What happened to OS/2? Computer Chronicles (1992)

[kinmanyuen]

lol... now where did i got sound impression on my pc?

...hmm maybe ultrasound software bundle.

[andymate2006]

I had sound impressions when I had Windows 95 back in the mid 90's. It was a good piece of software for it's time.

[Diskoboy1974]

Then came NT 4....

[MunzirSuliman]

no body sew gnu-linux coming :)

[Quaaludedude714]

I have 4 Copies , i,m an OS/2 Programmer - M$ & IBM worked together on it , then IBM bought it up , it still gets online today :) QC

[pigeonshouse]

The only 32 bit platform on the market?

What about Acorn's RISC OS?

[Dakkiller1]

If I was to make an adventure game with VGA graphics, Should I write it for OS/2 and then port it to DOS or should I just write it for DOS and just code in stuff that would allow the DOS version to run on OS/2

[andreshates]

lol the nigger had to mix some tapes!!!!

[chipdude72]

OS/2. Where's the other half?

[REPOMAN24722]

looks much better than windows 3.1x

[drygnfyre]

@REPOMAN24722 It actually appears to me to look virtually the same as the Windows 3.x UI. And it should, as both use more or less the same GUI. OS/2 called it the "Presentation Manager," while Windows 3.x called it "Program/File Manager."

[REPOMAN24722]

damn this is old

[jkirk1626]

Greg. Token.

[Geert365]

I just feel so out of place here, bye.

[mrFalconlem]

UPS Worldport hub in Louisville Ky, actually processes all their packages by scaling OS/2 db2... lol.

[xnonsuchx]

@mrFalconlem - OS/2 was very popular w/ point-of-sale and similar systems...even as late as 2005! It was mostly geared more towards industry than end-users, though. NT was the same, though...it was never meant for home users, though some tiny-dicked guys who THOUGHT they were power users had to have it. I had to do some NT support back in the late 90's and HATED it...especially dealing w/ those aforementioned d-bags.

[dvamateur]

@xnonsuchx I am one of those tiny-dicked guys who had to have Windows NT 3.51 as well as OS/2. My father must be well hung, cause he never liked those, and stuck to Win95, 98, XP, and now 7. My dick got really small recently, cause I bought myself Macintosh Classic and Macintosh Classic II of eBay with OS 6.0.8 and 7.0.1, respectively. What I do with it? MIDI sequencing! MOTU Performer or Opcode Vision anyone?

[xnonsuchx]

@dvamateur - Um...OK.

[semco72057]

@bkmoore773 Another problem with OS/2 was the lack of support for most sound cards, and Chicago supported all of them. Most people who was no expert didn't want to deal with the lack of support. I still have Win95 on one computer here now and one day I will fix the computer which I have OS/2 4.0, Win2000, and Solaris 8 on. I have each OS on a separate drive and uses a switch to boot up into the particular OS.

[semco72057]

I never used OS/2 2.1, but did buy a copy of 3.0 from a base exchange and tried it out. It worked great on the computer after I figured out how to install it, but found out in a hurry that the sound didn't work on my computer. I had the same problem with version 4.0 as well. You needed a specific sound card in order to get sound. Serenity Systems made it easier when they got the rights to sell the OS.

[tomperanteau]

I bought OS/2 starting with version 2.1 and ran a DOS BBS on it using a 386 with 8 meg of RAM. It ran beautifully, and when I expanded to 16 meg several months later, it ran even better. It was truly the best OS of the time.

[Jamman88888]

its called sound oppression and they have a black guy showing it off WTF

[MrCausePain]

Don't copy that floppy!

[computerhelperhacker]

@MrCausePain thats so funny

[ace942]

OS/2 was a very cool OS. The problem was that people were using Windows and did not want to switch their systems plus obtain new applications. Sometimes the better solution does not win out. The history of computers is a constant reminder of this.

[semco72057]

@ace942 Many people had problems installing the OS on their computers, and I had that problem with version 3.0, and 4.0 also. eCS made a few changes where it would install easier. Many windows users didn't want to deal with the changes which involved making changes to the config.sys, and went back to windows which was easier.

