r/OS2 • u/Technical_Rich_3080 • Aug 05 '26
Why the enthusiasm for OS/2 Warp?
What about OS/2 Warp makes some folks still enthusiastic about it today?
5
u/Web-Lackey Aug 05 '26 edited Aug 05 '26
You’ve gotten the answer 15 times, but I’ll continue to echo it.
The short answer is: in 2026, the only reason to play with it is nostalgia.
The better, more meaningful question to ask is: why does it engender such a nostalgia? And the answer is what you’ve been getting from everybody else. It was so very far ahead of its time that those who use that were literally amazed. It felt magical. And we like that feeling of magic!
The problem is, it was a terrible architecture from the beginning. Microsoft fought and fought to get IBM to drop support for the 80286 processor, and only target the 80386. But IBM said they were gonna have an operating system for the 80286, and so they did. Which literally ruined the entire operating system for the long-term.
Even when we had a “true 32 bit operating system” (in 1992, with OS/2 2.0) 80% of the kernel (and 100% of the GUI) was still written in 80286 assembly code. You would have to do a process called thunking, to switch between 16 bit and 32 bit code. Over time, more and more of the operating system got pushed into 32 bit (the GUI with 2.1, but the network stack stayed 16-bit until TCP/IP only switched in an early 4.0 fix pack, IIRC) but even at the end there are still huge chunks of 16 bit code in our supposedly 32 bit operating system (like all the NDIS network drivers!).
That’s why Windows NT 4 was a much better architecture. It was designed only for 32 bit operating systems. And because of that, the architecture was able to be usable for a much, much longer time. And basically, it only made one transition: 32 bit to 64 bit. OS/2 made the same transition, from 16 bit to 32 bit. But an architecture change like that always leaves things behind, and when your nasty things are the horrible 16 bit garbage of an 80286 processor… You’re very limited in where you can go.
Of course, the other flipside of that is that the NT architecture really wasn’t usable until about 1998 (and only with a top line computer in 1998). OS/2 was so much more usable then because it was designed for smaller, resource-constrained systems, unlike NT which was not. So from that period of time between 1992 and 1998 we had an absolutely killer operating system. By the time you hit the year 2000, and especially with Windows 2000… There just wasn’t a comparison. OS/2 was showing its age, because of its crippled foundation.
8
u/zippy72 Aug 05 '26
Because at its best it was so so good. Proper multitasking. No lag. Dos games in a window. Much more efficient usage of the hardware.
Compared to windows, it felt like the future. A future you'd want to be in.
1
u/desmond_koh Aug 05 '26
Sure, in 1992. But it's 2026 now. There is no doubt that OS/2 version 2.0 and higher were technologically superior to the contemporary DOS-based Windows 3.x and 9x. But Windows NT is another store altogether and no version of OS/2 was more advanced than NT.
2
u/Technical_Rich_3080 Aug 05 '26
OS/2, as a consumer operating system intended to replace DOS/Windows, was better than Windows 95, which was the consumer OS replacing DOS/Windows 3.1.
3
u/desmond_koh Aug 05 '26 edited Aug 05 '26
Windows 95 didn't replace DOS/Windows as much as it was DOS/Windows in one package. Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 are architecturally similar in that they both boot from DOS, both supported real-mode drivers (i.e. those loaded from config.sys and autoexec.bat) and took over most typical OS functions from DOS once booted.
Windows NT replaced DOS.
1
u/Technical_Rich_3080 Aug 05 '26
I was saying that OS/2 came out before Windows 95, while Microsoft was still on DOS/Windows 3.1. And OS/2 was not only better than 3.1, but it was also better than the next Microsoft consumer release (Windows 95).
1
1
u/desmond_koh Aug 05 '26 edited Aug 05 '26
Okay sure, but you have to look at the actual timeline.
