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Any OS/2 users or exusers here?

I worked for IBM from 1981 to 1994, I've used and developed software under versions of OS/2 from the 1's thru Warp. I have the hobbes cd archive, the developers toolkits, and an original version of Visual Age. Visual Age was a drag and drop programming tool. You connected icons to program your application. It does mostly database apps. I also have the spoken command interface for it, I can't remember what it was called though. When I get a second, I'm gonna hook up one of my model 80 PS/2 machines, a wizard board, and run OS/2 again.

Kipp
 
I ran OS/2 2.1 for the longest time because I lacked a copy of real Windows 3.1 that I could enjoy.
The DOS emulation was garbage and was always locking up on me. OS/2 in general wqas rubbish with all their tabbed BS and their Windows emulation. Oh my god was it slow.
I still have nightmares.....

Finally in 2006 I got a copy of Windows 3.11 and mercilessly formatted the drive, installed DOS 6.2 and then happily installed Windows 3.11.
My copy of OS/2 along with its CD of fixpacks, software and other random stuff now collects dust on a shelf.
 
I found v3 to be a lot more stable than v4. Networking on Warp Connect seemed tidier too in my limited experience. Have managed to collect v2.0 up to v4, along with v4 server. I read some time ago that IBM employed Amiga programmers to develope the gui. Can anyone here comfirm that?
 
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I never heard that about Amiga programmers working on OS/2. The pattern with most of those guys was to scatter to the wind, end up consulting for someone who was doing game development (3DO, Lynx, etc.) or set-top work, do a little consulting whenever someone new bought the rights to the Amiga technology, then when that would fall through, repeat the pattern.

I see a closer resemblance to the Mac than Amiga. Some of the joint work Apple and IBM put into the ill-fated Taligent project ended up in OS/2. So OS/2 got OpenDoc, and a lot of the OS/2 icons ended up looking like what you saw in System 7.5 or 7.6. On more than one occasion I had people remark that OS/2 looked a lot more like a Mac than like Windows.
 
NeXT said:
I ran OS/2 2.1 for the longest time because I lacked a copy of real Windows 3.1 that I could enjoy.
The DOS emulation was garbage and was always locking up on me. OS/2 in general wqas rubbish with all their tabbed BS and their Windows emulation. Oh my god was it slow.
I still have nightmares.....

Finally in 2006 I got a copy of Windows 3.11 and mercilessly formatted the drive, installed DOS 6.2 and then happily installed Windows 3.11.
My copy of OS/2 along with its CD of fixpacks, software and other random stuff now collects dust on a shelf.
Click to expand...

REAL Windows 3.1 was actually part and included inside of OS/2 2.1 Slow? It was fast on my old 386DX40. What kind of system did you try it on? Oh and tabs... yeah... everywhere now.
 
Grab an issue of any of the PC techie magazines from 1987 or thereabouts. Read the full-page ads from Billg about "Microsolft OS/2" and "Microsoft Presentation Manager". If you read the copy, you'd think that OS/2 was the work of Microsoft exclusively. Not one mention of IBM anywhere.

Does anyone think that this was an issue of contention between the two firms?

I never noticed that OS/2 was particularly slow.
 
I participated in the Beta for OS/2 1.0 when I worked at IBM. Later I was an OS/2 developer. When I left IBM in 1996, I joined a company that had an IVR (Interactive Voice Response) product that used OS/2 as it's OS. The product consisted of a machine with some telephony cards installed and then OS/2 and our software to control answering/responding to the phone lines. It was a turn-key system that, for the most part, just required plugging in, connecting phone lines and running. We often lost sales to Windows based systems, even though we could demonstrate our product's superiority, simply because the IT departments at many company's refused to allow an OS/2 based system in the server room because they lacked the knowledge to do anything with it. We eventually completely rewrote the software to be windows based. With that, we also got out of the hardware business and we just sold the Windows NT based software that companies could install on their own machines and buy their own telephony cards.

I have several boxed versions of OS/2 Warp in a box somewhere but haven't actually booted a machine with OS/2 since around 1999 or so.
 
Well other than Microsoft helping them develop the GUI and then creating NT which is the most common comparison and complaints I heard from the OS/2 community. Not on topic per this thread but a friend who used to work for Commodore still has (unfortunately no sound) a recording of himself on some pbs tech tv show demoing off the Amiga 3000. It was an awesome demo though (of course his system was loaded in comparison to a normal model) but with the bridgeboard he's running several amiga projects at once, draws a quick animation and plays a video or song then opens up a new window and up pops Windows 3.1 which he did something in then minimized while it ran some process and played with a few other things before coming back to Windows in a box. Was pretty damn funny.

