A look at operating systems that time forgot

elvis_presley said:
OS/2 lives on in Windows; MS&IBM jointly developed OS/2, and NT was to be the original OS/2 3.0, until IBM/MS had a kerfuffle and parted ways. Win2k8/Windows7 are direct descendants of that product. NT (OS/2 3.0) was made to be a very portable OS, and we're still seeing the fruits of that labour now, as MS announced Win7 ARM version last month.
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Yeah, OS/2 offered true multi-tasking, and not that time-slicing nonsense that came with Windows. It became the NT kernel because of its superiour multi-tasking capabilities.

Juice
 
w1z4rd said:
Not sure I agree with the NeXTSTEP one...
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It's true, Steve Jobs bought over Next's technology and developers to get a jump start for Mac OS X... the previous Mac OS 9 had serious limitations that were limiting future expansion and growth... hence Mac OS X was born out of the Unix Darwin kernel!
 
vinodh said:
Don't forget about Windows Vista: forgotten BEFORE it was replaced by Windows 7.
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It should not be forgotten totally - it should stand as a mute testimonial as to what can (and will) go wrong.

As for SCO v5.x, we still got a couple of old boxes running it, but these are being replaced with newer boxes running CentOS. Bliss. No more hardware issues.
 
"time forgot"? I know of all of those very well. There's a famous video floating around of Jobs demo'ing NeXT back in the day, and it was simply light years ahead of anything else - it took Microsoft another 10 to 15 years to catch up with what NeXT was then.
 
ponder said:
OS/2 was also a decent thing, way more so than MSs first attempts at Windows. Pity it did not succeed as we would have been much further along today.

MS has never really made anything. But it just shows you once again you don't need a technically superior product to gain market dominance.
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Indeed Bill Gates was a master at "strategy first, forget quality", and proved that superior business strategy could beat marketing, innovation and product quality.

As I recall, MS hired over several of the main OS/2 devs midway and put them to work churning out NT instead, which no doubt didn't help, though IBM didn't seem as sharp about getting the OS out there.
 
BGE said:
It's true, Steve Jobs bought over Next's technology and developers to get a jump start for Mac OS X... the previous Mac OS 9 had serious limitations that were limiting future expansion and growth...
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Um no, not exactly, you have it a little backwards. Steve Jobs created and owned NeXT after having gotten kicked out of Apple, and then when Apple was practically dead, he made a deal with Apple in which he sold his own company (NeXT) to Apple as he bought his way back in, along with the condition that he be boss. Apple was all but dead by that point so they accepted, and Steve Jobs then gave Apple the kiss of life, defibrillation and CPR, and started turning it around. NeXT was used as the foundation for Mac OS X.
 
Tick said:
... though IBM didn't seem as sharp about getting the OS out there.
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Part of IBM's problem at the time was the suites still thinking in terms of mainframes, they lacked vision.

Another example is the engineers at IBM wanted to use the Motorola 680x0 series processors in what we know today as the PC or IBM compatible back then seeing it was a much better architecture. The suites said no seeing they already had a license with Intel for 8086/8 in a trade they did for their Bubble memory license.
 
ponder said:
Part of IBM's problem at the time was the suites still thinking in terms of mainframes, they lacked vision.
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I know that's the common view. But it's not true - at least not entirely - there's a wrinkle and a lesson in this. Most IBM execs had the vision, the money, the technology, and the nous. Don "Father of the PC" Estridge really deeply understood the tech and the business. But by the early 1980s government pressure on IBM was so intense that execs weren't free to implement as their engineering and sales sense told them. The 17-year antitrust case against IBM forced company execs to look over their shoulders and consider legal risks whenever a new technology was invented. Remember, back then "Snow White" IBM was bigger than the "Seven Dwarfs" combined. When DEC's little VAXs hit the street, IBM's midrange S/36 and S/38 were purposely developed to be incompatible with S/360-S/370 OSs and apps, just to keep the Justice Dept off their backs. Ditto when the "micro computer" came round. Bottom line is government interference put the lawyer- and accountant-suits in charge at IBM (whereas it had been an engineering company first and a sales company second) and killed one of the greatest companies in history. I could go on in very great detail, but it's history, and who cares today anyway?

