Fun fact, while Trower was the manager who got Windows moving, it was Gabe Newell who served as the lead developer of Windows versions 1, 2, and 3. Win95 was the first version he wasn’t really involved with. By that time, he was working on porting Doom to Windows.
Gabe and Carmack are probably above Amelio and below Jobs and Gates in impact on the world - but probably above them all in impact when measured on a “desired” axis - people sought out Doom in a way that even the iPhone wasn’t.
Yeah, I don't know why this never popped on my radar. I read Abrash books long ago, MS employees blog too, its history around the creation of UIs (xerox/apple and all that), the OS/2 era .. and I never saw his name (or maybe selective vision tricked me).
If you play any Valve games with commentary he prefaces them with an invitation to email him directly with comments or questions. He's said that he doesn't have time to answer every one but he tries to read them all.
For a multi-yacht owning, industry driving billionaire, he does seem pretty cool.
> This is a major release of Windows and, similarly to the previous one [ep 10], it is not a complete operating system, but it’s simply a graphical user shell that is meant to be run on top of MS-DOS; thus, it inherently gains its limitations, albeit the developers had time to fix some things with this release, as well as add new features such as icons on the desktop and keyboard shortcuts.
This is largely untrue. When Windows is running, it's about 95% of a complete operating system. MS-DOS is only used to run DOS software and for file access. Windows takes control of the memory management, process management, video hardware, system timer, keyboard, mouse, printer, serial port, etc (basically every system resource except disk I/O) while it's running.
Despite how bad early Windows looks, it's doing some very impressive technical wizardry under the hood to be able to work in real mode on the 8086 and 286. It's a lot more complex than something like Mac OS 1 or GEM, and it makes sense why it kept getting delayed over and over for years. For example, they got multiple DOS programs to run simultaneously in real mode by intercepting all the DOS API calls and patching them on the fly to avoid breaking Windows. To get multitasking to work at all in 384 KB, they had to be able to dynamically load and unload chunks of programs when necessary to deal with memory pressure, and then walk all the stacks on the system and patch out any calls/returns to the unloaded code to instead call the memory manager and make it reload the code from disk. Making this transparent to software authors required a series of complicated workarounds which Raymond Chen has written about. See here if you're interested: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20110316-00/?p=11...https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20120622-00/?p=73...https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20120629-00/?p=72...https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20140103-00/?p=21...
The problem with all these arguments is that DOS extenders of the day used to do the same, or more. Do you call DOS extenders "operating systems not shells" too ?
On one hand you have that the technical answer to the above question is likely "yes". DOS is so simple that any non-trivial application likely qualifies as an operating system. Implementing some kind of virtual memory support is almost a given, and process control is not unheard of.
But on the other hand most people would refer to anything pre-95 as "shell" for the simple reason that it requires DOS to boot ; even when complexity-wise, 95 and later versions of 3.x are practically the same: if you call one an OS, you ought to call the other one a full OS too.
So this question is on the "angels on the head of a pin"-level; but this simply means there's no answer that doesn't require a lot of nuance, and this also applies to the "it can't be a shell, it does too many things" answer.
I would posit that Windows only became more technically sophisticated than early Mac OS with the release of Windows/386, the version of Windows 2.1 that ran multiple DOS VMs in protected mode.
I’m distinguishing “sophistication” from “complexity”. Windows/386 is “sophisticated” in that it implements a much richer model of execution than its predecessors, with a supervising kernel and memory-protected virtual DOS machines. This is different from the complexity of programming with segmented memory, or punching through the various layers of backward compatibility that had built up even as early as the 286.
Likewise, the Mac had some complexities of its own, even though the 68k wasn’t nearly as challenging to program for. Since the Toolbox shipped in ROM, they had to design syscalls (A-traps) in a way that could be patched by later versions of the system software. They soon had to work around software that wasn’t 32-bit clean when they started shipping machines with the 68020.
One of the more sophisticated bits of later Mac OS was the 68k virtual machine that was used to run major chunks of the Toolbox on PowerPC Macs.
