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).
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 was just a kid during the 1990s when all of this was happening, but a few years ago I remember reading about an IBM project named GUTS where one kernel would run multiple OS "personalities":
Microsoft technically delivered something very close to OS/2’s “Personalities” in Windows NT 4. They called it "Environment subsystems". Each subsystem could run applications written for different operating systems, the 3 available ones were Win32, OS/2 and POSIX. Then there was the "Integral subsystem", which operated system-specific functions on behalf of environment subsystems.
But every subsystem other than Win32 was kneecapped mostly due to politics and market positioning.
In late 90s Microsoft bought a company which had developed a more enhanced Unix subsystem and rebranded it as Interix and marketed as Windows Subsytem for Unix (SFU).
I believe the original WSL was a resurrection of SFU before WSL2 pivoted to a VM-based approach.
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.)
The plan was for all operating systems on top of IBM's POWER/PPC hardware to be rehosted as "personalities" on top of the Workplace OS microkernel, but in the end, OS/2 was the only personality that saw any real work.
The Workplace OS would also have been used on Apple hardware as part of the abortive Taligent project.
(It also would have been used on x86 and other platforms, but they started with PPC)
I'm not sure I agree with "dead end" outside of the benefit of hindsight, or maybe don't get the point you're making. Neither the PowerPC nor OS/2 were dead-end in 1995, and competition in the OS space was still happening. Why wouldn't IBM want to have PowerPC survive, let alone thrive, with OS options? And surely they'd have loved something to take on Microsoft at this point in history.
I think oddities like this were a consequence of a hardware world that was rocketing along the heart of Moore’s Law, alongside a software world that hadn’t matured past multi-year product cycles.
When OS/2 for PowerPC was set in motion, that Intel would “Make CISC
Great Again” with the Pentium was far from clear.
I remember that the "general consensus" was that RISC was gonna win, it was just a matter of when (and when it could be affordable). What was NOT certain was which RISC architecture would come out ahead, so there was a bunch of porting to "remove the risk" - later they would unport most everything and "remove the RISC".
Pentium shook that tree a bit, and Pentium II really razzle-dazzled it.
One of the original design requirements for NT was that it be portable between different CPU architectures, it was one of the driving forces behind its creation.
So much so in fact, Microsoft developed NT 3.1 first on non-x86 architectures (i860 and MIPS), then later ported to x86, to ensure no x86 specific code made it in.
"Windows NT 3.1 was released for Intel x86 PC compatible and PC-98 platforms, and for DEC Alpha and ARC-compliant MIPS platforms. Windows NT 3.51 added support for the PowerPC processor in 1995"...
NT is a pretty interesting bit of PC history, I can highly recommend the book "Show Stopper!" by G. Pascal Zachary that recounts its development, and also dives a bit into why making the OS portable across CPU architectures was so important to the team at the time.
Something I didn't realize until recently was that the original MIPS version of Windows NT was Big Endian. I'd always heard it said that WinNT was strictly, 100%, absolutely always little endian, and the fact that every CPU that got a port (or was going to get a port) was either little or bi endian confirmed this.
Well, it is true, but Windows did run BE on the original MIPS R3000 platform. And only on the R3K[0]. The CPU architecture flag is still defined on modern Windows as IMAGE_FILE_MACHINE_R3000BE. There's an early test build of Win3.1 + GDI somewhere that runs on this platform.
The actual first release of WinNT 3.1 only supported MIPS R4000 and higher, I think. In little endian mode.
[0] I know the Xbox used a modified NT kernel, I've seen claims that the Xbox 360 also was, which would make it the second NT system to run big endian. Not familiar enough with sources better than wikipedia to trust that it actually was.
One of my first job out of school was as a sales support for the then bleeding edge NT 3.1 MIPS box for a company in Canada. Fond memories of loading stacks of 1.44 floppy disks for NT 3.1 and mangling ARC paths (Advanced RISC Computing, boot firmware). This was pre-internet and documentation was often hard to come by, incomplete etc.
I remember demoing the machines to astonished clients by running a stupid number of Clock apps on the desktop without a hitch.
> What could have been. If the respective parties... on the PPC 615, OS/2
There was never a chance at that time because x86 chips were produced in such volumes that PowerPC chips couldn't compete price-wise. Also, OS/2 became an instant outsider once Windows 95 was released. Two underdogs don't make a winner. The article says it all:
"The OS was clearly unfinished and not entirely stable. Worst of all, there were about zero applications. Because OS/2 PPC was never truly in use, PowerPC versions of OS/2 applications were never sold."
