%, absolutely always little endian, and the fact that every CPU that got a port (or was going to get a port) was either little or bi endian confirmed this.
Well, it is true, but Windows did run BE on the original MIPS R3000 platform. And only on the R3K[0]. The CPU architecture flag is still defined on modern Windows as IMAGE_FILE_MACHINE_R3000BE. There's an early test build of Win3.1 + GDI somewhere that runs on this platform.
The actual first release of WinNT 3.1 only supported MIPS R4000 and higher, I think. In little endian mode.
[0] I know the Xbox used a modified NT kernel, I've seen claims that the Xbox 360 also was, which would make it the second NT system to run big endian. Not familiar enough with sources better than wikipedia to trust that it actually was.
I believe you're correct - Xbox runs a modified Windows 20000, and subsequent versions I'm not certain on but I know it basically stands up a modified Hyper-V and the parent partition is the interface OS with games booting whatever kernel they were built for inside a VM
I know, I was a Windows engineer, I knew it had been ported to many architectures, but somehow I missed PowerPC :)
One of my first job out of school was as a sales support for the then bleeding edge NT 3.1 MIPS box for a company in Canada. Fond memories of loading stacks of 1.44 floppy disks for NT 3.1 and mangling ARC paths (Advanced RISC Computing, boot firmware). This was pre-internet and documentation was often hard to come by, incomplete etc.
I remember demoing the machines to astonished clients by running a stupid number of Clock apps on the desktop without a hitch.
Fun times.
My first real job out of school was supporting Windows NT on Dec Alpha for a company in Canada.
Things were so weird and wonderful back then. You could get GCC from Microsoft for Windows NT 3.1 for Alpha (crazy). And when Windows NT 4.0 came out there was the FX32 subsystem that ran X86 apps on Alpha (very similar to Apple Rosetta but much earlier).
I did not realize Canada was such a hotbed of Windows NT RISC.
Interesting historical note: the main reason PuTTy exists is because its author was given a Windows NT on alpha workstation and there was no native terminal emulator for it that he needed to connect to other equipment. IIRC, PuTTy still supported alpha into the 2000s until the build machine he had failed.
It gets weirder.
Nintendo GameCube and Wii are also PowerPC based. And somebody managed to have them run Windows NT: https://github.com/Wack0/entii-for-workcubes
It was also on mips and alpha. There was an intergraph port as well that never went out
Solaris (2.5.1 at least) had a PowerPC port as well.
Never used OS/2 Warp. Is the Document shredder icon the recycle bin ? Love it.
Yes and no. It was a permanent delete, no visible GUI with deleted files. But there was an actual UNDELETE command that could be used to recover files (or not)
Shredder https://files.catbox.moe/ciheyq.png
Undelete https://files.catbox.moe/ny7xbs.png
What could have been. If the respective parties had just gotten their acts together on the PPC 615, OS/2, WordPerfect, and Lotus.
> What could have been. If the respective parties... on the PPC 615, OS/2
There was never a chance at that time because x86 chips were produced in such volumes that PowerPC chips couldn't compete price-wise. Also, OS/2 became an instant outsider once Windows 95 was released. Two underdogs don't make a winner. The article says it all:
"The OS was clearly unfinished and not entirely stable. Worst of all, there were about zero applications. Because OS/2 PPC was never truly in use, PowerPC versions of OS/2 applications were never sold."
Was there any act that would have overcome the synergy of Intel’s commodity hardware economics and Microsoft’s ecosystem dominance?
Yes, getting stuff together and getting it out there.
Windows 95 ate the world because the world was mainly still DOS; look at the numbers. It wasn't people upgrading from Win 3.1.
What numbers? As much as I hated Windows 3.x (which is why I upgraded from DOS to Linux, not to Windows 95, and never looked back) it did not occur to me that many by 1995 did not have some Windows 3.x installed, as it was required for so much software (even some games).
Windows 3.1 sold 3 million copies in the first three months, Windows 95 moved ten million copies in the first year.
Everyone I knew went from either no PC at all, or an older DOS 386-era machine to a Windows 95 computer.
3M copies in 3 months is more than 10M in a year (if you assume sustained sales).
I don't get what the numbers are supposed to imply.
Windows 3.1: ~3 million in first six weeks, ~>3 million in first three months, ~25 million in first year.
Windows 95: ~1 million in first 4 days, ~7 million in first five weeks, ~40 million in first year.
These figures represent Microsoft’s own sales figures.
Still don't support the claim that people were mainly updating from DOS without Windows 3.x. Anecdotally I still think almost everyone using DOS by 1995 had Windows 3.x installed as well. Not necessarily a copy of Windows that was the result of Microsoft selling a copy of course.
Yeah those don't match parent's comment.
Additionally, while this is US-centric, there were still many households in the mid-1990s whose first computers were PCs running Windows 95, just in time for the World Wide Web to be widely available, which created demand for personal computers. Additionally, this was during the time when Apple was struggling; its Performa lineup geared toward home users was not in the best of shape in 1995 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Macintosh_5200_LC). By the time Steve Jobs returned and Apple released the first iMac (1998), it was just about time for Windows 98.
Being at the right age when Windows 95 came out, I didn't really know that there was a "Windows" prior to 95. My dad's computer ran DOS and used something called Powermenu as an organiser for executing programs. I think I had to run Wolfenstein in a tiny window for it to be fast enough to be playable, and may have, at one point, deleted one of the required DOS system files in order to try to tweak the life out of it to try to get it playable full screen. I think that was a 286. More years ago than I care to admit.
Hey give Windows 3.11 FOR WORKGROUPS some respect ;)
Apple somehow managed to claw it's way to releavance from a weaker position in 1998 (with PoserPC!) So if they had their act together they could have done better in the early 90s.
hey squandered their early lead in the US among consumers and education and also ignored the international market.
Not gonna lie Wintel was a formidable force. Microsoft was ruthless in cornering the market.
But technically, OS/2 and MacOS gave Windows a run for it's money, arguably superior on some respects, and you could say the same for PowerPC and Intel.
‘SteveB went on the road to see the top weeklies, industry analysts and business press this week to give our systems strategy. The meetings included demos of Windows 3.1 (pen and multimedia included), Windows NT, OS/2 2.0 including a performance comparison to Windows and a “bad app” that corrupted other applications and crashed the system. It was a very valuable trip and needs to be repeated by other MS executives throughout the next month so we hit all the publications and analysts.’
‘The demos of OS/2 were excellent. Crashing the system had the intended effect – to FUD OS/2 2.0. People paid attention to this demo and were often surprised to our favor. Steve positioned it as -- OS/2 is not "bad" but that from a performance and "robustness" standpoint, it is NOT better than Windows’
"I have written a PM app that hangs the system (sometimes quite graphically)."
http://iowa.gotthefacts.org/011107/PX_0860.pdf http://iowa.gotthefacts.org/011107/PX_0797.pdf
DOS ain’t done ‘till Lotus won’t run.