I didn't get to do a whole lot with the dos/Windows emulation in OS/2 other than some 3.x which seemed ok but I admit I wasn't truly trying to run anything under it so it could have had compatibility issues. I know at least with the BBS scene the BBS was written for OS/2 specifically but the doors it ran were all dos doors so it was just emulating the fossil driver or door.sys info for the bbs then a shell to dos to get most of the common doors to run. A few took some tweaking but in general they worked fine. I also heard a lot of folks recommend 3 over 4 but not sure why. I have both but maybe I never tried running the telnet stuff under 3 which may be interesting. I did get a little confused over the versioning though. Once they did the EE, Warp, Connect, and Server (was there a Connect Server also?) although I think it was just that it included some networking stack or something?
 
I think the low point of OS/2 development was with the release of 1.2. It was buggy and IBM blamed MS while MS blamed IBM. Two companies, three widely seperated development teams, no one in charge of everything: amazing that anything worked at all.

OS/2 was slower than Windows when running Windows apps. The overhead of OS/2 passing calls to the generally slower OS/2 video drivers plus the increased memory demands all contributed to a decline in performance. A number of Windows applications had 386 vxds for increased speed but were able to run in standard mode with an alternate code path. OS/2 got these apps in the much slower vxd ignoring mode. Of course, poorly tested vxds led to rampant stability problems especially as several programs all abuse direct hardware access.
 
Using OS/2 on older high end hardware with plenty of RAM and HD space will take care of the bloat issues that slow the user experience down. OS/2 and NT required more resources then DOS/Win3 did back then and people who could not afford the extra RAM and faster CPU tended to not like it very well. Plus these days we know what hardware works best and there are decent drivers for the cards, unlike when OS/2 was bleeding edge.

There are plenty of older systems and OS that are much more fun to play with these days then they were when first released.
 
Unknown_K said:
Using OS/2 on older high end hardware with plenty of RAM and HD space will take care of the bloat issues that slow the user experience down. OS/2 and NT required more resources then DOS/Win3 did back then and people who could not afford the extra RAM and faster CPU tended to not like it very well.
Click to expand...

That was very true. We ran OS/2 on a bunch of PS/2 Model 55s (486SLC CPU of some sort, 16 meg of RAM max, 200-ish meg HDD as I recall) and it was stable but very slow, even just for word processing. When we replaced them with IBM PC 330s and 350s, which had 50 MHz 486DX2s, faster video, faster HDDs, and could take more than 16 MB of RAM, it was much nicer.

In the 1993-94 timeframe, a lot of magazines were recommending you get the fastest 486 CPU you could afford, then outfit it with 8 megs of RAM to run Windows 3.1. That setup was fine for Windows 3.1, but if you tried to run OS/2 on 8 megs of RAM, you weren't going to be real happy with it.

When I ran OS/2 on my Pentium-75, the only speed difference I noticed running my Windows 3.1 apps was launch time. Word 6.0 launched in a couple of seconds under Windows 3.1, but took closer to 10 seconds under OS/2 since it was loading a Windows 3.1 environment to run the app in. Even on my Compaq 486SX2/66, OS/2 ran really well. I had 16 meg of RAM in it initially, then later I upgraded it to 20 (it had 4 megs on the motherboard and 4 empty SIMM sockets). Jumping from 16 meg to 20 meg wouldn't have made much difference at all under Windows 3.1, but OS/2 sure appreciated it.

There were a lot of other little tricks you could do to improve OS/2's performance too. There was even a $15 or $20 application called Performance Plus that would go in and hotrod your config.sys file for you and suggest other changes to the system based on the capabilities of your video hardware and such. But you could go tune the system by hand too. I got pretty good at doing that. I didn't have much excuse not to; I installed version 3.0 on at least 200 machines.

krebizfan is right about video in Windows 3.1 apps causing problems though. OS/2 didn't crash very often at all, and I ran my systems really hard. It wasn't unusual at all for me to have 5, 6, 10 programs open and running at once. More often than not, when it did crash, I was running Corel Draw. Most of the time it worked OK, but every once in a while it would do something crazy. Depending on how unlucky I was, it might just bring down itself and the Windows subsystem, but there were at least a couple of times it brought the whole system down.
 
