Windows 10 - free upgrade to those with PC using Windows 7 or 8

[WillAdams]

I found using PenPoint and NeXTstep much better than struggling w/ Windows 3.1/95.

[ApK]

Originally Posted by BWinmill

Unless you had a modem. First with online services and then with the Internet, OS/2 provided a vastly superior solution to DOS and Windows 3.x.

I don't know if it was or wasn't better, but it's apparently irrelevant, because I know of NO ONE who used it (statistically speaking).
Any issues with DOS or Windows handling of modem activity was obviated by the special purpose monolithic apps of the day: Compuserve, The Source, AOL (built on GEOS, on top of DOS), GEnie, etc. all had applications that handled the connectivity just fine. Those apps are what folks used to get online, so nothing else about the OS mattered.
By the time people cared about getting direct IP connections to an ISP, Windows had improved, and OS/2 was a non-issue.

[bullet]

Originally Posted by ApK

I don't know if it was or wasn't better, but it's apparently irreverent, because I know of NO ONE who used it (statistically speaking).
Any issues with DOS or Windows handling of modem activity was obviated by the special purpose monolithic apps of the day: Compuserve, The Source, AOL (built on GEOS, on top of DOS), GEnie, etc. all had applications that handled the connectivity just fine. Those apps are what folks used to get online, so nothing else about the OS mattered.
By the time people cared about getting direct IP connections to an ISP, Windows had improved, and OS/2 was a non-issue.

As I recall IBM in their infinite wisdom subcontracted some OS/2 development out to a firm called Microsoft. At the very least it turned out to be a terrific learning experience for one of those firms.

As an aside as this and recent posts have little to do with Windows 9 (oops I mean 10) I think there are still OS/2 servers running today. Long live REXX...

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by bullet

As I recall IBM in their infinite wisdom subcontracted some OS/2 development out to a firm called Microsoft. At the very least it turned out to be a terrific learning experience for one of those firms.

As an aside as this and recent posts have little to do with Windows 9 (oops I mean 10) I think there are still OS/2 servers running today. Long live REXX...

They had a few disagreements over features.
Like the 370 guys kept insisting there was no need for downloadable fonts or laser printer drivers; all their target customers already had high speed line printers.

[ApK]

Originally Posted by bullet

As I recall IBM in their infinite wisdom subcontracted some OS/2 development out to a firm called Microsoft. At the very least it turned out to be a terrific learning experience for one of those firms.

You'd think they'd have learned enough from the PC-DOS/MS-DOS efforts.

Was it really a subcontract thing? I had been under the impression that it was out right joint development, which in the schism resulted in NT and OS/2.
And NT, of course, led to all later versions of Windows, including....wait for it....Windows 10!

[bullet]

Originally Posted by ApK

You'd think they'd have learned enough from the PC-DOS/MS-DOS efforts.

Was it really a subcontract thing? I had been under the impression that it was out right joint development, which in the schism resulted in NT and OS/2.
And NT, of course, led to all later versions of Windows, including....wait for it....Windows 10!

I heard IBM needed more resources to develop OS/2.
It may have been a joint effort rather than a subcontract, but you would think IBM would be have been smart enough not to share secrets with pirates. Argg.

Beyond that M$ knew how to deal/partner with other vendors to share the booty=mutual success. IBM had to try to do it all themselves=independent fail.

It is nice we have another choice with GNU/Linux. I wish I had converted to Unix years ago.

[murg]

Originally Posted by bullet

I heard IBM needed more resources to develop OS/2.
It may have been a joint effort rather than a subcontract, but you would think IBM would be have been smart enough not to share secrets with pirates. Argg.

Back then, the mindset at IBM was that they were a hardware shop, the software was a means to sell hardware.

So they really didn't understand the new software centric model. Of course, at that time, the PC hardware was just starting to become commoditised.

[murg]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

The same dynamic was repeated in the short, barely noticed, UNIX vs NT Workstation war.

I remember using the Apollo Aegis Unix-like workstation in the 80s...

Huge screen, windowed Unix, touchpad on the keyboard. I loved it. Especially as I was also dealing with mega-advanced MS-DOS based graphics with 2 palettes of 4 colours each at the time.

[fjtorres]

It was a co-development deal and they fought a lot; IBM wanted to take out desktop-centric features (printer drivers, etc) and pack in terminal emulation features.
The split did not result in NT spinning out, rather two versions of OS/2, initially.
When the final schizm played out MS kept all rights to Windows and DOS, and OS/2 1.3 APIs. IBM got the unfinished OS/2 2.x that became warp eventually.

NT is an entirely different creature architected by David Cutler (previously of DEC and VMS) for 90's hardware. Processor independent, it was built around a microkernel design, not a monolithic kernel, with installable OS subsystems.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WindowsNT

Originally NT carried a 16-bit Windows subsystem, the core Win 32bit subsystem, an OS/2 1.3 text only system (Presentation Manager was all IBM and one of the causes of friction--MS wanted Windows APIs instead of OS/2 APIs) and a barebones Posix subsystem. The latter two were dropped with WinXP.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WindowsNT

Since then both the microkernel and installable systems have been modified and replaced repeatedly and very little original code likely remains.

Also of note:

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archi..._of_Windows_NT

And http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windo...Virtualization

Elements of both were used to create the XBOX OSes but they are not really Windows.
Word is that the XBOX One will be getting an installable Win10 environment. No details yet.

As to OS/2, the reasons for the split were cultural:
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS/2

MS coders coming from the OC side wrote terse code with minimal documentation, IBMers from the mainframe side, used to more resources were... less economical.

