IBM ends sales of OS/2, December 16, 2005

It’s hard to be an underdog operating system when you’re produced by a Fortune 10 company. But somehow, OS/2, IBM’s heir apparent to MS-DOS and PC DOS, managed to be exactly that. It’s the operating system everyone who was around in the 90s heard of, but few understood. And it has a reputation for being something nobody used. So it surprises people sometimes that IBM ended sales of OS/2 in December 2005. Most people assume it was much earlier.

What OS/2 Warp had to offer

I bought a Compaq 486 in the summer of 1994, using the overtime money I got opening one of those oversized Best Buy stores the size of a 1970s shopping mall. And let’s just say I had a bad case of buyer’s remorse.

Windows 3.1 was underwhelming to say the least. Arguably its graphic design was a bit more polished and professional looking than an Amiga, and there was a lot more software. But when I tried to use Windows 3.1 like an Amiga, it was a no-go. The multitasking was sluggish and it crashed all the time.

In November 1994, I bought a copy of OS/2 Warp, and finally got over my PC buyer’s remorse. It felt like what 1990s computing was supposed to be.

I used it as my primary OS for almost four years. Yes, even after Windows 95 was released. It wasn’t really until Windows XP that I stopped missing OS/2. Windows XP Service Pack 2 at that.

Where OS/2 came from

Microsoft and IBM developed OS/2 jointly in the late 1980s to give the IBM PS/2 series something better than DOS. Those early versions were late and didn’t work all that well. It had a faster, more efficient and more reliable file system and multitasking, but little else going for it.

The plan was for IBM to develop OS/2 2.0 and Microsoft to work on version 3.0. Then Microsoft decided to jump ship and go on its own. The OS/2 3.0 codebase became the basis for Windows NT. IBM went ahead with OS/2 2.0 and 2.1. BBS operators loved it, because it allowed them to run multi-line boards, do maintenance without kicking people off, and even run a BBS in the background while they did other things on their personal PC, so they didn’t need to keep a second beater PC around to run their BBS anymore.

The name OS/2 suggested it only ran on a PS/2, and that was a bit of a problem. It ran really well on IBM PS/2s, but it ran fine on most clones too. The only clones I ever struggled to run OS/2 on were Gateway 2000 PCs. It ran fine on everything else I tried to run it on.

One last attempt at commercial success

When IBM released a new, performance-enhanced version of OS/2 in 1994 with a new OS/2 desktop called the Workplace Shell, they called it OS/2 Warp, hoping the name would be a bit more marketing friendly. It was more successful than earlier versions of OS/2, and it gained a cult following. But it was a small cult following. Maybe its popularity approached that of the Amiga.

I think the problem was that most people learned not to push their PCs as hard as I pushed my Amiga. If your idea of multitasking was pulling up the calculator app without closing Word, Windows 3.1 was fine. If you expected to have a word processor and spreadsheet open at the same time and drag data from one over to the other for hours on end without bluescreens, Windows 3.1 wasn’t going to do it. Amigas could do that. OS/2 could as well. But when I showed people that capability in the store when I was working at Best Buy, I usually got weird looks.

OS/2’s secret weapon

OS/2 was a full 32-bit operating system with memory protection and multitasking. It ran DOS and Windows in a separate virtual machine, which protected it from the rest of the system. Well, mostly. Occasionally the Windows subsystem could crash the whole machine, but it was pretty rare. I could run the system for weeks or months on end without any crashes or reboots. If I stuck with native OS/2 apps, I could run indefinitely.

I still don’t know exactly why, but a lot of the DOS games I liked ran faster in OS/2 than they did in real MS-DOS on the same hardware. Some of it was probably due to the better file system and disk caching, but the graphics performance was faster and smoother too. I couldn’t run the DOS game in a window like Windows 95 often allowed, but I could run the games fullscreen and switch back to the desktop to check on something if I wanted.

Why OS/2 Warp failed

OS/2 Warp ran 16-bit Windows applications rather well, but 32-bit Windows 95 applications weren’t compatible and IBM didn’t have a good way to make them compatible. Without comparable native OS/2 32-bit applications, OS/2 Warp was going to be a dead end if Windows 95 caught on. Needless to say, Windows 95 caught on.

IBM didn’t do as much to encourage OS/2 development as Microsoft did Windows development. Even though IBM owned Lotus, even the OS/2 version of Lotus Smartsuite was late to market and seemed a bit underwhelming. Of course Microsoft never ported its 32-bit office suite to OS/2, and neither did Wordperfect.

IBM’s approach to running DOS and Windows applications probably seemed a little clunky. Where Microsoft implemented a subsystem it called Windows on Windows, IBM’s virtual machine was higher overhead. You noticed that it took longer to load Word on OS/2 than it took on any version of Windows. Once it was loaded, it was amazing, but nobody likes slow load times.

The long road to IBM ending sales of OS/2

OS/2 died a long, slow death after Windows 95 came out. IBM released a new version, Warp 4.0, after Windows 95 and Windows NT 4.0 came out. It added speech recognition, which was ahead of its time, but it was really too little, too late. If you wanted to multitask and play games, you ran Windows 95. If you wanted OS/2-like stability, you ran Windows NT 4.0.

The main holdout was the banking industry. My first real job with benefits was as an OS/2 administrator, and after they scrapped OS/2 at my first job, an acquaintance who worked at a local bank was very interested in hiring me. I wonder sometimes what might have happened if I’d taken that job, but it was obvious even then that Windows NT was the future. Still, OS/2 powered automated teller machines well into the 21st century, because it was reliable and stable, and by late 1990s standards, low overhead. ATMs are a large reason IBM continued selling OS/2 until December 16, 2005.

Arguably, OS/2 isn’t completely dead. Demand for an OS/2-compatible operating system that could run on modern hardware led to IBM licensing the technology after it ended sales of OS/2. Ecomstation and ArcaOS are two examples of operating systems based on OS/2 that run on post-2005 hardware and come with updated software packages as well. I frequently get asked why IBM hasn’t open-sourced OS/2. The continued existence of commercial products based on it would be why.

Dave Farquhar

David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.