The way 386 enhanced mode worked was that there was a 32-bit preemptive multitasking kernel that would run 16-bit virtual machines. The first VM ran Windows in standard mode, and the rest were the DOS VMs. This meant that Windows programs still shared an address space and were cooperatively multitasked. This is actually somewhat similar to how Apple shoehorned multiprocessor support into later versions of Classic Mac OS. The OS runs under a microkernel. There's one main thread where all the cooperative multitasking happens (anything that uses the Toolbox must run in this thread), and then both user software and the system can make new threads that get preemptively multitasked with the main thread. The main difference is that I don't believe there's a way for Windows software to make use of the preemptive scheduler (unless maybe they do something hacky with a VxD driver, but that's kind of silly).
I remember reading the PowerPC System Software volume of Inside Macintosh[1] at the time, and what I found impressive wasn't that 68k applications ran under emulation on PowerPC, but that much of the Toolbox and System Software were also still implemented in 68k code, implemented in terms of a general mechanism that could also be used by third-party code.
This came at a performance cost, of course, but I don't recall the Workgroup Server 6150 I was using at the time feeling significantly slower than my Quadra 605, though to be fair the 605 was at the very bottom end of the 040 Mac line. Then again, with the exception of a larger hard drive and bundled AppleShare software, the WGS 6150 was equivalent to the entry-level Power Mac 6100, as well.
Same here. We use notion at work, and I’m often sent notes with a handful of lines of fairly bland text, which I dismiss. I only sometimes later realize that there was more text hiding under those visible lines.
I’m not really going to put any cognitive effort into fully concentrating on something like this to the point where I see that there is something that looks like it might be an expansion button. If I’m supposed to see it, it should be visibly on the page.
I'm very sorry about that, we're testing this system as it's a brand new UI; we had left it closed not to overwhelm people, but we can leave it open by default if needed.
Heya, while you're taking feedback, the link in "If you haven’t read OS/2’s side yet, you can do so by either scrolling the page up (on bigger screens), or clicking here." doesn't do anything for me when clicked. It's also not immediately obvious that the OS/2 article is in the upper-right and needs to be clicked again. Why not link to that article straightaway? :)
Feels like we remember MS-DOS as simple because it fit the time. One user, limited hardware, not much going on in the background. As soon as you try to add multitasking, networking, or even basic isolation, that simplicity doesn’t really hold up.
I was looking back to why I enjoyed computing so much more in the 80's and 90's compared to now, and of the many reasons, one of them was "No multitasking".
Or even "little multitasking" because while Windows had multitasking, we didn't have the HW to do too many things at the same time.
Right now we're on the crazy end of that spectrum. Every tab on your browser is potentially an application, and we multitask like crazy on it.
Do I want to go back to "No multitasking?" Not really. Or at least not all the time. But I definitely want to put barriers. Such as taking a minute to switch windows/applications.
Also the days when you turned on a computer it was ready to rock within two seconds. A few friends were discussing video game load times throughout the years. Overall the elapsed times haven't changed much at all.
That does not match my memory at all. Booting my family’s 386, even into DOS, was a minutes-long affair involving memory tests and messages like “loading HIMEM.SYS”.
Well… it was still far more simple than anything today. Whether we are looking at Concurrent CP/M-86 or at Multitasking MS-DOS 4, these were far more simple than anything OS today. Once we add many users, you start looking at things like Xenix and other early Unices. Those too, we’re more simple than anything today.
Which feature do you want to get rid of? If you try out an OS like fuzix you'll have a blast and you'll also wonder how to do many things since it's got about 1 percent of all the modern features.
Id go other way too. Disk Operating System might seem simple or even downright pleasant. Easy to understand and well compartmentalized DOS/BIOS Interrupt API, small functions doing small things.
Then you read some "under the hood" book or source code and start stumbling upon decade of hacks upon hacks to keep this cart rolling while computer revolution was happening in the background.
One example: IBM in its infinite wisdom didnt expect to support more than one type of floppy in 5150 BIOS. IVT (Interrupt Vector Tble) has allocated space for only one DPT entry (Diskette Parameters Table), same goes for DBA (Bios Data Area). Few years later 1.2MB 5.25 drives showed up, year later 720KB 3.5 ones and so one. As a result BIOS was forced to play musical chairs under the hood constantly shuffling contents of that _one DPT entry_ replacing it on the fly while trying to keep track of whats going on. Of course DOS needs to run on older PCs without multi floppy format aware BIOS thus 1986 MS-DOS 3.2 introduced DRIVPARM doing exactly the same shuffling one layer above https://jeffpar.github.io/kbarchive/kb/060/Q60091/
DOS was build one small hack at a time. High Memory, Upper Memory, Expanded memory, Extended memory, A20, exit from Protected mode, more than one kind of floppy, hard drive, more than two hard drives, the list of kludges just keeps going.