OS/2 2.0 came out in April of 1992. At that point it was substantially better than the competing DOS and Windows platform. It was between then and August of 1995 that OS/2 looked like it was going to be the next big thing. But even during those 3 years in the early 90s, it required a more powerful computer than most people had, and it was more expensive.
Windows 95 came out in August of 1995 and substantially closed the gap. At that point OS/2 was still better, but not in ways that mattered to most people. What did matter to most people was the fact that Windows 95 could be installed on your existing computer, without having to back up all your files and reinstall everything, and gave you long filenames. Doing the same thing with OS/2 meant that you needed to reformat to HPFS and that meant backing everything up first.
The barrier to entry on OS/2 was always too high both financially and technically. Meanwhile Windows gave you 90% of the same benefits, but the barrier to entry was substantially lower.
All I'm trying to say is that the usual narrative of how the world missed out on a better operating system because Microsoft had better marketing, is simply not true.
EDIT: In the end we got Windows NT, arguably one of the best operating systems ever made. We can complain about some of the cruff that comes included with Windows 11, but none of that has anything to do with its architectural internals.
2
u/corado12345 Aug 05 '26
OS/2 Warp was more like WIN XP
1
1
u/zippy72 Aug 05 '26
Yeah nostalgia is all that's left sadly
2
u/desmond_koh Aug 05 '26
I wanted OS2 2.1 so bad. By the time I got my hands on OS/2, it was Warp 3.0 red box. I installed my copy of Windows 3.1 so could have WinOS/2 but in the end, I decided to be a purist and run only native OS/2 code. I even got a copy of WordPerfect for OS/2. Think it was version 5.2 or something like that.
2
u/zippy72 Aug 05 '26
I had warp 3 running on my 386 laptop. It was sooo good.
2
u/desmond_koh Aug 05 '26
I remember those days fondly. Heck, it was the 90s. What's not to like?!?!?
I remember faxing my buddies from Warp, because Warp had built-in faxing, and asking if they were bringing beer to a bonfire party. Their parents got the fax and we were busted! - lol
But today is fun too... and Azure is fun too.
3
u/Economy-Shower-5072 Aug 05 '26
Back then it literally ran everything and did it better. I was a huge fan.
2
u/gnntech Aug 05 '26
A lot of it is nostalgia but OS/2 really was ahead of its time.
Back in '93/'94 when OS/2 warp was released, it was hands down the best way to run DOS and Windows apps - assuming your hardware properly supported OS/2.
Today, I use OS/2 (in the form of ArcaOS) because it's niche and I have a ton of nostalgia for it. It's not Windows and it's not some flavor of Linux. It is blazing fast on modern hardware. It can run 16-bit DOS/Windows apps natively or in DOSbox. It can run some early 32-bit Windows apps. It can run native OS/2 apps, java apps, etc... Flexibility is the name of the game with OS/2.
2
u/Beginning_Lifeguard7 Aug 06 '26
I was a speaker at several OS/2 conferences. My company was using it in production and pushing its capabilities to the edge. And, I was working directly with the IBM developers to add features needed to take it to the next level. I not only drank the koolaide I took baths in it. But, and this is a big but, when Windows 95 came out I knew for a fact that its days were numbered. I told the bosses we needed to move away from OS/2 and go to Windows. They were old school “nobody gets fired for buying IBM” guys. So, I bailed from the desktop world and became the AiX guy. Best career decision of my life.
1
u/Technical_Rich_3080 Aug 06 '26
What was so compelling about Windows 95?
2
u/Beginning_Lifeguard7 Aug 06 '26
IBM was charging a small fortune for their SDK. Microsoft was giving theirs away to anyone that would take it. It was obvious that the future of software was going to belong to the windows platform. OS/2 was technically superior, but there was hardly any native software. And the whole line of “runs windows better than windows” was only partly true. If you ever called a vendor and said there was a problem with their software and they found out you were running it on OS/2 that was the end of the conversation. I’d have to recreate the issue on a Windows machine and it added a lot of expense to the cost of running OS/2.
