I remember working with a guy who was the internal IBM rep (we were in corporate tech support in the late 1990’s and we were a BIG IBM reseller, so my friend got lots of bennies at work) and he had a PPC 605 (not the 615 IIRC), but he ran AIX on it (we were in the AIX and Unix support team).
I’m always curious how these projects come about and survive: why go to all of the effort to port for a dead-end product line? As technically sweet as it is? I imagine they would’ve found a decent market if they’d ported to Power Mac.
(Also, was the x86 emulation implemented in-house? I wouldn’t be surprised if some niche small company had a x86 emulator for PPC product that they could be paid to port.)
I remember at the time there was also going to be the wonderful new kernel that would allow OS/2 and MacOS to coexist on the same machine. As someone who had a Mac and an OS/2 machine side-by-side on his desk, this seemed like it could be a wonderful thing, but alas, it was never to come to be.
I miss OS/2 a lot. For what it was at the time (intel, not ppc) it worked really well. When I was at Netscape, my build machine was OS/2 so I could do windows builds and still actually work. Machines then were much less capable than now, but I rarely had any bogging down of the system.
I did my first internship at Boca Raton in the OS/2 device driver support group. They announced OS/2 PPC while I was there, and also BeOS was dropped around the same time. Suffice it to say it was an exciting time for PPC hardware that I could never afford on my own (Windows 95 also came out that year, it was all so nuts).
To the nostalgics among us: what made OS/2 special? 32bit support?
I recall trying OS/2 2.0 or 2.1 back in the day, coming from a DOS/Win3.11 setup. It seemed to have the same basic features as DOS/Windows but wasn't properly compatible with my existing software. Admittedly, this was before I knew anything about programming. I discovered Linux not much later. It wasn't compatible with anything either, but seemed like a totally different and much more compelling proposition.
The OS/2 WARP Presentation Manager was a better "desktop" paradigm than Win3.11. It supported more customization and stranger "objects" you could store on your desktop. It felt a bit more coherent and a lot more powerful than the Win3.11 Program Manager.
I was mostly a kid with a huge stack of PC games I'd play, and OS/2 was a better launcher for many (but not all) of them than DOS/Windows. I was "dual booting" OS/2 WARP and DOS/Windows, but because of my gaming habits it was more like quintuple booting because I had a long boot menu with I want to say 4 to 7 different combinations of AUTOEXEC.BAT/CONFIG.SYS settings depending on type of game I intended to play or if I was going to use a Windows app or something else, then one OS/2 WARP boot option.
A bunch of Windows apps (many of which ran better, even) and even some games I recall I started launching from OS/2 WARP instead of DOS/Windows, making the first boot choice of the day a lot easier. (Though I don't remember being able to delete most of the other combinations, still had to reboot for certain games and Windows apps that needed more RAM than what OS/2 left for applications. OS/2's biggest problem at the time was a huge RAM footprint compared to Win3.11, much less DOS micro-tuned with AUTOEXEC.BAT/CONFIG.SYS low footprints for specific driver combos.)
At the time, formatting a floppy disk was a single task thing.
Downloading a file via Zmodem was mostly a single task thing.
The Windows of the day could to the latter, but not the former.
OS/2 on my 8mb 386sx could do both AND have a clock up, and play solitaire, and have another terminal window open.
It took a bit to get there, and there was swapping while everything loaded, but it was true pre-emptive multitasking, while still maintaining the highly time critical I/O stuff that Windows couldn't touch.
I had a brush with the PS/2 and OS/2 back in the day. IBM offered the PS/2-based Personal/370 on the platform with a card that could execute S/370 SW. My team built the I/O channel card for connecting 3480 tapes and the like. It was funny seeing the fat bus and tag cables attached to a little box through an adapter pigtail.
Wow, PPC? I once had a Norstar NAM for voicemail, and did connect a monitor and keyboard and witness OS/2 on that. I think the NAM was an x86-based system. But I know the Meridian PBXs themselves were completely distinct from Norstar that I used. Never knew Nortel used PPC. Very neat!
