REDMOND, WASHINGTON – This author was recently searching on the Internet looking for an old acquaintance—he called OS/2—with which he had lost touch. While searching numerous online newspapers, this author stumbled across an obituary for his friend that confirmed his demise. The obituary was from a newspaper in the Redmond, Washington area that announced the death of OS/2, someone with whom this author was very familiar and had worked with many years ago. This author knew that he had not seen or heard from his old acquaintance in some time but never realized why until he went searching for him and discovered that the OS had passed away.

The obituary that was found was short but very revealing. It described where and when his acquaintance had lived, what the acquaintance had accomplished in his short life span that others like him had not achieved, and it reported what the cause of death was to have been. The obituary, dated 31 December 2006, read like the following:

A once prominent figure in the OS world, OS/2, was found dead this morning in his Redmond, Washington home at the young age of 17. Born to the parents of Microsoft and IBM in April, 1987, OS/2 was the brainchild of both companies, which resulted from a Joint Development Agreement between the two parties in 1985. Just prior to his birth, Microsoft and IBM had wanted to name their offspring, CP/DOS, but after his birth, following two years of labor, they settled on the name OS/2, which stood for Operating System/2 because it sprang from the 2nd generation line of Personal System (PS/2) computers that IBM had sired earlier. OS/2 was reared as a text-mode OS but quickly featured a rich API for controlling the video display and handling mouse and keyboard events so that programmers who were writing protected-mode programs no longer had to call the BIOS or access the hardware directly. 

Other achievements of OS/2, during his short life, included a set of development tools consisting of video and keyboard APIs as linkable libraries that allowed family mode programs to run under MS-DOS, something unparalleled at the time. In addition, a task switcher called Program Selector was developed in OS/2 that allowed for text-mode multitasking of text sessions that could run multiple programs. OS/2 promised a GUI for its text-mode OS and, in October, 1988, OS/2 came through with a graphical interface that was similar to its predecessor Windows 2.1. Later in life, OS/2 introduced distributed database support for IBM databases and SNA communications support for IBM mainframe networks.

 Also, toward the end of his life, OS/2 developed installable filesystems, introducing the HPFS filesystem, which allowed long filenames for files in the OS. During his warp years starting in 1994, OS/2 offered greater hardware support, the ability to run multimedia programs, Internet-compatible networking, and a basic office application suite called IBM Works (OS/2, 2010; OS/2 Warp – OS/2 Withdrawal from Marketing and Change in Support, 2010).

The cause of death of OS/2 seems to have been associated with its lack of mass market appeal and dropping market share in the technology market with the sales of OS/2 dropping off sharply in December, 2005. It appears that OS/2 never fully recovered and finally succumbed to its financial-illness a year later in December, 2006. OS/2 is survived by its desktop relatives: Windows 95, 98, NT, 2000, XP, Vista, and 7” (OS/2, 2010).

Did OS/2 deserve to die the way it did? This author would support the notion that during its warp years, OS/2 was considered an OS that had promise to be the OS of the future. However, due to the splitting up of IBM and Microsoft, in 1990, OS/2 lost much needed support from IBM and, as a result, Microsoft’s Windows 3.0 became extremely more popular among users primarily because it came bundled in most new PCs sold by Microsoft while OS/2 remained an expensive standalone OS. Furthermore, OS/2 did not have the driver support of Windows 3.0 and this oversight led to its ultimate demise. As a result, OS/2 may not have met with the death that it deserved, but it certainly lost its battle with the support of its user-base and the market share.

References:

OS/2. (2010). Retrieved January 29, 2010, from Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS/2

OS/2 Warp – OS/2 Withdrawal from Marketing and Change in Support. (2010). Retrieved January 29, 2010, from IBM – OS/2 Warp: http://www-01.ibm.com/software/os/warp-withdrawal/