[Imprezaman555]

wow, that looks incredible next to win3, and hundreds of (computer) years before win95

[aidanday]

@Imprezaman555 I actually ran OS/2 for a few months between Windows for Workgroups 3.11 and Windows 95. All my geek friends were jealous... Of course it was pirated. Maybe 8 or 9 floppies?

[trevormeuse16]

audicity does the same job :) thats like... its ancesstor from like trillion of computer years ago

[gli7utubeo]

They're saying that using simple file-extension association means it's object oriented. Buzzword central.

[Terminator4004]

So i guess that OS/2 magazine didn't work out :)

[JesusManson323]

In the mid-90s I was a 24 year old working for the State of California, and I remember some old fart IT guy always raving about how OS/2 was technically SUPERIOR to Windows 95.

And then OS/2 seems to have vanished.

[kristell9]

Big fan of os/2 but ibm seemed to have no interest in pushing it. Even ibm laptops weren't issued with them! Sad, because it was a great OS for the time.

[aviator1223]

was os/2 unix or linux? or 9x or was it just a shell to run on dos?

[ascheepe]

@aviator1223 os/2 was what eventually m$ took (and programmed together with ibm) and named nt. os/2 was much better imho.

[drygnfyre]

Not really true. OS/2 was originally designed by IBM in the late 1980s, coded by Microsoft. Windows NT was very similar in both design and function, but the two OS are not the same. OS/2, though, was perhaps the first mainstream OS to be fully 32-bit and support real multi-tasking. Other OS did exist at the time such as NeXTstep and even various other Unix derivatives, but none were really all that popular or widely used.

Windows NT ultimately "won" the war when XP was released in 2001.

[ascheepe]

I always thought they based NT on the work on OS/2 they did. I still have a copy of OS2 3.x somewhere, back in the days (with what linux 0.99 and bsd still in lawsuits) OS/2 was a really nice thing. Thanks for explaining.

[alex9044]

@drygnfyre Windows won long before XP with release of 3.1 and then 95 and NT. 3.1+DOS basically took 90% of the desktop OS's.

[WINANDMACNERD]

OS/2 is it's own Operation system.

It was the successor to DOS.

[drygnfyre]

No, it wasn't. OS/2 was not a "successor" to MS-DOS anymore than Windows 3.x or Windows NT was. It was simply another OS, but one that had real multi-tasking and was fully 32-bit.

[drygnfyre]

OS/2 was actually a proprietary designed by IBM but coded by Microsoft. It was based on Unix but was also able to run MS-DOS applications.

And no, it wasn't a "shell" of MS-DOS the way Windows 3.x was. It was its own kernels with its own executables and APIs.

[Xzeleous]

LOL at 90's intro.

[OZtwo]

What happened to OS/2? Microsoft worked on the next version of OS/2 to at the end, rename it Windows NT 3.1!! (yes, NT is just OS/2).....Funny thing was, when NT took off and everyone started saying how cool it was..that it was what they needed to replace windows 3.1..all I could say was yes, I know..OS/2 is very cool..I told you so...

[christo930]

@OZtwo NT is NOTHING like OS/2. The only commonality among them is the ability for windows NT to run OS/2 command line programs (and that is gone) (yes XP, Vista and 7 are all NT).

OS/2 was object oriented which NT WAS/IS not and so on.

[OZtwo]

@christo930 well, yes, the WPS was Object Oriented. Got an old NT non bootable disk laying around?? Try booting it up and see what you get :) As you look at the error message, ask you self: did I format this in OS/2 or Windows NT??

OS/2 was the best there ever was, besides Unix and what is keeping Windows alive to this date.

[christo930]

Are you sure this is 92 and not 94? I don't remember the Pentium coming that early.

[reiknir]

@christo930

The Pentium sampled in 92, shipped in 93, but was absurdly expensive until 95/6. Just the chip cost more than a 68030 Mac computer, top of the line at the time.

[nickeox]

32, go 64!