I have an OS/2 machine here that has custom OS/2 software.

Has Matrox Illuminator Video Card, once upon a time it had 2 of these cards, so you might say OS/2 was running 3 video cards at once,
all worked, using custom drivers for OS/2 and the cards.
 
Unknown_K said:
Using OS/2 on older high end hardware with plenty of RAM and HD space will take care of the bloat issues that slow the user experience down. OS/2 and NT required more resources then DOS/Win3 did back then and people who could not afford the extra RAM and faster CPU tended to not like it very well. Plus these days we know what hardware works best and there are decent drivers for the cards, unlike when OS/2 was bleeding edge.

There are plenty of older systems and OS that are much more fun to play with these days then they were when first released.
Click to expand...
Couldn't agree more. Just dug the hdd out with Warp 3 on it ,then fitted it to my P200mmx with 128 megs of ram(though I guess it only picks up 32-64megs or so). Apart from a few SB16 errors, not unexpected, booted fine and it honks along.

Interesting that features were available back then are touted as modern "innovations". Jeez that must be one of the most overused words it the IT industry. Found this reference to Amiga technology- http://tinyurl.com/26kt928.
 
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Looks like that's the WinNT 3.51 HPFS driver. I know it functions in NT4; wouldn't surprise me if it also worked as claimed on newer versions. I had a situation where a dying computer decided to no longer run OS/2 for us, though it willingly ran NT4 for some bizarre reason. After spending a full weekend with IBM technicians trying to get the server live again, we downgraded the server to NT4 out of desperation. All the partitions were HPFS of course, so I installed the NT 3.51 HPFS driver, mounted the disks, and got the server back in business.

Completely unsupported, but hey, it worked that way for several months until I put bigger disks in it. At that point I switched it to NTFS.

Thanks for reminding me of that horrible weekend. Ugh. :)
 
You're welcome ;)

The NT 3.51 pinball.sys needed a patch to run higher than NT4. It's not really surprising the driver worked, NT4 was really just NT (same system under the hood as it were) with a Win9x look and feel anyway. Found a few forums were folk tried to use the unpatched version but their systems hickupped. Whereas the patched version functioned fine. The only catch is partititions must be no greater than around 8 gigs.
 
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I tried out 1.0, skipped it, then got 1.1. I kept working with OS/2 until Warp 4. There was a good while when it looked like a viable OS to run on the desktop as well as for replacing Lanman/U servers (Lan Manager for Unix.) I enjoyed developing code under OS/2 for both it and Windows. When I got 2.1 I converted all my Windows/WFW systems over and just left on partition for testing under DOS/Windows. My experience was that it crashed/hung far less often than Windows. But I wasn't running Corel and other graphics drawing apps, just games and horizontal apps. I did my drawing on a Unix box (Apollo workstation) and an Amiga.

I really liked OS/2 after the initial problems, basically from 1.3 onward. There was gold in it from 1.1 on, but the release rate on promised features and tug of war between IBM and MS sullied things at the outset, market-wise. The markting of 2.0 and 2.1 was a good comeback, IMO, but IBM just couldn't stay the course in the face of MS's opposition. Too ad, what we have now is less because of it.
 
OS/2 Warp 4.5 (4 with Fix Pack 15) is the main OS I have on my Gateway 2000 P5-133 XL, dual-botting MSDOS 6.22. The machine has 64MB of RAM and runs OS/2 quite nicely. I had to install a video driver pack developed by some third-party company (I forget the name now), which used to be a commercial product but was finally given away for free after they stopped developing it (as I recall). The network card and sound hardware are also working perfectly. A bit painful to browse web sites with it, but I use the NIC to transfer files to it from my file server via FTP. Some DOS games work, with sound and all, under a highly tweaked Full screen command prompt session. However, MOST newer DOS games (anything from the DOOM era and up) will not, even changing around DPMI settings. I dual-boot into MSDOS when I need to play such games (this includes Ultima 7 and 8). If all games worked, I wouldn't have a need for a dual-boot configuration.

I also have OS/2 2.0 installed on an IBM PS/2E 486 SLC2-50 system. I barely use that machine so I haven't done much with OS/2 2.0.

I used to run OS/2 2.1 and subsequently Warp 4 on my long gone Model 95... :'(
 
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