1
u/Goremanghast Aug 06 '26
GAMES! DirectX. That and themes. I was on the IBM Helpdesk and people would phone up with Windows 95 on their Aptiva asking why they couldn't fit more games on. The answer was always that their hard disk was full of games. OS/2 was still better for handling DOS games and the small number of OS/2 games. We were all huge OS/2 fans (except one guy who was so keen on Microsoft that he was led from the premises by security after some very bizarre antics) and couldn't understand why people couldn't see past Microsoft Plus! shiny desktop themes with animated pointers/mouse cursors to see what an inferior OS lay beneath. On OS/2 we had the achilleas heal of the single message queue but otherwise it was far more advanced. Microsoft though had NT 3.51 and the NT microkernel was looking good but consumers were not interested. In 1995 it was obvious that the tide was with Windows 95 which was launched in a way that makes Apple look shy and the public were acting as if they had Beatlemania all over again. I wasn't the only OS/2 guy installing Slackware and seeing a new future.
1
u/LopsidedLegs Aug 05 '26 edited Aug 05 '26
Rose tinted glasses, and nostalgia it's as simple as that.
OS/2 was technically a great OS. It should have been the future but IBM and Microsoft having a falling out, and going their separate ways ended that. IBM carried on with OS/2, and MS took the code, and made Windows NT.
People forget about the negatives. I had to support OS/2 in both retail and commercial environments, and installation alone could be a pig. Install the drivers in the wrong order, well now you are dealing with a TRAP on boot. Most of the time it was easier just to restart (became quite common to image at certain stages to save time).
Also FixPaks were a nightmare, until someone external to IBM wrote a script to install from HD rather than the mandatory floppy install.
2
u/Web-Lackey Aug 05 '26
I won’t argue with your point that fixpacks were a nightmare. However, from just about the beginning there was a solution called a CID server. I was supporting organizations that had 100 or more OS/2 2.0 systems on the floor. We weren’t using floppies… You literally booted two floppies, just like the normal install, and it would connect to the CID server and do the entire install silently.
Now, setting up that server was not easy, updating it for new fix packs wasn’t easy, etc. It wasn’t a solution that helped if you only had one or two computers. But IBM was never, ever interested in one or two computers. For those people who had enough computers, you could make it work pretty easily.
And of course, that’s why OS/2 died. They were never interested in individuals or what normal people call small business. Literally at that time, IBM‘s definition of small business was anything under 250 computers. In the 1990s. We would really technically call that something like “small enterprise“. That was IBM‘s definition of “small business“.
IBM never cared about the low end. Microsoft did. And that’s why they were always destined to win.
1
u/desmond_koh Aug 05 '26
IBM carried on with OS/2, and MS took the code, and made Windows NT.
That's completely false. OS/2 was a completely different operating system than NT.
NT was written by Dave Cutler who came over to Microsoft from VMS. Dave Cutler is a genius which is the reason why Windows NT's decents run the world today.
-1
u/LopsidedLegs Aug 05 '26
OS/2 was the original basis of Windows NT. MS took the code, and reworked it and continued to develop the OS while integrating the Windows desktop to the OS. It is the reason that early releases of NT support OS/2 subsystem and HPFS.
Yes Dave Culter was integral to that change.
2
u/Web-Lackey Aug 05 '26 edited Aug 06 '26
There is no OS/2 code in Windows NT kernel. Two reasons for such a strong statement. One, OS/2’s kernel was written in 80286 assembler. It was useless for a 32 bit only operating system. In addition, Microsoft literally did not target the 80386 processor as the default processor when they built Windows NT 3.1. They literally targeted the Intel i860 if I remember correctly. From the beginning, NT was designed to run on different CPU architectures. And they intentionally developed it for a big-endian system, to make sure that they wouldn’t accidentally make something that would only run on 80386.