[tipoomaster]

OS/2 by IBM was a very efficient operating system. It was fast even on the older processors and it could run anything that you installed on it. If an app crashed, it was the only thing that crashed. The operating system remained running and recovered nicely. If you were the developer, you could even get dumps to help you understand why the app failed. It's too bad IBM couldn't market the thing properly. It would have been a Microsoft-beater.

[christo930]

The biggest downside of OS/2 was how slow it is. Even on P2 at 400mhz, os2 2.1 was slow as shit. It's also incredibly complicated and notoriously difficult to support (I know 1st hand, I supported 200 OS/2 machines). REXX scripting was nice and allowed for automated updates, but complexity and slowness always killed it for me.

[starsiegeplayer]

@christo930 complexity yeah... but slow? I have warp4 installed on an pentium 60 and it feels like the pentium is overpowered.

[christo930]

@starsiegeplayer I never supported warp 4, but warp 3 I did and it was very slow, even on p2 at 400mhz. with 512mb ram, especially booting and application launching. In other ways, it was incredible, especially comm manager and it's support for img imaging on the 2nd full screen monitor that actually has a MF address.

[Eskimo50]

wicked comb-over.

[isthisnickvalid]

My soundblaster came preloaded with a very similar programme!

[weed4smoker20]

how did you get a 27 min vid on youtube

[WESTSIEEDE]

he has a special directors account

[jaya2009]

"micro tower" design rofl xD

gosh that must've ruled at the time

[luckystrke]

"we recommend you have 6 MB of memory" :D

[FutureiMacuser]

They refrenced "Dont Copy that Floppy" at about 1:10 or 1:00

[kurisux]

@FutureiMacuser They are the ones who created "don't copy that floppy"

[FutureiMacuser]

@kurisux

Yeah, I've realized that in the last two years. XD

[kurisux]

@FutureiMacuser Yeah, I noticed the second I hit "Post" that I did a massive necrobump!

Well, at least for a time while this stays on the top of the comments list, others won't bug you about it! Don't ya hate how stuff gets top-rated and you don't know about it? XD

[WolfCoder]

@FutureiMacuser that's because the software publishers foundation produced that video, hee hee!

[FutureiMacuser]

@WolfCoder

Yeah, I know. It's been about two years since I posted that. :P

[bridgetown1966]

1992 or 1982? Shyte, man... I'm expecting You Can't Do That On Television to come on next.

[whenultra]

Evolution shrunk the os/2, it is still a good administrative program for industrial printing though, cmd still works, it's major problem is link wise it is geared to office groups, and not nimble for net groups, ibm servers are/were geared for specific administrative, development and command functions, there are more than 70 com structs in competition for OS, collaboritive usages, xerox icons, amiga"boxes", norway databases, arps "admin" build progressive systems,it grew,it grows,it's older now.

[LuisWithAZ]

What the heck is wrong with that Edwin dude's jaw?

[luigi2999]

I saw OS/2 in it's original shrink wrap in a thrift store

[sparky4444444444444]

wow those are nice compys lol that music is like freaking furturistic

[burkezillar]

I'll give £10 to any person who sees the joke on the first main screen lol

[livebabylive15]

is the joke that OS/2 failed to beat windows

[chazcov08]

Show number 1024. As in how many bytes in a megabyte.

[restcure]

1024 bytes in a kilobyte.

I miss that Cheifet guy.

[chazcov08]

Correct.  Damn, I knew that! Must have been a LATE night entry. D'oh!

[kwg2005]

i think it's interesting they were discussing the object oriented os, dropping and draging icons. this is 1992, i thought apple invented that in 1983.

[linuxreuben]

you are right.

[TheGeek1028]

But it's the first time it's conveniently on a PC. Beside 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 and other Windows versions.

[LuisWithAZ]

Actually, I think Xerox 'invented' it in the early 70's.

[Sciesch]

I had similar thoughts, the moderator does not seem impressed too!

[freakybuzz]

My favorite part was the demo of "Sound Impression." Light years away from today's DAWs (e.g., Pro Tools, Logic, Digital Performer) but wow! What a flashback! Great vid.

[robonuggie]

hindsight is a great thing.......