Hello, I'm the author of this article, I checked it, and it looks fine on my end. Where is the problem exactly, and which browser are you using?
Edit: I spoke to EmeraldDM8, who made the UI, and if it's what he thinks it is, it's because the series page is not done yet, and once it's ready, that will include a link to that page.
Well, technically Windows 2.1 (released May 1988) came before OS/2 1.1 (released October 1988). OS/2 1.0 was text-only. So at least for 5 months in 1998, Windows technically beat OS/2.
And OS/2 1.1 was very similar to Windows 2.1, so it's arguable if it was actually much better.
OS/2 1.2 was a massive leap though, not only beating Microsoft GUI wise by a whole year, they even implemented tons of advanced features that we didn't see until Windows 95.
When I started working at Novell in October 1988, I was on the OS/2 team. The version I installed first was 1.0 so I remember that there was no GUI. A few months later we got the update (1.1) with the GUI.
What I remember the most is that they ordered us memory expansion cards that gave us an extra 4MB of RAM for a total of 5MB. I didn't see the actual invoice, but I remember them telling me that the expansion card cost about $2,000. I try to remember that when I complain about memory DIMMs measuring in the dozens of GB going up a bit in price.
That was the slogan of OS/2 2.0. But by then where Windows 3.x was already out and in 386 Enhanced Mode, more than good enough. It also had the extra "escape hatch" of being able to quit to real DOS if a DOS box didn't work.
OS/2 1.x's DOS box was bad, with lots of limitations, which isn't good when most existing PC apps are DOS apps. As for GUI, well, lets call the Presentation Manager 1.x v Windows 2.x a no-score draw.
> And yet it failed in the common user's perspective
In Germany, the situation was different: there, at that time OS/2 (in particular OS/2 3.0 Warp) had quite a bit of popularity among common users because Escom and in particular Vobis (the latter was an at that time ultra-successful chain for selling computers in Germany) decided they want to challenge Microsoft's de-facto monopoly on operating systems of that time by also selling PCs that had OS/2 pre-installed (you only got DOS/Windows installed for an upcharge):
"Als die deutschen Computerhändler Vobis und Escom ankündigten, auf ihren PCs zukünftig OS/2 vorzuinstallieren und Windows nur noch gegen Aufpreis anzubieten, übte Microsoft massiven Druck auf die beiden Computerhändler aus. So schloss Microsoft Vobis vom Beta-Programm von Windows 95 aus, bot für die Zukunft Windows-Lizenzen nur zu wesentlich schlechteren Bedingungen an und versuchte, Vobis dazu zu zwingen, eine Verschwiegenheitserklärung zu unterzeichnen."
DeepL translation:
"When the German computer retailers Vobis and Escom announced that they would pre-install OS/2 on their PCs in the future and offer Windows only at an additional cost, Microsoft exerted massive pressure on the two retailers. For instance, Microsoft excluded Vobis from the Windows 95 beta program, offered Windows licenses in the future only under significantly worse terms, and attempted to force Vobis to sign a non-disclosure agreement."
"1995 setzte Vobis wegen Lieferterminverschiebungen der 32-Bit-Plattform Windows 95 darauf, Kunden standardmäßig das bereits erschienene 32-Bit-Betriebssystem OS/2 von IBM auf PCs vorzuinstallieren, wodurch OS/2 auf dem deutschen Markt einen größeren Bekanntheitsgrad als anderswo erreichte. Microsoft soll in der Folge versucht haben, Vobis die Lizenz für Windows 95 zu entziehen, was einen schweren wirtschaftlichen Nachteil für Vobis bedeutet hätte."
DeepL translation:
"In 1995, due to delays in the release of the 32-bit Windows 95 platform, Vobis decided to pre-install IBM’s 32-bit OS/2 operating system—which was already available—on PCs as standard, resulting in OS/2 achieving greater recognition on the German market than elsewhere. Microsoft is said to have subsequently attempted to revoke Vobis’s license for Windows 95, which would have caused Vobis serious financial harm."