Though my time with them came only as non-IP phone systems started to be considered obsolete, I am still a huge fan of the rock-solid stability and realtime speed of those digital systems. Not to mention their lack of a need for subscription services to operate.
I absolutely loved OS/2. It was an absolutely phenomenal operating system. I really wish that IBM had put more effort behind it. Today, if MS and IBM could actually cooperate with one another, it'd be great to get it open sourced.
Sadly, by the time OS/2 was really competitive, MS had taken the market, and there was little reason for most users to go buy another operating system when Win3 or Win95 came on their machines, and NT was shipping on workstations.
In the OS/2 2.x days my primary means of interacting with other OS/2 folks was the Canopus (Wil Zachman) forum on Compuserve (75060,264 checking in). Weird that I still remember my Comuserve user id!
At that time, there was a somewhat common saying "Annoy IBM, support OS/2!". This was essentially mocking the ineptness (disdain?) of IBM marketing for OS/2.
(75060,264 checking in). Weird that I still remember my Comuserve user id!
Over 40 years later, and I still remember mine, too. I have no idea why. Something about those octets that sticks in your brain like phone numbers used to.
After returning a 'Reader Service Card' I found in Info World magazine, I started getting catalogs from Indelible Blue. They were _the_ big reseller of OS/2 software. Lots of good stuff in there, plus they had articles evangelizing OS/2 and ReXX scripting.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 32.8 ms ] threadMan I was jealous!
(Also, was the x86 emulation implemented in-house? I wouldn’t be surprised if some niche small company had a x86 emulator for PPC product that they could be paid to port.)
I recall trying OS/2 2.0 or 2.1 back in the day, coming from a DOS/Win3.11 setup. It seemed to have the same basic features as DOS/Windows but wasn't properly compatible with my existing software. Admittedly, this was before I knew anything about programming. I discovered Linux not much later. It wasn't compatible with anything either, but seemed like a totally different and much more compelling proposition.
I was mostly a kid with a huge stack of PC games I'd play, and OS/2 was a better launcher for many (but not all) of them than DOS/Windows. I was "dual booting" OS/2 WARP and DOS/Windows, but because of my gaming habits it was more like quintuple booting because I had a long boot menu with I want to say 4 to 7 different combinations of AUTOEXEC.BAT/CONFIG.SYS settings depending on type of game I intended to play or if I was going to use a Windows app or something else, then one OS/2 WARP boot option.
A bunch of Windows apps (many of which ran better, even) and even some games I recall I started launching from OS/2 WARP instead of DOS/Windows, making the first boot choice of the day a lot easier. (Though I don't remember being able to delete most of the other combinations, still had to reboot for certain games and Windows apps that needed more RAM than what OS/2 left for applications. OS/2's biggest problem at the time was a huge RAM footprint compared to Win3.11, much less DOS micro-tuned with AUTOEXEC.BAT/CONFIG.SYS low footprints for specific driver combos.)
Downloading a file via Zmodem was mostly a single task thing.
The Windows of the day could to the latter, but not the former.
OS/2 on my 8mb 386sx could do both AND have a clock up, and play solitaire, and have another terminal window open.
It took a bit to get there, and there was swapping while everything loaded, but it was true pre-emptive multitasking, while still maintaining the highly time critical I/O stuff that Windows couldn't touch.
Though my time with them came only as non-IP phone systems started to be considered obsolete, I am still a huge fan of the rock-solid stability and realtime speed of those digital systems. Not to mention their lack of a need for subscription services to operate.
Sadly, by the time OS/2 was really competitive, MS had taken the market, and there was little reason for most users to go buy another operating system when Win3 or Win95 came on their machines, and NT was shipping on workstations.
At that time, there was a somewhat common saying "Annoy IBM, support OS/2!". This was essentially mocking the ineptness (disdain?) of IBM marketing for OS/2.
Over 40 years later, and I still remember mine, too. I have no idea why. Something about those octets that sticks in your brain like phone numbers used to.