in 1987 ibm corporation was set toreleaseibm os2 os2 wasgoing to be the next big thing in theworld of operating systems probablybigger thaneven well the innovative windows 95 thatyou see herewhat happened why did it fail what wasit even likelet's explore and some more welcome backto another episode of retro tech byteslet's take a step back and a stepforward and talk about the differenttrajectories thatos2 and microsoft windows tookwhat you see here is not microsoftwindows 3.xit's not 3.1 or 3.0 the usual one thatyou seefor you know dos gaming pcs this ismicrosoft windows nt3.51 which was released in 1995.nt 3.51 was the final evolution in thent3 serieswhich was microsoft's attempt atcreating a stable 32-bitobject-oriented operating system whileos2 and microsoft windows certainlyshare a storied past together asalmost siblings os2 took a differentapproachunlike the program manager that windowsnt 3.5 used which was shared withwindows 3.1os2 used the workplace shell which wasfar more modern sleekand in many ways innovative theworkplace shell looks like somethingmore out of a macintosh than out of thepcit's far more sleek and confined butalsoquite usable and almost clear to theuser as to what they're looking atit's more innovative and intuitive solet's talk a little bit aboutos2 itself and its history os2 was firstdeveloped in 1987 as part of a jointdevelopment agreement between microsoftand ibm os2 in itsinitial iterations was a single usermultitasking osand it was designed for the 286. itrequiredactually higher memory standards thanmicrosoft windows at the timeallowing the 286 to address the full 16megabytes of memory space and takeadvantage of all thatthe thing is the presentation managerwhich became the workplace shell thatwas usedit was derived semi from windows 2.0but it was also different it wassimilar looking in the early versions ofos2but as os2 evolved so too did the guijust like in microsoft's windowsspeaking of microsoft it's important torecall and reiterate thatos2 was initially developed as a jointproject with microsoftin fact this early version that you seehere was actually bundled and sold asmicrosoft os2 so anyway why os2well ibm had the ps2 so os2 was theoperating system for the personal systemtooos2 was developed between microsoft andibmand this agreement that the two of themsigned dates back to 1987.now take a look for a moment you noticethat uh plaintiff's exhibit stickeryeah let's talk about that for a secondos2 became the sort of wedge betweenmicrosoft and ibm at least in theoperating system spaceos 2 was more complicated than dos moreexpensive than windows andfrankly to the average consumer it justdidn't make sense it was too expensiveand all the features it supportedweren't really needed since mostsoftware at the time was still beingwritten for ms-dosto make matters worse os 2's earliestversionswere straight-up command lines theydidn't possess a graphical userinterface sowhy buy it sure you could take advantageof the 286's virtual memory addressingbut i meanthat's a feature that the average enduser didn't care about and frankly theirhardware might not even have beensupported due to lack of driversos2 was a mess in its early days and thedivision between microsoft and ibmcertainly didn't help the situationand led to os2 not being able to grab afoothold in the consumer marketthat is to say from a technicalstandpoint os2 is a masterpieceit's stable it's fast it handles allsorts of complexand almost over the top featuresat least in context of its time but asfar as os2 being an actual saleableproduct oh no consumers had no intentionto buy something that wellthey wouldn't be consuming so microsoftand os2yeah not bound to last ibm howeversaw things differently they uh blamedmicrosoftfor os2 being only to capture somethinglike six percent of the marketos2 in a sense was a commercial failurebut in another senseos2 was the technological marvel it wasso far ahead of its time in terms of itscapabilitiesit could run windows programs it couldrun dos programs and it wasstable and it was fast it could do bothbutit had the hardware requirementsnecessary to do like what that soundsso when you're talking about hardwareyeah most consumers didn't have thathardware and againanother issue and another reason forlack of saleseven so ibm tried to market os2 issomething that itprobably was and probably wasn't abetter windows than windows a better dosthan doswas it both well we'll take a look atthat in a little bitbut let's just say that being a betterdos than dos and a better windows thanwindows was a tough sellthat being said os2 was highlycompatible with windowsand highly compatible with dos and ifanythingos 2 was nothing short of one of themost compatible operating systems atleast for the timeit had support for windows 3.1 it hadsupport for ms-dosit had support practically almost everymodernand major piece of software that hadbeen written at the timeat least for the x86 space and sureos2's presentation manager had a highlyadvanced apibut with highly advanced things comeslots of documentationand lots fewer reasons to sell againtake a look at this 3 000 pagesfor presentation managers documentationi mean that sounds like pretty typicalibmcertainly but at the same time that doesnot sound like a product that theaverage consumer wants to buythat being said the technical referenceas referenced in this document hereis 210 just for the technical referencethe programmer's toolkit 787 i meanwe're talking aboutridiculously expensive software forridiculously expensive hardwarethe ps2 systems that this ran on yeah ifyou're not familiarthey were probably some of the mostexpensive computers that you could buyat the timeeven