Vobis also produced its own computer magazine named "Highscreen" (named after Vobis' brand name for their PCs) that also contained lots of beginner tips for OS/2 to get PC buyers accustomed to OS/2.
Past that point complexity kept on increasing. Don't get me wrong - I use modern day linux, modern day ruby ... it's all fine. Modern computers are fast too. But at the same time I feel we lost simplicity along the way. Now this is even more noticable with microslop everywhere.
Fun fact, while Trower was the manager who got Windows moving, it was Gabe Newell who served as the lead developer of Windows versions 1, 2, and 3. Win95 was the first version he wasn’t really involved with. By that time, he was working on porting Doom to Windows.
Sorry, are we saying Valve Gabe Newell? That's blowing my mind from both timeline and area perspective.
Yup, where do you think he got the money to start Valve? :-)
Yep, I still do love this little factoid
It's a fact, though, not a factoid.
Huh, valid correction, thank you, never realised that those weren't synonyms
He notably worked at Microsoft before founding Valve.
I believe he’s confirmed that his time at Microsoft both gave him the money and the desire to make Valve and Steam.
The desire to switch to games was, reputedly, seeing Doom outsell Windows 3.x with none of the marketing budget (with Windows having huge one).
Then not getting enough support in trying to drum up better support for gaming at Microsoft, IIRC
Gabe and Carmack are probably above Amelio and below Jobs and Gates in impact on the world - but probably above them all in impact when measured on a “desired” axis - people sought out Doom in a way that even the iPhone wasn’t.
Half Life 3.11 confirmed.
I think he must have sworn off any v3 after MS-DOSv3.
Half Life for Workgroups
Copilot Life
Clippy is the final boss
That's for Portal 3.
Yeah, I don't know why this never popped on my radar. I read Abrash books long ago, MS employees blog too, its history around the creation of UIs (xerox/apple and all that), the OS/2 era .. and I never saw his name (or maybe selective vision tricked me).
Very fun fact
I love this kind of lore. Thanks for enhancing
He's an awesome guy!
If you play any Valve games with commentary he prefaces them with an invitation to email him directly with comments or questions. He's said that he doesn't have time to answer every one but he tries to read them all.
For a multi-yacht owning, industry driving billionaire, he does seem pretty cool.
> This is a major release of Windows and, similarly to the previous one [ep 10], it is not a complete operating system, but it’s simply a graphical user shell that is meant to be run on top of MS-DOS; thus, it inherently gains its limitations, albeit the developers had time to fix some things with this release, as well as add new features such as icons on the desktop and keyboard shortcuts.
This is largely untrue. When Windows is running, it's about 95% of a complete operating system. MS-DOS is only used to run DOS software and for file access. Windows takes control of the memory management, process management, video hardware, system timer, keyboard, mouse, printer, serial port, etc (basically every system resource except disk I/O) while it's running.
Despite how bad early Windows looks, it's doing some very impressive technical wizardry under the hood to be able to work in real mode on the 8086 and 286. It's a lot more complex than something like Mac OS 1 or GEM, and it makes sense why it kept getting delayed over and over for years. For example, they got multiple DOS programs to run simultaneously in real mode by intercepting all the DOS API calls and patching them on the fly to avoid breaking Windows. To get multitasking to work at all in 384 KB, they had to be able to dynamically load and unload chunks of programs when necessary to deal with memory pressure, and then walk all the stacks on the system and patch out any calls/returns to the unloaded code to instead call the memory manager and make it reload the code from disk. Making this transparent to software authors required a series of complicated workarounds which Raymond Chen has written about. See here if you're interested: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20110316-00/?p=11... https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20120622-00/?p=73... https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20120629-00/?p=72... https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20140103-00/?p=21...
The problem with all these arguments is that DOS extenders of the day used to do the same, or more. Do you call DOS extenders "operating systems not shells" too ?
On one hand you have that the technical answer to the above question is likely "yes". DOS is so simple that any non-trivial application likely qualifies as an operating system. Implementing some kind of virtual memory support is almost a given, and process control is not unheard of.
But on the other hand most people would refer to anything pre-95 as "shell" for the simple reason that it requires DOS to boot ; even when complexity-wise, 95 and later versions of 3.x are practically the same: if you call one an OS, you ought to call the other one a full OS too.