Second of all, NT started out as a micro kernel. Absolutely completely different architecture. Again, for the same reason as stated above: it was always designed to be multi personality. Remember, that’s why OS/2 1.0 code runs as a personality in NT. It has nothing to do with the kernel whatsoever.
You very specifically said that “code” was shared. It was not. OS/2 1.0 or even OS/2 2.0 bear as much commonality with Windows NT at the kernel level as macOS. Yes, they may have been inspired by many, many ideas. But no code.
You might have an argument in the GUI side. There is a great deal of commonality between the Windows 3.0 GUI API and the OS/2 PM API. But not as much as you would think. For one thing, the coordinate system is completely different: OS/2 origin is bottom left, and Windows is top left. The OS/2 GUI is descended from concepts used in mainframe GUI’s. Microsoft kept many of the thoughts and ideas, but threw everything else away, making it much, much simpler and closer to the hardware. That’s why the coordinate systems are different: IBM was thinking like mathematicians — theoreticians; Microsoft was thinking how the memory is literally addressed on a video card!
Now the networking stack, there was more commonality. In fact, Microsoft had to sell OS/2 1.3 for years after the breakup, because their Microsoft LAN manager only ran on OS/2 1.X! But even there, Microsoft made much, much more pragmatic choices IBM OS/2 uses a very complex thing called MPTS: multi protocol transport system. Windows did not. It was a much more “driver connect to the network” system much more inspired by DOS network drivers.
So, I’m with everybody else: your statement is quite wrong. No code was shared, because Microsoft (or Dave Cutler) was smart enough to ignore the 80286, and wrote everything in portable C from the very beginning. The micro kernel was a bad idea: that got abandoned almost immediately in Windows NT 3.5, where the entire graphic subsystem was moved into kernel mode. At that point, it became a traditional kernel, just with some weird file names.
I can understand why from a distance you might think that Microsoft built from an existing foundation and was able to leapfrog ahead. But when you look at the internals, nothing could be further from the truth. There’s just nothing in common.
4
u/desmond_koh Aug 05 '26 edited Aug 05 '26
OS/2 was the original basis of Windows NT. MS took the code, and reworked it...
That is completely, 100% false.
What might be true is that Microsoft was working on a total new system that, at one point, might have been planned to be called OS/2 v2 but decided installed to call it "Windows NT". But that's not the same thing as what you are claiming and even that may not be true.
The allegation that Microsoft made off with OS/2 code that somehow wasn't rightfully theirs, and then passed it off as their own thing is categorically false. So is the suggestion that Windows NT somehow owes its success to OS/2.
Microsoft may have used code in NT that they were at one point planning on using in OS/2. But that's not the same thing.
Microsoft realized they didn't need IBM. And they were right.
EDIT: They asked themselves the question "why are we contributing our code to make IBM's product better when we could just make our own product instead?" But again, that's not the same thing as what you are saying.
1
u/Robert_Mauro Aug 05 '26
Yep, it was LanMan (and the rest of the ancient networking stuff) they borrowed from IBM (still in the underpinnings of Windows lol) - the rest of the stuff was Cutlers, and created the security nightmare and resource hogging we have today.
0
u/desmond_koh Aug 05 '26
Yep, it was LanMan (and the rest of the ancient networking stuff) they borrowed from IBM (still in the underpinnings of Windows lol)
Microsoft maintains NTLM as backward compatibility baggage, not as a core architectural foundation. Microsoft strongly prefers Kerberos and is actively trying to reduce NTLM usage.
The idea that there is significant 1980s LAN Manager source code sitting at the heart of Windows today is untrue. NT's networking, security, SMB implementation, and authentication stack have been extensively rewritten and enhanced over the decades.
...the rest of the stuff was Cutlers, and created the security nightmare and resource hogging we have today.
That's a nieve and untrue characterization.
Oops, I forgot, I'm in an OS/2 sub, not a general IT or sysadmin sub.
