OS/2 a quarter century on: Why IBM lost out and how Microsoft won
Let's pile into the DeLorean to see what might have been
Ensure Ease of Recovery with Asigra’s Agentless Software
Twenty-five years ago IBM unveiled its master plan to reclaim the PC industry. In November of that year the first floppy diskettes of OS/2 version 1.0 trickled out. Microsoft had co-developed the software with Big Blue. The world would look very different if the plan succeeded. And the world was already changing significantly. It was 1987.
Today OS/2 is remembered not for what it was, but for its role in an industry war that saw Microsoft emerge triumphant. When OS/2 shipped, Microsoft employed 1,800 staff, fewer than shopping channel QVC employs in Liverpool today. Microsoft wasn’t even the biggest PC software company. But a few years later it was not only the dominant player in the industry, but the most valuable corporation in the world; the mere rumour of Microsoft entering a new market would cause panic among established players.
In keeping with El Reg tradition, I cranked the old software into life to see how OS/2 looks today. But it’s also worth posing the question once again: could IBM have won? If OS/2 was the reason Big Blue lost, could Microsoft have been stopped if IBM had come up with a smarter plan? But first, let’s set the scene, and go back to in time, to a world before ‘platforms’ and ‘ecosystems’, and remind ourselves what the IT industry looked like in the mid 1980s.
Primordial soup: The world in 1987
It was a fragmented universe, back then. The serious money was in old iron, in vertically integrated systems. IBM was the master of this universe, having just settled a decade-long antitrust battle. It employed 405,000 people in 1985 - equivalent to 12 Googles.
Digital Equipment, IBM's nearest rival, which sold half of the world's minicomputers, employed over 100,000. The centre of the IT industry was around Boston and upper New York State, reflecting the impact of Cold War-era government pork, and the enduring influence of MIT, the world’s leading engineering university in Boston, Massachusetts. The microprocessor had only just begun to have an impact, and this could be heard in the cry of "open systems". For the next few years "open systems" would become a marketing buzzword almost as ubiquitous as "the cloud" is today. Open systems meant Unix, and Unix meant Sun Microsystems – which was burning up the competition in the new networked workstation market.
That was the business market. Games and cool multimedia were the domain of strong 16-bit microcomputers, with Commodore’s Amiga and the Atari ST lines finding niches in audio and (later) video production. The strides they made and the amount of time they took to make them made Apple’s Macintosh look like an overpriced toy. The Mac was essentially just another Motorola 68000-based micro - a very well-designed one for sure - but technically inferior to the more sophisticated Amiga, and too weird for business. The Mac looked like it might sink Apple, but the Postscript language, Apple’s LaserWriter printer and PageMaker created desktop publishing, and gave Apple an unshakeable hold on a corner of the publishing industry.
Then there was the IBM PC. Crude, dysfunctional, uncool: the PC managed to combine the worst of all worlds. As a business machine it was far less capable than a Sun Workstation. And who the fuck wanted a PC in their home? As a multimedia machine it was non-starter; there were no sound cards, it couldn’t do anything except beep.
But the PC had one or two things going for it. Offices and departments could buy their own PC or clone, and start using a database or spreadsheet much more quickly, easily and cheaply. The alternative, of course, was to lease time from the company mini or mainframe, and go through the bureaucratic process of requesting that a software application be written or amended. As far as PCs went, there was choice of hardware, with multiple vendors selling "compatibles", or clones, and thriving dealer channels and training and support companies. The PC meant Novell for networks; SCO’s Unix (or one of dozens of now-forgotten species) for vertical back-office business applications; and for everything else, the biggest companies of the day - Lotus Corporation and Ashton Tate. The ubiquitous PC business applications – dBase, Lotus 1-2-3 and WordStar and WordPerfect - had their own "ecosystems". Trained users in the "ecosystems" provided a pool of skilled labour, macros and add-ins, and even serious, compatible products that produced charts or reports.
You may notice a couple of things missing. The idea of an "API" was unknown. The idea of a platform "ecosystem" - a multi-sided market - was unknown, because the "platforms" in the PC world back then were the applications themselves. DOS provided no API, merely interrupt vectors, invitations to cause trouble. On DOS, there was nothing out of the box to help you if you were an application developer. So if you had a new DOS software application, you needed to support all the peripherals yourself. If your customer had an HP LaserJet, or a swanky Hercules graphics card, you’d need to write the drivers; each application provided its own set. by 1989, WordPerfect had supplanted WordStar as the most popular PC word processor, partly because of its excellent driver support.