So this question is on the "angels on the head of a pin"-level; but this simply means there's no answer that doesn't require a lot of nuance, and this also applies to the "it can't be a shell, it does too many things" answer.
That's exactly what I'd say, as it still requires DOS to boot, thus another OS.
I would posit that Windows only became more technically sophisticated than early Mac OS with the release of Windows/386, the version of Windows 2.1 that ran multiple DOS VMs in protected mode.
Depends how you define sophisticated. Mac used the 68k so didn't have to jump through all those hoops mentioned above.
I’m distinguishing “sophistication” from “complexity”. Windows/386 is “sophisticated” in that it implements a much richer model of execution than its predecessors, with a supervising kernel and memory-protected virtual DOS machines. This is different from the complexity of programming with segmented memory, or punching through the various layers of backward compatibility that had built up even as early as the 286.
Likewise, the Mac had some complexities of its own, even though the 68k wasn’t nearly as challenging to program for. Since the Toolbox shipped in ROM, they had to design syscalls (A-traps) in a way that could be patched by later versions of the system software. They soon had to work around software that wasn’t 32-bit clean when they started shipping machines with the 68020.
One of the more sophisticated bits of later Mac OS was the 68k virtual machine that was used to run major chunks of the Toolbox on PowerPC Macs.
The way 386 enhanced mode worked was that there was a 32-bit preemptive multitasking kernel that would run 16-bit virtual machines. The first VM ran Windows in standard mode, and the rest were the DOS VMs. This meant that Windows programs still shared an address space and were cooperatively multitasked. This is actually somewhat similar to how Apple shoehorned multiprocessor support into later versions of Classic Mac OS. The OS runs under a microkernel. There's one main thread where all the cooperative multitasking happens (anything that uses the Toolbox must run in this thread), and then both user software and the system can make new threads that get preemptively multitasked with the main thread. The main difference is that I don't believe there's a way for Windows software to make use of the preemptive scheduler (unless maybe they do something hacky with a VxD driver, but that's kind of silly).
I remember reading the PowerPC System Software volume of Inside Macintosh[1] at the time, and what I found impressive wasn't that 68k applications ran under emulation on PowerPC, but that much of the Toolbox and System Software were also still implemented in 68k code, implemented in terms of a general mechanism that could also be used by third-party code.
This came at a performance cost, of course, but I don't recall the Workgroup Server 6150 I was using at the time feeling significantly slower than my Quadra 605, though to be fair the 605 was at the very bottom end of the 040 Mac line. Then again, with the exception of a larger hard drive and bundled AppleShare software, the WGS 6150 was equivalent to the entry-level Power Mac 6100, as well.
[1] https://vintageapple.org/inside_r/pdf/PPC_System_Software_19...
Windows 3.11 can run in vanilla DOSBox. Under DOSBox-X you basically boot Windows by converting DOSBox into a PC emulator.
Not a fan of the pre-collapsed sections of an article. I was wondering where the text was.
Same here. We use notion at work, and I’m often sent notes with a handful of lines of fairly bland text, which I dismiss. I only sometimes later realize that there was more text hiding under those visible lines.
I’m not really going to put any cognitive effort into fully concentrating on something like this to the point where I see that there is something that looks like it might be an expansion button. If I’m supposed to see it, it should be visibly on the page.
I'm very sorry about that, we're testing this system as it's a brand new UI; we had left it closed not to overwhelm people, but we can leave it open by default if needed.
Heya, while you're taking feedback, the link in "If you haven’t read OS/2’s side yet, you can do so by either scrolling the page up (on bigger screens), or clicking here." doesn't do anything for me when clicked. It's also not immediately obvious that the OS/2 article is in the upper-right and needs to be clicked again. Why not link to that article straightaway? :)
I'll fix it immediately, thank you!
I had the same confusion and closed the tab, only to discover here on HN that there's more. Open by default sounds reasonable.
Feels like we remember MS-DOS as simple because it fit the time. One user, limited hardware, not much going on in the background. As soon as you try to add multitasking, networking, or even basic isolation, that simplicity doesn’t really hold up.
I was looking back to why I enjoyed computing so much more in the 80's and 90's compared to now, and of the many reasons, one of them was "No multitasking".
Or even "little multitasking" because while Windows had multitasking, we didn't have the HW to do too many things at the same time.