OS/2 1.x targets the 80286 processor and DOS fundamentally doesn't. IBM insisted on supporting the Intel 80286 processor, with its 16-bit segmented memory mode, due to commitments made to customers who had purchased many 80286-based PS/2's because of IBM's promises surrounding OS/2.[18] Until release 2.0 in April 1992, OS/2 ran in 16-bit protected mode and therefore could not benefit from the Intel 80386's much simpler 32-bit flat memory model and virtual 8086 mode features. This was especially painful in providing support for DOS applications. While, in 1988, Windows/386 2.1 could run several cooperatively multitasked DOS applications, including expanded memory (EMS) emulation, OS/2 1.3, released in 1991, was still limited to one 640 kB "DOS box".

Given these issues, Microsoft started to work in parallel on a version of Windows which was more future-oriented and more portable. The hiring of Dave Cutler, former VMS architect, in 1988 created an immediate competition with the OS/2 team, as Cutler did not think much of the OS/2 technology and wanted to build on his work at Digital rather than creating a "DOS plus". His "NT OS/2," was a completely new architecture.[19]


The OS/2 2.0 upgrade box
IBM grew concerned about the delays in development of OS/2 2.0 and the diversion of IBM funds earmarked for OS/2 development towards Windows. Initially, the companies agreed that IBM would take over maintenance of OS/2 1.0 and development of OS/2 2.0, while Microsoft would continue development of OS/2 3.0. In the end, Microsoft decided to recast NT OS/2 3.0 as Windows NT, leaving all future OS/2 development to IBM.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by murg

I remember using the Apollo Aegis Unix-like workstation in the 80s...

Huge screen, windowed Unix, touchpad on the keyboard. I loved it. Especially as I was also dealing with mega-advanced MS-DOS based graphics with 2 palettes of 4 colours each at the time.

Originally our group ran on IBM 360/370 (even a PC/370) and Crays.
Got too expensive and timesharing too unproductive so we looked for alternatives.

We started with sample SGIs and SUNs, committed to a big 1st Gen RS6000 network (because of the monster floating point power and adhoc clustering). $3M in hardware for 20 people. Next gen we migrated to UltraSparc for under $500K and later to DELL XEON workstations for under $100K. After that, all the core codes ran native NT instead of UNIX and a refresh runs maybe $30K. We've been running Windows tablets all century.

Big believers in distributed computing over glass house systems, my bosses.
Through all that (we migrated work from crays to PCs in barely a decade) productivity went up by 100x. (10X better fidelity, 10x throughput).

[wodin]

Originally Posted by murg

Back then, the mindset at IBM was that they were a hardware shop, the software was a means to sell hardware.

So they really didn't understand the new software centric model. Of course, at that time, the PC hardware was just starting to become commoditised.

That plus, at the time IBM was a huge corporate conglomerate with all the bureaucratic inertia that that implied. MS was virtually a small business in comparison, with the boardroom being made up of the founding geeks, with an intimate understanding of IT rather than business administration.

[theducks]

Is this the Old Computer farts home
I came from (hardware support) a mainly DEC PDP-Unix, IBM 308x and Later Sun 3's house.

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by HarryT

The Windows vs. OS/2 "wars" were even worse!

Windows 3.x won, because the one thing I've always been saying: applications. Windows 3.x had them, OS/2 had not (except for some niches, such as banking apps).

Thus, Windows 3.x won this fight, even though OS/2 was already a full 32-bit operating system, with a DOS-emulation that was so good that it was actually possible to run Windows 3.x within OS/2; called Win-OS/2. There were even versions of OS/2 in which Windows 3.x was included by default.

OS/2 was a much more powerful operating system than Windows; OS/2 2.1 in 1993 was most of what Windows NT became in 1996.

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by BWinmill

While Windows 3.x and Windows 95 were sufficient for most people because it got the job done, people are forgetting how truly unstable those platforms were. Even when problems were a product of third party software, people are forgetting how the more rigorous memory protection of Unix, OS/2, and Windows NT enabled developers to detect and resolve memory addressing problems during the development phase. Thankfully, Microsoft has made incredible progress on that front.

What many people forget is that Windows 3.x was not an operating system. It was a DOS-application with its own memory management. Other DOS-applications, such as games, often used DOS4GW as extended memory manager; Windows 3.x had its own stuff. This was one of the things that made Windows 3.x unstable.

Windows 95 should never have existed. It was Windows 4.0, tacked on top of DOS 7.0, extended with the Win32 API coming from Windows NT 3.x. Microsoft should have skipped Windows 95, and and put the stuff Windows 95 did better (better DirectX support so more games could run, a device manager, a more powerful DOS-emulator to compete with Windows 95's native DOS-support) into NT4. USB was already introduced in 1996, and NT4 had no support for it. It should have had, even if it would have pushed back the release into 1997. (There were some third party stacks, to support mice, keyboards, and some specific scanners and printers.)

As I said, Windows 95/98/ME should never have existed, and the world should have switched from Windows 3.1 to Windows NT 4.

I did; I ran OS/2 3.0 (and Windows 3.1 on top of it) from 1994 to 1996, first with 4MB and then 8MB RAM, and then switched to Windows NT 4 as soon as I was able, first upgrading that computer to 16MB, and later, 32MB. Therefore I never had any of the Windows crashing problems of the time.

[WillAdams]

Windows 3.0 won 'cause Microsoft convinced everyone that 1MB would be enough memory to run a windowing system (and it was, if one had one written in assembly language such as GEOS).

People bought Windows 3.0, then bought more memory, then bought a memory manager, then bought a drive compression program, then bought a larger hard drive, then Windows 95 came out and they started the whole thing again, 'cept w/ 4MB RAM.

OS/2 was quite nice, the problem was IBM was more realistic up front about the memory requirements, so it was perceived as much more expensive.

I'd give a lot to be able to find a copy of OS/2 for Pens which was updated for Y2K.