alt Hacker NewsInside OS/2 (1987)
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Preemptive multithreading is better than cooperative multithreading (which windows 3 used) but then it's de-fanged by allowing the threads and process to adjust their own priority and set arbitrary lower bounds on how much time gets allotted to a thread per thunk.
Then there's this:
> All of the OS/2 API routines use the Pascal extended keyword for their calling convention so that arguments are pushed on the stack in the opposite order of C. The Pascal keyword does not allow a system routine to receive a variable number of arguments, but the code generated using the Pascal convention is smaller and faster than the standard C convention.
> Also, the stack is-restored by the called procedure rather than the caller.
This article is probably the first time I 'get' why OS/2 was seen as the future and Windows 3 as a stop-gap, even without the GUI. The OS/2 GUI never really blew me away and every early non-GUI versions of OS/2 are mentioned it always seemed a bit dismissive.
But seeing it laid out as just the multi-tasking kernel that it is it seems more obvious now as a major foundational upgrade of MS-DOS.
Great read!
'SteveB went on the road to see the top weeklies, industry analysts and business press this week to give our systems strategy. The meetings included demos of Windows 3.1 (pen and multimedia included), Windows NT, OS/2 2.0 including a performance comparison to Windows and a “bad app” that corrupted other applications and crashed the system. It was a very valuable trip and needs to be repeated by other MS executives throughout the next month so we hit all the publications and analysts.'
http://iowa.gotthefacts.org/011107/PX_0860.pdf
'The demos of OS/2 were excellent. Crashing the system had the intended effect – to FUD OS/2 2.0. People paid attention to this demo and were often surprised to our favor. Steve positioned it as -- OS/2 is not "bad" but that from a performance and "robustness" standpoint, it is NOT better than Windows'.
After all these years COM is still now as cool as SOM used to be.
With meta-classes, implementation inheritance across multiple languages, and much better tooling in the OS tier 1 languages.
OS/2 powered NYC Subway MetroCard vending machine for decades
> OS/2, Microsoft’s latest addition to its operating system line
Wasn't it mostly an IBM product, with Microsoft being involved only in the beginning?
The cool thing about OS/2 2.1 was that you could easily boot off of a single 1.44 Mb floppy disk, and run multitasking operations, without the need for the GUI.
I had (and likely have lost forever) a Boot disk with OS/2, and my Forth/2 system on it that could do directory listings while playing Toccata and Fugue in D minor in a different thread.
I wrote Forth/2 out of pure spite, because somehow I heard that it just wasn't possible to write OS/2 applications in assembler. Thanks to a copy of the OS/2 development kit from Ward Christensen (who worked at IBM), and a few months of spare time, Forth/2 was born, written in pure assembler, compiling to directly threaded native code. Brian Matthewson from Case Western wrote the manual for it. Those were fun times.