Right now we're on the crazy end of that spectrum. Every tab on your browser is potentially an application, and we multitask like crazy on it.
Do I want to go back to "No multitasking?" Not really. Or at least not all the time. But I definitely want to put barriers. Such as taking a minute to switch windows/applications.
> enjoyed computing so much more in the 80's
Also the days when you turned on a computer it was ready to rock within two seconds. A few friends were discussing video game load times throughout the years. Overall the elapsed times haven't changed much at all.
That does not match my memory at all. Booting my family’s 386, even into DOS, was a minutes-long affair involving memory tests and messages like “loading HIMEM.SYS”.
You're thinking 10 years too late. The TRS-80, C64, Apple ][ all booted in seconds.
Fun that it has oscillated from instant boot then to minutes-long boot a decade later back to instant boot (or resume to be fair) today.
Turning my computer took a few minutes. It would do the RAM check (all 640K of it), at a fairly slow pace.
Any sort of GUI took a minute or two to boot. My laptop today is ready to go before I get the lid fully open.
Well… it was still far more simple than anything today. Whether we are looking at Concurrent CP/M-86 or at Multitasking MS-DOS 4, these were far more simple than anything OS today. Once we add many users, you start looking at things like Xenix and other early Unices. Those too, we’re more simple than anything today.
Especially as, in Unix, you needed to add things by yourself, so it could be as simple or complex as you needed it to be
Remember desqview?
Just call me Pepperidge Farms, I loved Desqview for the time. It worked well, given what they had to work with.
I mostly remember it from BBS's - it was _the_ way to run a multi-line BBS for a while.
GEOS was pretty cool too - amazing what you can fit in 64K if use a big enough hammer :-D
That does not mean that we need things to be as complex as they now are though.
Which feature do you want to get rid of? If you try out an OS like fuzix you'll have a blast and you'll also wonder how to do many things since it's got about 1 percent of all the modern features.
Id go other way too. Disk Operating System might seem simple or even downright pleasant. Easy to understand and well compartmentalized DOS/BIOS Interrupt API, small functions doing small things.
Then you read some "under the hood" book or source code and start stumbling upon decade of hacks upon hacks to keep this cart rolling while computer revolution was happening in the background.
One example: IBM in its infinite wisdom didnt expect to support more than one type of floppy in 5150 BIOS. IVT (Interrupt Vector Tble) has allocated space for only one DPT entry (Diskette Parameters Table), same goes for DBA (Bios Data Area). Few years later 1.2MB 5.25 drives showed up, year later 720KB 3.5 ones and so one. As a result BIOS was forced to play musical chairs under the hood constantly shuffling contents of that _one DPT entry_ replacing it on the fly while trying to keep track of whats going on. Of course DOS needs to run on older PCs without multi floppy format aware BIOS thus 1986 MS-DOS 3.2 introduced DRIVPARM doing exactly the same shuffling one layer above https://jeffpar.github.io/kbarchive/kb/060/Q60091/
DOS was build one small hack at a time. High Memory, Upper Memory, Expanded memory, Extended memory, A20, exit from Protected mode, more than one kind of floppy, hard drive, more than two hard drives, the list of kludges just keeps going.
I mean, when it came out, people didn't really need much of that
"Gui Wonderland" series header is underlined but isn't a hyperlink. Oversight, or minor nit designed to make me crazy?
Hello, I'm the author of this article, I checked it, and it looks fine on my end. Where is the problem exactly, and which browser are you using?
Edit: I spoke to EmeraldDM8, who made the UI, and if it's what he thinks it is, it's because the series page is not done yet, and once it's ready, that will include a link to that page.
But OS/2 was a better DOS than DOS, and a better Windows than Windows!
Well, technically Windows 2.1 (released May 1988) came before OS/2 1.1 (released October 1988). OS/2 1.0 was text-only. So at least for 5 months in 1998, Windows technically beat OS/2.
And OS/2 1.1 was very similar to Windows 2.1, so it's arguable if it was actually much better.
OS/2 1.2 was a massive leap though, not only beating Microsoft GUI wise by a whole year, they even implemented tons of advanced features that we didn't see until Windows 95.
When I started working at Novell in October 1988, I was on the OS/2 team. The version I installed first was 1.0 so I remember that there was no GUI. A few months later we got the update (1.1) with the GUI.
