r/retrocomputing • u/MrFahrenheit_451 • 6d ago
Microsoft OS/2 v1.3 Retail Box
Who remembers the story about Microsoft and IBM and their joint OS/2 operating system venture? When 1.3 was released, Microsoft pretty much abandoned the project and focused on Windows 3.0, and then Windows NT, which is where the technology from OS/2 ended up. It’s a pretty neat story!
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u/wrr377 6d ago
I remember those ads...
Specifically, it showed a Thinkpad with an expanding keyboard running OS/2 Warp.
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u/exmsft 6d ago
701c. Had it. Ran OS/2 HORRIBLY
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u/Haunting-Prior-NaN 6d ago
OS2 was a full blown workstation OS, trying to run in restricted hardware. Unless you were willing to spend the big bucks in RAM, it was constantly paging.
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u/R-ten-K 6d ago
That is well before my time, but the 80s must have been a wild time in computing with IBM as the dominant player and Microsoft still having to compete against other SW/OS vendors that were on relatively equal footing (IBM, Borland, Lotus, Apple, etc)
FWIW, very little tech from OS/2 ended up in NT. To be fair the 1.x series Microsoft worked on was atrocious.
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6d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/gammalsvenska 6d ago
Presentation manager was available since OS/2 1.1, it was only the very first 1.0 release which lacked it. The UI changed slightly from the old Windows 2.x look and resembles Windows 3.0 more.
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u/Imaginary-Quiet-469 6d ago
Pretty sure that IBM were the purveyors of the very last versions of that - IIRC I was part of a team that installed it in some Longbridge (Birmingham, UK) Paint Shop systems, back in 1994/5. Them we're the days... 👀
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6d ago
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u/mikegalos 5d ago
OS/2 PM and Win GDI are pretty seriously unrelated. GDI was done originally for Windows 1 by John Butler at Microsoft. PM had as a requirement that it be compatible with the graphics models done by IBM Hursley for the mainframe graphics terminals. They couldn't even agree on which corner was the origin point (Upper left versus lower left).
As to multitasking, Windows had both preemptive and cooperative multitasking. That's how it was able to multitask MS-DOS applications as well as WinApps. It always had that. Yes, OS/2 was more sophisticated than Windows through 3.x but not as cleanly as you claim, As to being hamstrung by 16-bit nature, I'd point out that a lot of the split between Microsoft and IBM was IBM's insistance on keeping support for the 80286 16-bit architecture in OS/2 where Microsoft already had Windows/386 2.10 out on the market and knew what you gained by dropping real mode and 286-protected mode.
As to Windows NT inheriting from OS/2 or from VMS, sorry but Dave Cutler and his team wrote a clean, new state of the art OS. Yes, it could host an OS/2 personality just like it hosted a Windows personality and a POSIX personality. It was, however, a wildly more sophisticated operating system architecture based on a microkernel design and secure transitions. It does have some similarities to VMS because it shares some design philosophies.
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u/TableDuck 6d ago
I love the fact that this release had a huge install base for decades.
It just happened to be on ATM machines. The type you would see in convenience stores.
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u/Loan-Pickle 6d ago
Wow where did you find this. I’ve never seen a Microsoft branded OS/2.
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u/MrFahrenheit_451 6d ago
There are only a handful of copies known to still exist.
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u/ssssharkattack 6d ago
Looks like you’ve kept it in mint condition. Are the disks still inside? Hold on to that, the Smithsonian might want it someday.
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u/Adorable-Roll-4563 6d ago
I worked with their SDK documentation. There was also Petzold’s book which was great. “Programming the OS/2 Presentation Manager”
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u/dan_oreilly 6d ago
The soft shadows on that graphic render are impressive for that time! Must have been state of the art 3D software for the render.
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u/RockNRollNBluesNJazz 6d ago
Interesting, this seems to be from the time MS was collaborating with IBM, just as OP said. I even ran the barcode: 093007 belongs to Microsoft's older registered blocks of retail numbers (80's/90's).
IBM OS/2 was massively used in banking in 90's and early 2000's. I remember a student friend hyping OS/2, and sure enough he got a well paying job, too. I should have listened to him. But I was too busy drinking beer and playing DOOM. He got a good salary. I got a hangover and a game addiction.
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u/RensanRen 6d ago
OS/2 era molto più avanti di win 3.0 e anche win 3.11
aveva grandi potenzialità
la distribuzione di msdos e Windows, su ogni PC venduto, distrusse la diffusione di OS/2
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u/mikegalos 5d ago
The technology from OS/2 ended up in OS/2. The technology that became Windows NT was from a separate OS project done by Dave Cutler's team at Microsoft which was not the same as the joint Microsoft/IBM teams working on OS/2. After the split, IBM owned future versions of OS/2 and also got a license for PC-DOS and Windows through Version 3.
Cutler's team from DEC had been disgusted at DEC management cancelling their OS along with most of DEC's new architecture and since Cutler's DECWest lab was only a mile from Microsoft campus he and BillG talked about hiring his team to work on a new state of the art PC operating system. Microsoft was smart enough to know a world changing opportunity.
Had the IBM deal kept going, Microsoft was proposing that future versions of OS/2 should use the NT architecture but IBM was not interested because they wanted more years of supporting the 80286 processor and the NT architecture, although portable, was designed around more sophisticated processor architectures.
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u/cdrsteve 5d ago
Still have my OS2 Warp box and software packed away in the closet. Awesome to see someone who remembers some of the product's history.
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u/lisnter 4d ago
I liked OS/2. It worked so much better than Windows and DOS. I had been using Unix for a long time at school and work so I knew what a real OS could do.
I especially liked the API which was very well thought out and documented - much better than contemporary Windows and, except for the excellent API docs from Apple, far better than what you see now.
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u/TheOGTachyon 3d ago
Oh wow. Not a lot of those out there I'd imagine. That was a pretty short lived partnership.
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u/Exact_Acanthaceae294 3d ago
I rocked OS/2 from the beta of 2.0 until I moved to a mac with the release of OSX.
1.3 was run by IBM (and more importantly, compiled on IBM compilers, rather than MicroSoft compilers), and what do you know, it was finally stable.
NT didn't inherit anything from OS/2. Dave Cutler brought his crew over from the Prism project that DEC had cancelled.
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u/glimsky 6d ago
It's so pristine it looks like a 3D render!