in spite of its commercialshortcomings os2 trudged on as somethingof atechnological masterpiece in aperformative modelit was fast it was compatible it was youknowall over the place as far as the abilityto run everything from dos programs towindows programsto os2 specific programs it wasa masterpiece if you wantedcompatibilityin many ways it was a jack of all tradesand a master of nonethat was the real problem underlying os2but just because it was a problem didn'tmean that the operating system wasunusableno no no not at all os2 really founditself in thecorporate and embedded spaces wherenetworking was importantand its memory management and all sortsof extendedmultitasking features could be takenadvantage of for examplein networking intensive applications os2washighly successful before we go anyfurther it's important to take a look athowibm marketed os2 and perhaps comment asto whythat led to the operating system'sfailurenot all personal computer operatingsystemsgive you your best shot some will doseveral things at oncebut not always chalk one up for ibm'sadvancedos2 it runs any number ofprograms simultaneously seamlesslysafely get more work donepower up any ibm compatible like the newambra 486s with os2i can't believe you're running a videoand you've got the internet going hereand it's back did you notice that it'snot missing a beat here and how do youdo all this at the same timephone dial and record video right fromthe desktop databasespreadsheet communications the wholething i like how easy it is to go backand fortheverything together around 90 bucksno yeah no yeah os2warp a totally coolway to run your computerso yeah in typical ibm fashion os2 was acomplicated work productso complicated in fact that themarketing itself was complicatedhere's some boxes of os2 that wereoffered for sale these are some of thedifferent versions that you would seeand none of them were cross-compatibletake a look at that red boxthat version is known as the red spineversion of os2 warp 3.it did not contain compatibility for dosand windows built incompare that with the blue box of os2warp connectthat contained compatibility for dawsonwindows and it containednetworking would the average end user beable to figure that outprobably not the thing is and i guesswhat i'm trying to say isos2 basically lacked an identity was ita corporate product was it a commercialproductit tried to be both and it failed but infailure there were various successesso let's take a look and highlight someof the more interesting aspects of os2here i'm going to install os2 on theworld's fastest 386 and get it runningon some old ibm hardwareos 2 might seem like it's a complicatedproduct installin fact here's some footage of theinstall sped up 2 000sure it wasn't exactly an easy processbut i wouldn't call it arduous eitherit was quite doable and even without anyreal technical expertisecompared to windows it was pretty much acinch with two discs and a cd for os2warp threethe process itself didn't really taketoo long i mean if you're not familiarwith the world's fastest 386i'll put a link at the top here butbasically what we're talking about is a75 megahertz ibm blue lightningat its performance peak the bluelightning is pretty much equal to a 486dx266 so the system's no slouch but thething iseh installing any graphical operatingsystem on a dx266 can be a painand os2 wasn't too bad actually itinstalled pretty quickand it offered me right away networkingbecause i used warp 3 connectblue spine edition which i previouslymentioned so i could get that windowsand dos compatibilityas far as the actual windows and doscompatible part yeah that'sautomatically installed i installed thison a blankcompact flash card and was able to getall of the features the operating systemright awayi didn't have to tweak anything i wasable to select what i wanted and muchlike a typical windows installonce it walked through the steps it waspretty much self-explanatorythe actual installer portion itself thatprobably took the most time justwatching that really pretty os2 bar gobyso yeah as someone who had never reallymessed with os2 before besides readingabout it on wikipediai would say that the install process waspretty simple it was straightforward itwas no more complicated than installingwindows 95and in fact i would even argue it wasperhaps more self-explanatory because itset itselfup afterward i didn't have to configureany drivers i didn't have to installanything specificand the hardware in the world's fastest386 would be detailed below in thedescription but for the most part it'spretty standard stuff i mean even thesound blaster pro 2 wascaptured by ibm os2 and the drivers wereinstalled just fineno problem at all it even got myvideo card which was a trident 9440and speaking of the video card iactually did install the trident driversbecause the ibmprovided drivers were a little bit lesssophisticated and really meant forthe older trident 8900 series thetrident 9440 drivers were actually quitenice andenabled some gui acceleration andallowed me toload a resolution of 1280x1024 which wasyou know perfectly usable i only set itto 800x600 just for readability's sakebut1280x1024 on os2 actually looks prettygoodi was impressed the other thing i wasreally impressed with as far as os2 wasthe actual speedusing the operating system never feltsluggish i've got a pair of 16 megabytefast page mode sims in the systemand in fact if you're hearing somethingright now that's os2 sound effects inthe background and yeahsystem doesn't really slow down evenwhen it's playing sounds or openingclosing various windowsit's pretty impressive for what thisthing can do with basically a hopped up386in fact it's impressive