What I remember the most is that they ordered us memory expansion cards that gave us an extra 4MB of RAM for a total of 5MB. I didn't see the actual invoice, but I remember them telling me that the expansion card cost about $2,000. I try to remember that when I complain about memory DIMMs measuring in the dozens of GB going up a bit in price.
I also still have an unopened box (still shrink wrapped) of OS/2 Warp sitting on my shelf.
OP is referring to OS/2 2.0 after IBM took over the OS, not the previous Microsoft 1.x versions. The post is a quote from IBM’s marketing.
https://www.reddit.com/r/retrobattlestations/comments/nl43aq...
That was the slogan of OS/2 2.0. But by then where Windows 3.x was already out and in 386 Enhanced Mode, more than good enough. It also had the extra "escape hatch" of being able to quit to real DOS if a DOS box didn't work.
OS/2 1.x's DOS box was bad, with lots of limitations, which isn't good when most existing PC apps are DOS apps. As for GUI, well, lets call the Presentation Manager 1.x v Windows 2.x a no-score draw.
Has everyone forgotten how crashy Windows 3.x was, though? It was terrible.
If only every program worked out of the box... :')
And yet it failed in the common user's perspective but I've seen many ATMs run it and those were usually the working ones without BSODs on them.
> And yet it failed in the common user's perspective
In Germany, the situation was different: there, at that time OS/2 (in particular OS/2 3.0 Warp) had quite a bit of popularity among common users because Escom and in particular Vobis (the latter was an at that time ultra-successful chain for selling computers in Germany) decided they want to challenge Microsoft's de-facto monopoly on operating systems of that time by also selling PCs that had OS/2 pre-installed (you only got DOS/Windows installed for an upcharge):
> https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=OS/2&oldid=266114...
"Als die deutschen Computerhändler Vobis und Escom ankündigten, auf ihren PCs zukünftig OS/2 vorzuinstallieren und Windows nur noch gegen Aufpreis anzubieten, übte Microsoft massiven Druck auf die beiden Computerhändler aus. So schloss Microsoft Vobis vom Beta-Programm von Windows 95 aus, bot für die Zukunft Windows-Lizenzen nur zu wesentlich schlechteren Bedingungen an und versuchte, Vobis dazu zu zwingen, eine Verschwiegenheitserklärung zu unterzeichnen."
DeepL translation:
"When the German computer retailers Vobis and Escom announced that they would pre-install OS/2 on their PCs in the future and offer Windows only at an additional cost, Microsoft exerted massive pressure on the two retailers. For instance, Microsoft excluded Vobis from the Windows 95 beta program, offered Windows licenses in the future only under significantly worse terms, and attempted to force Vobis to sign a non-disclosure agreement."
> https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Vobis&oldid=26171...
"1995 setzte Vobis wegen Lieferterminverschiebungen der 32-Bit-Plattform Windows 95 darauf, Kunden standardmäßig das bereits erschienene 32-Bit-Betriebssystem OS/2 von IBM auf PCs vorzuinstallieren, wodurch OS/2 auf dem deutschen Markt einen größeren Bekanntheitsgrad als anderswo erreichte. Microsoft soll in der Folge versucht haben, Vobis die Lizenz für Windows 95 zu entziehen, was einen schweren wirtschaftlichen Nachteil für Vobis bedeutet hätte."
DeepL translation:
"In 1995, due to delays in the release of the 32-bit Windows 95 platform, Vobis decided to pre-install IBM’s 32-bit OS/2 operating system—which was already available—on PCs as standard, resulting in OS/2 achieving greater recognition on the German market than elsewhere. Microsoft is said to have subsequently attempted to revoke Vobis’s license for Windows 95, which would have caused Vobis serious financial harm."
Vobis also produced its own computer magazine named "Highscreen" (named after Vobis' brand name for their PCs) that also contained lots of beginner tips for OS/2 to get PC buyers accustomed to OS/2.
MS-DOS was quite simple if you think about it.
Past that point complexity kept on increasing. Don't get me wrong - I use modern day linux, modern day ruby ... it's all fine. Modern computers are fast too. But at the same time I feel we lost simplicity along the way. Now this is even more noticable with microslop everywhere.
Maybe that's the reason people are going back to older tech? Personally, I use an iPod and I find it's simple enough and does the job
They did a dirty to RISC OS with that blurry pic at the end.
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