rest in peace -- OS/2 Obituary

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

Obituary: OS/2
December 16, 2002
By John C. Dvorak <http://www.pcmag.com/author_bio/0,3055,a=123,00.asp>
Born April, 1987. Died Dec. 10, 2002. Cause of death: neglect. Place of
death: Armonk, New York. Next of kin: none. Attending funeral: nobody.
Official announcement appeared on IBM Website
<http://www.ibmlink.ibm.com/usalets&parms=H_902-274> .
I suppose this poor fellow has been dead for a long time, but perhaps nobody
remembered to pick up the corpse (yes, I said the same about CP/M 10 years
ago). While CP/M died from the ravages of progress, OS/2 died from neglect
and lack of will. And yes, backing away from OS/2 was a pragmatic move,
since IBM could not compete with Microsoft or its tactics. But how amazing
to see a company that large cowed into submission by a bunch of
whippersnappers in Washington who already had taken IBM to the cleaners when
they convinced the Goliath to let them own PC-DOS at the outset. The death
of OS/2 must be humiliating for IBM.
The history of OS/2 is a ragged mess. Although begun as a joint
Microsoft-IBM project to create the next generation of operating systems, it
was apparent early on that the partnership was not going to work. Microsoft
had too many coders who hated to work with IBM, and IBM was too slow-moving
for the rest of the caffeine-jacked Microsoft folks.
I was an OS/2 fan, and even did a book on the OS for Random House. The OS
was generally faster and less prone to crashing than any of the early
versions of Windows. But IBM didn't know how to prime the pump and get
people to develop for OS/2. The company stupidly reckoned that if you give
developers a good operating system, coders will code for it. Microsoft saw
this issue differently, and would do anything to get people to code apps for
Windows. Many of the early Windows programs ran on OS/2 through a piece of
shared code that let Windows code work. But we all knew that wouldn't last.
Microsoft was forever changing the Windows API, and had done so since the
first release of the product. The API has only recently stabilized, and we
still don't know how long that will last.
OS/2 wasn't perfect, and my last days with the product came when I did a
reboot or a shutdown and OS/2 went into limbo. If you ran into this
situation, you had to completely reinstall the OS, and it happened one time
too many for me. That was that. IBM was already making noises about giving
up on OS/2, and Windows 96 was just around the corner.
Over the years, I noticed that many of the cooler features of OS/2 became
incorporated into Windows. For all practical purposes, if you are using
Windows 2000, you are probably running what would have been OS/2. The only
exception is that all the money goes to Microsoft. And before you object to
that, you should note that the original OS/2 was called Microsoft OS/2
(there were even little pins around with that moniker).
Some years ago, I wrote a column called "Free the Code," where I made the
point that abandoned software should become public domain, and that code
should be shared by the public. I noticed recently that this is becoming an
issue on many discussion forums since a lot of abandonware seems prevalent
in the post-dot-com bust. In the column I suggested that IBM free the OS/2
code if it really wanted to get Microsoft. Instead of screwing around with
Linux, we all could have been playing with the source code for OS/2. What a
great idea. OS/2 could have just been freeware.
Anyway, someone pointed out to me that there was no way that IBM would ever
do such a thing, since much of the code was likely under license or, worse,
much of it owned by Microsoft anyway! I agree with this assessment. OS/2, of
course, will continue to find its place in the kernel of various stagnant or
proprietary systems where it will evolve into something far removed from
what could have been. It goes the way of the other genuine operating systems
that couldn't get a foothold, like the Amiga OS and GEM on the Atari and the
PC. This fate for OS/2 is a shame.
As to how and why the OS failed to become a huge success-I'm leaving the
debate open this week. Steve Ballmer comes to mind. He started the ball
rolling by proclaiming OS/2 to be the next great operating system, and
within a few years he was walking around the floor of a computer show
putting disks into computers running OS/2 to crash the systems and prove
that OS/2 wasn't crash-proof!
The whole history of OS/2 is quite odd indeed. Before you proceed, a quick
look at former IBMer David Both's personal history of the product
<http://www.os2bbs.com/os2news/OS2History.html>
<http://www.os2bbs.com/os2news/OS2History.html
<http://www.os2bbs.com/os2news/OS2History.html> > might give you some ideas.


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