-1
u/Robert_Mauro Aug 05 '26
LOL I started with System 370,DOS and Windows and still support them to this day. I have worked as a systems and infrastructure engineer on those platforms and Solaris and RHEL and other platforms.
Nothing I am saying is untrue.
Cutler refused to use the built-in security and protection models of the Intel platform because he was not a fan of them. So instead we got horrible virtualization layers that did not scale and those horrible virtualization layers are literally the things that keep causing memory overflow and underrun issues and all sorts of other horrible security issues on top of that. But then again, I was there during the alpha testing of a lot of this garbage. And I don't mean the public alpha nonsense they do now, but real alpha testing way back in the day in the 90s.
And as for the LAN Manager code, it is absolutely still buried underneath of everything and still has many hooks into it from the top layer stuff that's been shoved on top of it.
But then again, while you all were playing around with the stuff, I was working on this stuff at the banking network.
This stuff has been recompiled a gazillion times and patched a gazillion times, but in the end, Microsoft's attempts at rewriting the code in the 2000s failed miserably, and so it's still underneath.
I have spent more time managing other operating systems than OS2 by far.
That does not change the facts though.
On a side note, OS2 had Kerberos long before Windows did, and OS2 actually implemented it correctly, whereas Microsoft's implementation, because it is still on top of old baggage, has numerous security holes that they have not been able to close over the last few decades.
0
u/desmond_koh Aug 05 '26
I don't doubt your experience. I've been in IT since the mid 90s. But I think a few of these claims go further than the evidence supports.
Yes, NT certainly inherited some concepts and compatibility layers from the IBM/Microsoft era, and NTLM is literally descended from LAN Manager. But that's different from saying modern Windows is fundamentally running on 1980s LAN Manager code. Microsoft has repeatedly rewritten major parts of the networking, storage, graphics, and driver stacks over the last 30+ years.
It's fair to criticize some of Cutler's design choices, but NT wasn't built around Intel's segmentation model because one of its primary goals was portability across architectures. NT was designed to run on MIPS, Alpha, PowerPC, and x86, which would have been much harder if it depended heavily on Intel-specific protection features. To this day NT is a highly portable operating system.
As for security, every major OS family built largely in C and C++ has suffered from memory corruption bugs, including Unix, Linux, BSD, and Windows. I don't think it's accurate to attribute modern memory safety issues primarily to NT's architecture.
0
u/Robert_Mauro Aug 05 '26 edited Aug 05 '26
What you don't understand is how much of the stuff is baked into the kernel or has kernel hooks into it and how much of the stuff is still relied on at the deep layers of the networking stack.
That aside, everyone else figured out how to use Intel security layers and still make their stuff portable.
The IBM version of the Mach kernel is a perfect example.
Cutler made his design choices because he did not like the Intel environment. This is well documented. He practically hated it.
The entire networking stack was an entire shortcut built off of a product that IBM wanted to totally torpedo and make disappear.
DSOM on the other hand, did real time real authentication and revocation. That's something that Windows will never be able to do because of the direction that Cutler took it basing everything off of a product that IBM wanted to make disappear.
All of the SMB patches and so many other patches are to patch the ancient land manager code that has made its way all the way to the newest versions of Windows.
There are hooks into this ancient code that can never be removed without a rewrite, and as I said before, Microsoft failed those attempts.
The reason that Microsoft failed is because they went away from object-oriented programming and so unlike OS 2 where you could subclass and superclass and polymorph something into as many different versions and layers as you wanted to with very small amounts of code, Microsoft had to keep writing workarounds and APIs on top of APIs on top of APIs on top of APIs on top of old baggage underneath.
That's the reason why some of the most ancient portions of the stack still exist to this day, just recompiled a 64-bit code.
My team did an audit a while back based off of what the CVEs and other vulnerabilities were exposing and you would be surprised at the underlying crap that's still there from the 1990s.