Additionally, while this is US-centric, there were still many households in the mid-1990s whose first computers were PCs running Windows 95, just in time for the World Wide Web to be widely available, which created demand for personal computers. Additionally, this was during the time when Apple was struggling; its Performa lineup geared toward home users was not in the best of shape in 1995 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Macintosh_5200_LC). By the time Steve Jobs returned and Apple released the first iMac (1998), it was just about time for Windows 98.
Being at the right age when Windows 95 came out, I didn't really know that there was a "Windows" prior to 95. My dad's computer ran DOS and used something called Powermenu as an organiser for executing programs. I think I had to run Wolfenstein in a tiny window for it to be fast enough to be playable, and may have, at one point, deleted one of the required DOS system files in order to try to tweak the life out of it to try to get it playable full screen. I think that was a 286. More years ago than I care to admit.
Apple somehow managed to claw it's way to releavance from a weaker position in 1998 (with PoserPC!) So if they had their act together they could have done better in the early 90s.
hey squandered their early lead in the US among consumers and education and also ignored the international market.
Not gonna lie Wintel was a formidable force. Microsoft was ruthless in cornering the market.
But technically, OS/2 and MacOS gave Windows a run for it's money, arguably superior on some respects, and you could say the same for PowerPC and Intel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workplace_OS
The 1990s were quite a time for personal and workstation computing.
I think the OS/2 subsystem was 16-bit OS/2 1.x so nobody cared and the POSIX subsystem was just compliant enough to win government contracts.
This design is why we have the "Windows Subsystem for Linux" (a name everybody hates) because "Windows Subsystems" were already a thing in Windows.
Docker, Distrobox, and even Flatpak are one kernel with multiple "personalities" but they are all still Linux I guess.
You can also argue have this on our desktops today with things like KVM in Linux and Hyper-V in Windows.
But every subsystem other than Win32 was kneecapped mostly due to politics and market positioning.
In late 90s Microsoft bought a company which had developed a more enhanced Unix subsystem and rebranded it as Interix and marketed as Windows Subsytem for Unix (SFU).
I believe the original WSL was a resurrection of SFU before WSL2 pivoted to a VM-based approach.
(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.)
The Workplace OS would also have been used on Apple hardware as part of the abortive Taligent project.
(It also would have been used on x86 and other platforms, but they started with PPC)
When OS/2 for PowerPC was set in motion, that Intel would “Make CISC Great Again” with the Pentium was far from clear.
Pentium shook that tree a bit, and Pentium II really razzle-dazzled it.
So much so in fact, Microsoft developed NT 3.1 first on non-x86 architectures (i860 and MIPS), then later ported to x86, to ensure no x86 specific code made it in.
NT supported quite a few architectures:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT#Supported_platforms
"Windows NT 3.1 was released for Intel x86 PC compatible and PC-98 platforms, and for DEC Alpha and ARC-compliant MIPS platforms. Windows NT 3.51 added support for the PowerPC processor in 1995"...
NT is a pretty interesting bit of PC history, I can highly recommend the book "Show Stopper!" by G. Pascal Zachary that recounts its development, and also dives a bit into why making the OS portable across CPU architectures was so important to the team at the time.
Well, it is true, but Windows did run BE on the original MIPS R3000 platform. And only on the R3K[0]. The CPU architecture flag is still defined on modern Windows as IMAGE_FILE_MACHINE_R3000BE. There's an early test build of Win3.1 + GDI somewhere that runs on this platform.
The actual first release of WinNT 3.1 only supported MIPS R4000 and higher, I think. In little endian mode.
[0] I know the Xbox used a modified NT kernel, I've seen claims that the Xbox 360 also was, which would make it the second NT system to run big endian. Not familiar enough with sources better than wikipedia to trust that it actually was.
I remember demoing the machines to astonished clients by running a stupid number of Clock apps on the desktop without a hitch.
Fun times.
There was never a chance at that time because x86 chips were produced in such volumes that PowerPC chips couldn't compete price-wise. Also, OS/2 became an instant outsider once Windows 95 was released. Two underdogs don't make a winner. The article says it all:
"The OS was clearly unfinished and not entirely stable. Worst of all, there were about zero applications. Because OS/2 PPC was never truly in use, PowerPC versions of OS/2 applications were never sold."
Windows 95 ate the world because the world was mainly still DOS; look at the numbers. It wasn't people upgrading from Win 3.1.
hey squandered their early lead in the US among consumers and education and also ignored the international market.
Not gonna lie Wintel was a formidable force. Microsoft was ruthless in cornering the market.
But technically, OS/2 and MacOS gave Windows a run for it's money, arguably superior on some respects, and you could say the same for PowerPC and Intel.