enough that welllet's try playing some of the includedmidi files and see what we can getsome of these ibm included jams areactually a little bit better than[Music]canyon.mid[Music]whatwhatwhatwhat whatokay so what about the windows portionof the os wellclicking on that folder that sayswindows programs you can actuallyopen a version of program manager knownas winos2winos2 is basically a full copy ofwindows 3.1that runs as part of os2 it's runningunderneath the operating system andyou're basically running windows on topof os2but the performance difference isn'treally too greatyou know nothing seems less snappy thanusual i mean program manager still seemsperfectlyadequate and it has all the usualinstalled accessories and features imeanit even has the midi player which when iuploaded the drivers for the creativesound blaster 2.0 that's in the systemi was able to get some midi playbackgoing but this is where i started to runinto issues with os2but if you really want to see just howcompatible os2 is with windows and doslet's take a look at the soundblasterpro 2 installthese are the install floppies that camewith the card for the ct1600they're meant for dos and here i amrunning them in a dos windowand it ran just fine in fact they ranliterally how you would expect on anydoll space systemthat was running an ibm blue lightning386at 75 megahertz i mean there wasliterally no difference between runningthis in pc dos 2000 which is what ipreviously had the system onand in os2 exceptall right yeah it is running a littlebit slower than normal and that canprobably be accounted for due to memorymanagement as well as running doson top of os2 because keep in mind os2itselfis its own operating system the versionsof dos and windows that are built intoitare running basically alongside of or ontop of it depending on how you'relooking at itso from that perspective there is goingto be some performance loss and overheadinstead of just installing it on thebare metal of the system itselfthat being said i mean everything worksas you'd expect take a look at thisi'm going to place some of the soundtest tracks and they work just like theywould in dosor in windows 3.1[Music]even cooler is that the windows driverinstaller portion of the actual installfor the creative cardcaught the version of windows that'srunning as wino s2and was able to install the windowsdrivers too for the windows portion ofthe cardit worked just fine and i didn't have todo anything specifici mean literally all i did was continuewith the installopened up program manager it was thereopened up dosit showed up everything looked like iwas using a regular systemexcept i was using os2 and doing all ofthis on top of the existing operatingsystemit was really cool and it kind of showedoff the versatility of os2[Music]see even microsoft agrees with me i meanclearly the system itself ispretty impressive and versatile so justto test out that versatility we'veplayed midi files in os2 itselflet's try playing some of those wino s2midi files in windowsso i'm going to pull up canyon.mid whichis the included midi file that comeswithwindows 3.1 i mean everyone's heard itit's pretty iconicbut i still want to give it a test ifnot for the memes for the actual testingaspectlet's take a looknow if you've heard this before youprobably are thinking that's notquite right and well it's notmy suspicion is that there's somethinggoing on with the midi mapper especiallysince this is windows being runon top of os2 but i'm not quite certainanyway let's get to what everyone reallylikes to see andplay some games with this thing so herewe're going to check out doomin os2 versus its performance in pc doson the same systemagain this is the same world's fastest386 andyeah well take a look here[Music][Applause][Music][Applause][Music]do[Music]in all honesty you can really see theoverhead that os2's dawson windows implementationsprovide andcertainly the performance is adequatebut not acceptable i meani wouldn't call that playable howeverhere's a full screen of wolfenstein 3dbeing played andapologies for the weird resolution i'mnot quite sure but apparently os2 isjust weird about those thingsthat being said os2 runs wolf 3d justfineand this is the unmodified dos versionbut if you look closely and listenclosely you might noticethere's certain sound effects thataren't just playing at alland i'm not exactly sure what that'sabout butyeah os2 things i guess[Music]uh[Music]oh[Music][Music][Music]uh[Music]uh[Music]realistically though that's not what os2is for let'sexplore a little bit of what it couldactually do which would be you knowmultitaskingso i'll pull up windows write and theni'll pull up an os2 application in thiscase i'll just pull up the driver panelfor thetrident t-gui 9440 that's in there andyeahworks as intended i mean os2 was amultitasking os and yepit can multitask across windows acrossdos and across os2without a problem but let's push theenvelope a little more and try somethingmore interesting what if you wanted torun an os2 applicationand you also wanted to run doom wellthere was an os2 version of doom thatbeing said it was a beta but there wasan os2 version of doomso yeah let's check it outwhat whatgowhat whatwhat whatwas os2 a success or a failure wellthat's complicated it lives on today inembedded systems andatms and the like and it even ran newyork city's subwaybut the fact remains os2 was nothingshort of a technological marvelespecially at its time that being saidlike all marvels it was quirkyat best is it worth another lookabsolutelyis it a blast and totally interestingabsolutelydo i recommend checking it outabsolutelythanks again for watching and this hasbeen another episodeof retro tech bytes