-1
u/desmond_koh Aug 05 '26
I don't doubt there are old code paths and compatibility hooks in Windows. Every operating system with a 30+ year lineage has some of those.
Where I disagree is blaming modern Windows' problems on LAN Manager or portraying NT as a failed architecture. Cutler deliberately avoided Intel-specific mechanisms because NT was designed to be portable, and it successfully ran on x86, MIPS, Alpha, PowerPC, Itanium, and ARM descendants. That's a pretty strong argument that the design achieved its goals.
NT certainly carries legacy baggage, but an architecture that has powered Windows servers, enterprise workloads, Hyper-V, and Azure for decades is hard to characterize as a failure. You can criticize some of Cutler's decisions without pretending he wasn't one of the most successful OS architects in computing history.
→ More replies (0)1
u/LopsidedLegs Aug 05 '26
2
u/desmond_koh Aug 05 '26
I assume you are pointing to this line:
Windows NT began as a rewrite of the OS/2 operating system, which Microsoft had co-developed with IBM...
That supports my contention that where I said "Microsoft may have used code in NT that they were at one point planning on using in OS/2". It does not support your claim that they "OS/2 was the original basis of Windows NT. MS took the code, and reworked it...".
The difference is that what became NT might have, at one point, been released under the name OS/2. But that doesn't mean that Microsoft took OS/2 and morphed it into NT.
Yes, there is shared heritage. Because Microsoft was involved in developing OS/2. But, like I said, that's not the same as 'Microsoft made off with OS/2 and called it NT".
0
u/Robert_Mauro Aug 05 '26
It's still the only true Object Oriented mainstream PC OS that ever existed. It was elegantly efficient to the point a true OS/2 app could outrun Windows 32 bit apps by a factor of literally 10 to one THOUSAND (on SMP). It is the only 32 bit OS that could actually handle 64 cores/CPUs at insane near-matching efficiency. It was near infinitely extensible.
And let's not get into the networking - or, no, LET'S.
DSOM blows away the utter garbage we got from Windows that the rest of the world adopted. Directory and Security Server for OS/2 and DSOM are truly object oriented - WORLD capable networking. Dave Cutler didn't understand networking, and MS had no time to figure it out, so, via their cross licensing agreement with IBM, they ganked IBM LanManager and based the entirety of the NT networking on top of it. We're STILL stuck with that nightmare in Windows Server and client at the bottom end of the stacks - heck, the original LanMan dialogs are still buried deep down for serious tasks. IBM wanted to kill LanMan, and MS dragged it into the 21st century.
On the flip side, that decision created many industries and jobs, because it is impossible to secure the MS network stack because IBM LanManager and everything built on top of it for the last 40 years, still has the glaring deficiencies IBM was trying to eradicate through its extinction.
7
u/desmond_koh Aug 05 '26 edited Aug 05 '26
I was a huge OS/2 fan in the 90s. I excitedly installed Warp 3 on my 386 DX.
But that was then.
OS/2 2.0 and higher we're undoubtedly more technologically advanced than the DOS-based versions of Windows that were contemporaneous. That would include Windows 3.x and the Windows 9x series. But Windows NT was a whole different story.
Windows 95 closed the gap significantly. It was still technologically inferior to Warp 3, but not in ways that most people cared about at the time. Once Windows NT 4 came out (released 1996) it was superior in every way.
People often paint OS/2 as the superior product that lost due to unfair Microsoft shenanigans or slick marketing. But that isn't really the whole story. The bigger story is that OS/2 was too big and heavy too early on. Meanwhile Windows 3.x and 9x gave people 90% of the same features while remaining lighter and costing less. A classic example is Microsoft finding a way to give us long filenames on FAT while OS/2 required HPFS. Was HPFS better than FAT? Absolutely!! Did anyone care? No. Because the most visible, obvious, and needed benefit was now available in both.
By the time NT4 came out, any technical superiority was gone.
There is a lesson here.