The article is the briefest little trip down memory lane - and an age give-away. I cut my teeth on the Zilog Z80 and CP/M in 1979. To this day I have a soft spot for CP/M because they came out with CP/M-86 for the Intel 8086 and even CP/M-68K for the Motorola. But Gary Kildall (DRI) preferred hang-gliding (so the apocryphal story goes) and his $6b company faded and was eventually bought by Novell. By the way, it was billg who suggested IBM do a deal with Digital Research Inc (DRI), but it didn't go anywhere.

I was there (in IBM) then, and closely involved with PC and later PS/2 + OS/2. And I was one of the OS/2 guys who went over to Microsoft, because I loved PCs and the US Government was basically killing IBM (see above). Back in those days Microsoft was absolutely the 'micro computer revolution' cheerleader and everyone except the IBM-fans loved Microsoft because it was little David against Goliath IBM. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

Back to Ponder's point about Motorola: in them thar days IBM owned 12% of Intel and essentially gave them their unique fab technology in exchange for patent x-licensing, so going Intel 80xx for the first Chaplin Machine was part of the POR for the 5150. And yes, I loved the Mote 680x0, which back then was architecturally superior to the Intel silicon. In 1984 I even bought a Sinclair QL (68008, yeah, I know) just to learn 680x0 machine code, but the 24-bit addressing, 8-bit I/O and ludicrous tape-based Microdrives (remember 'em?) just never cut it, so for work I plunged into Intel, CPM/86 and eventually PC-DOS (IBM's version of MS-DOS), which dominated before the Attack of the Clones. Every cent I had went into tech, which is one of the reason's I didn't marry until 30 ... in those days 64 kilobytes of RAM costed R500 in then's money! For fun I fiddled with every new tech that promised amazing power at peanut prices, including AmigaOS and BeOS (which I got from ex-Apple Jean-Louis Gassée himself). And read Byte magazine (and twenty others) from cover to cover.

They were fun days. An innovation every week. Where's all the fun gone?

(PS. I left Microsoft in 1997)
 
Arthur said:
In 1984 I even bought a Sinclair QL (68008, yeah, I know) just to learn 680x0 machine code, but the 24-bit addressing, 8-bit I/O and ludicrous tape-based Microdrives (remember 'em?) just never cut it,

They were fun days. An innovation every week. Where's all the fun gone?
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No, say it ain't so, a QL? :D

I still have fond memories of 680x0 assembly language and later during studies we did 8086/8 which I did not like but those are very distant memories.

Have to agree on the fun factor, it's just not the same any more.

Thanks for a nice writeup though ;)
 
Arthur said:
They were fun days. An innovation every week. Where's all the fun gone?
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Standardisation is a good thing, except it kills all the fun. ;)

BTW, I think I still remember all 158 of the Z80's op-codes to this day, in hex! :)

While we're so far OT here; I collect micros from the 70's and 80's. MY center-piece is my own first computer, a 1978 6502/1MHz/4KB RAM Compukit 101 / Ohio Scientific with one of the first 8K BASIC interpreters, written by a youngster called Bill. And it still works.

Anyone with anything interesting they want to get rid off / sell, drop me a PM. :)
 
i guess Windoze ME is totally forgotten then :D

OS2 is and always was way more stable than windows
 
I'll never forget Windows ME!! The only OS that ever blue screened on the first boot after a fresh installation. Man what a train wreck.
 
And then there was Xenix, my first stepping stone to linux. :) From the Wikipedia:

Xenix was Microsoft's version of Unix intended for use on microcomputers; since Microsoft was not able to license the "UNIX" name itself, they gave it an original name.

... When Microsoft entered an agreement with IBM to develop OS/2, it lost interest in promoting Xenix. In 1987 Microsoft transferred ownership of Xenix to SCO in an agreement that left Microsoft owning 25% of SCO. When Microsoft eventually lost interest in OS/2 as well, it based its further high-end strategy on Windows NT.

... In the late 1980s, Xenix was, according to The Design and Implementation of the 4.3BSD UNIX Operating System, "probably the most widespread version of the UNIX operating system, according to the number of machines on which it runs".
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