pibbuR said:
pibbuR who misses OS/2 (yes, he used it, admittedly the IBM version, from version 1.0 to the bitter end.).
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I had measurement equipment that used OS/2 (and a friend who worked at a banking software company that developers for OS/2 in the early 90s). Also had some optical analysis software that shipped with a computer running BeOS ... but my fave was definitely the one that came with a NeXTStep laptop!
 
pibbuR said:
pibbuR who misses OS/2 (yes, he used it, admittedly the IBM version, from version 1.0 to the bitter end.).
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I always wanted to have OS/2 on my PC, I always thought that it had great potential.

Alas ! I never came to it. It was too expensive when I was young, and nowadays ... The eComStation is the successor, and even that has a successor nowadays : ArcaOS.
 
txa1265 said:
Yet another example of Microsoft very carefully signing contracts and agreements in ways that allowed them to totally screw over someone who did all the work.
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That's not really how it happened. IBM wanted to screw MS as much as the other way round, but failed in good part because of internal fights and its heavy structure, and also thanks to some managers like Akers who underestimated Gates and missed opportunities from IBM to get its own GUI software. It ultimately lost on both the hardware and the software fronts because it shoot itself in the foot too many times.

IBM didn't do all the work in that affair. It was IBM who contacted MS to write it in the first place, based on its own specifications, and MS did a good part of the job, at least initially. The result was ugly compared to IBM's standards, but at least something was done. IBM finally took over because of too many disagreements between the two partners; among other things, it tried to contain the potential Windows thread by forcing MS to restrict it to a part of the market and failed to do so. IBM also managed to shut down its own desktop software division despite a great start, critically limiting the number of available apps for the later versions of OS/2, and ultimately shut down OS/2 entirely - what it should have done much earlier (and almost did).

It's a miracle this company still exists.
 
IBM's handling of that OS was SO MUCH like a bureaucracy [spelling ?] bureau handling an OS ... It was just awful. I mean REALLY awful.
IBM was - in that respect - the 180 degree opposite of pure marketing driven Microsoft ...

The only really good thing that came out of it - imho - was the Workplace Shell For Windows, which was a shell indeed for Windows 3.10 in the shape of the WPS for OS/2.
It was written, so it said, "as part of the EWS program", whith "EWS" = "employee written software".
Just - be careful and don't put the shutdown program into the autostart group like I did ! :ROFLMAO:

It might still be there on the archive.org web site.
I have found it only a few days agon on one of my old disks again.
 
Yes, IBM was very bureaucratic and Microsoft a bunch of hackers. It must have been fun to attend those meetings... The MS guys seemed to make better technical decisions too, like not supporting the 286 and directly jumping to the 386 to get real hardware support for multitasking, even if that CPU wasn't available yet. I think OS/2 finally made the same move years later with another version.
 
Couchpotato said:
So physical media for games or movies is dead? Well obviously not it seems.
www.pcgamesn.com

New optical disc has room for 1,000 copies of Baldur’s Gate 3

The DVD and Blu-ray era isn't over yet, as scientists demonstrate the potential for a laser-based disc with 125TB of storage space.
www.pcgamesn.com www.pcgamesn.com
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That's a comfortable size. :)
It's only a paper that shows it could be possible, though. It would be nice for physical backups, but I wonder if there's still much interest for that these days.

Here's the link to the paper, if you have a subscription to Nature:

www.nature.com

A 3D nanoscale optical disk memory with petabit capacity - Nature

Optical nanoscale disk memory with petabit-level capacity is developed by extending the recording architecture to three dimensions with hundreds of layers, and exabit-level storage can be achieved by stacking the disks into arrays.
www.nature.com www.nature.com
 
IBM was also very interested, probably mostly in C/PM. They organised a meeting from the east coast flew to San Jose (even with a blank cheque signed by John Akers (CEO of IBM).
They turned up where the meeting was organised and the C/MP wasn't even there, the weather was great so he went ballooning! IBM tried again but I think this time he had gone surfing.
At this point IBM went back to Microsoft (always) number 2 anyway.

(How do I know? One of my personal friends carried the cheque each time.)
 
Hurls said:
IBM was also very interested, probably mostly in C/PM. They organised a meeting from the east coast flew to San Jose (even with a blank cheque signed by John Akers (CEO of IBM).
They turned up where the meeting was organised and the C/MP wasn't even there, the weather was great so he went ballooning! IBM tried again but I think this time he had gone surfing.
At this point IBM went back to Microsoft (always) number 2 anyway.

(How do I know? One of my personal friends carried the cheque each time.)
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Was that Digital Research with their CP/M-86? (I never understood why it wasn't CP/M-160 ;))
 
Couchpotato said:
So physical media for games or movies is dead? Well obviously not it seems.
www.pcgamesn.com

New optical disc has room for 1,000 copies of Baldur’s Gate 3

The DVD and Blu-ray era isn't over yet, as scientists demonstrate the potential for a laser-based disc with 125TB of storage space.
www.pcgamesn.com www.pcgamesn.com
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I feel like physical for games/movies/music is definitely starting to make a resurgence like we saw with vinyl for music ... but instead of 'audio quality', it is about 'ownership'. As console gamers get burned when game companies 'de-list' games and remove them from their shops, they have become increasingly adamant about physical copies (see this a lot with Nintendo Switch)
 
Redglyph said:
Following the OS/2 talk of two weeks ago, here's a fresh 1-hour video by RetroBytes, which tells the history of OS/2. There are a few minor technical inaccuracies and he forgot about the infamous deal IBM tried to shove down MS' throat to limit them to the low-end market, but it's quite instructive and brings other interesting details to light.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3DZJ_LD7F4
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Thanks for sharing ... I never responded to your earlier post but had looked back and ... well, I guess that is what happens when you have a bunch of IBM friends telling you their versions of a story! :D
 
txa1265 said:
Thanks for sharing ... I never responded to your earlier post but had looked back and ... well, I guess that is what happens when you have a bunch of IBM friends telling you their versions of a story! :D
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Well, maybe they know something the public doesn't. It's only what I read, provided I didn't even mix anything up.
 
Hurls said:
They

care about M/PM (not sure exact wording but multitasks as they saw as the real breakthrough)
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I had to look it up because I never heard of that one before. There's indeed a series of MP/M versions, which added the multi-user/multitasking features to the corresponding CP/M ones. It looked pretty advanced for the time.
 
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