The "operating system" DOS was a misnomer: it was a boot loader. DOS had a crude 8+3 file system. There was no API to speak of - apps wrote anywhere and everywhere they could. And it was single-tasking, with task-switching possible only through crude third-party hacks.
So by the mid-1980s, IBM had two challenges. One was to fend off Unix and the Open Systems bandwagon and reclaim the PC for business and wind it back into the mothership. The second was to bring the PC into the modern era, which meant giving it multitasking, networking support, and the graphical user interface that almost every other system enjoyed. It did so in three ways – with a new software platform, a new hardware architecture, and a new TLA (Three Letter Acronym). With the hardware, the PS/2 range, IBM made the system bus proprietary in the hopes of licensing it to clones and add-in card vendors. Nobody wanted to know, however. Rather than making the rest of the world "incompatible" with IBM and therefore unattractive to punters, PS/2 merely made Big Blue’s systems incompatible with the rest of the world. Only IBM shops bought PS/2s, and IBM eventually relented.
The TLA was a grand all-encompassing bullshit strategy called Systems Application Architecture, and it was IBM’s very IBM-ish response to Open Systems. SAA promised huge sets of standards unifying IBM’s developer interfaces, user interfaces and communications protocols. For Big Blue, a rationalisation strategy was long overdue. For example, IBM systems didn’t use the industry standard character encoding system, ASCII – they used their own, called EBCDIC – and there were (at least) six versions of EBCDIC. SAA didn’t make IBM an "open system" at all.
Next page: The new PC operating system
COMMENTS
Windows 3.0
The first time I saw Windows 3.0 was during my first week in university. Being a long-time Amiga user, I laughed my ass off at what I saw was a ham-fisted attempt to recreate that which had already existed (and worked better) for almost a decade. Even the name, "Windows" was a riot...talk about stating the obvious while missing the point, as there was more to most GUI operating systems of the day than just "windows." The nerdy business student who was showing me his new toy was exactly the kind of person Microsoft was counting on...a "person of faith" who had longsuffered through DOS and was willing to ignore the very, very frequent UAEs of Microsoft's pretend "operating system."
But anyway, the joke was on me as the crash-ridden piece of junk actually took over the world, mostly propelled by the nerdy business types. Or was it...after C= bit the dust dragging Amiga along with it, I discovered a little upstart called Linux in 1993 and never looked back. SLS users represent!
Speaking of journalists, during the dark days of Microsoft's rise to power i used to enjoy reading Will Zachmann, one of the few voices who dared criticize Microsoft. Wonder what ever happened to him, he was a voice in the wilderness for a time. Were it not for Will we wouldn't know about Steve "Barkto" Ballmer and his astroturfing brigade on C$.
Re: Absolute rip off, but not a toy
You're certain of something but they aren't facts.
Atari and Commodore produced models with everything up to the 68040. They were after different market segments. Because Apple was targeting a much higher price point and margins it could afford to be first out the gate with the latest from Motorola. But if it was about something you could afford and use Atari And commodore had much to offer.
At the time the SE/30 was introduced, Amiga 2000 models with 68020s and hard drives were readily available. The Mac was the better choice if you had something like desktop publishing in mind. But I was working at game developer Cinemaware then and we had a very early Mac II unit. We naturally wanted info on details that would aid in game development for this fast and colorful machine. When I called Apple and explained what we wanted to do I was essentially told "Steve doesn't like games on his computers." My feeling was, "Screw you, too, Steve."
I've avoided Apple products ever since and have never felt I was missing much from outside the RDF.
Re: Microsoft with knife in hand
@midcapwarrior - how many windows flavours are there now? Are you supposing that windows 8 Metro/Modern UI *isn't* going to confuse the market?
Linux flavours are good. Some are for routers, DVD players, some for TVs and similar systems, some for phones, tablets, some are for servers, some are for desktops and some excel at supercompting. Cern even has a flavour of Linux for the number crunching of petabytes of LHC data.
It is these flavours that have allowed Linux to flank Microsoft. And know that another flavour of Linux is Android (Linux kernel).
IT infrastructure monitoring strategies
Agentless Backup is Not a Myth
Top 10 SIEM implementer’s checklist
Steps to Take Before Choosing a Business Continuity Partner
Enabling efficient data center monitoring
