OS/2

~ the goodbye ~

i missed os/2. i was twelve in 1996 on a 33.6k modem at home in ankara, running whatever windows version had come on the pc. nobody in the turkish home-pc segment was on os/2. the people who saw it daily were inside corporate it departments at places like banks and atm networks. for normal users it was a thing you read about in pc magazine and never installed.

what os/2 was supposed to be: the next thing after dos. ibm and microsoft signed a joint development agreement in 1985 to build the proper modern os for the ibm pc, multitasking with protected memory and a real graphical shell. ibm wrote most of the kernel while microsoft wrote most of the userland. version 1.0 shipped in december 1987 and version 1.3 followed in 1991. somewhere between those two releases the partnership rotted. microsoft had been quietly building windows on the side, and it shipped windows 3.0 in 1990 to enormous sales. ibm stayed on os/2 alone after that.

ibm spent the rest of the decade trying to win back the desktop. warp 3 in october 1994 was the version most pc nerds actually saw, and warp 4 in september 1996 even added speech recognition before that was normal at all. neither sold to home users at any kind of scale. by the time warp 4.52 shipped in december 2001 the only people still buying os/2 were corporate clients who had already committed their entire back-office stack to it years earlier.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it landed ~

os/2 was where the pc industry's two biggest companies wanted to go in 1987. ibm had the hardware. microsoft had the dev tooling. between them they had something like 90 percent of the desktop market. the joint agreement said dos was the past and os/2 was the future, and ibm's enterprise sales force was selling it that way to its own customers for years. for a long stretch in the early 90s every business pc procurement officer was being told that os/2 was the safe path forward.

the version that actually got real penetration was warp 3 in 1994. it ran dos and windows 3.x applications alongside native os/2 ones, had a usable preemptive multitasking kernel, and shipped on a cd with the bonus pak that included a browser and modem software. for a few months it genuinely outsold windows in some corporate channels. ibm at its peak claimed eleven million copies shipped, which was an enterprise-license-count number that meant something different from windows install base, but it was not a small product.

~ how it actually ended ~

windows 95 landed in august 1995 with the kind of consumer marketing budget ibm had never put behind os/2. the start menu and plug-and-play on every box, with the rolling stones licensed for the launch ad. within twelve months every home pc shipped with windows 95 preinstalled and every developer pivoted to writing for it. ibm's own pc division kept selling windows machines because that was what customers were asking for. inside ibm the os/2 team watched their own parent company stop bundling them. warp 4 in 1996 was the last serious push and it landed into a market that had already moved.

after that ibm wound it down slowly. warp 4.5 server in 1999 and warp 4.52 in december 2001 were targeted at the corporate customers who had not yet migrated, mostly banks running atm networks and brokerage back-ends. retail sales formally ended on december 23 2005, and ibm's own support ended one year later on december 31 2006. by then the only people still running production os/2 workloads were the ones who literally could not afford to migrate, and they paid third-party vendors to keep the lights on.

~ what came after ~

os/2 lives on in two ways. one is the third-party fork. serenity systems shipped ecomstation from 2001 to about 2011 under license from ibm, and arca noae picked up the same license in 2017 with arcaos, which is still being updated. the install base is in the low thousands and is mostly hobbyists plus a few legacy industrial sites. the second way is in atms. for years after the consumer product was dead a substantial fraction of the world's automated teller machines still ran os/2 underneath, because the banks that wrote the atm software in 1995 did not rewrite it just because microsoft had moved on. you could be standing in front of an atm in 2010 pulling cash from an os/2 box.

the deeper inheritance is the rhetorical one. os/2 is the canonical case of the technically-better operating system that lost on distribution. every later os argument about why the more elegant kernel did not win goes back to this one. ibm controlled the hardware and still could not push it past microsoft once microsoft had the developers. the platform's actual technical pedigree, from preemptive multitasking to the workplace shell, ended up looking like footnotes on the path windows took anyway.

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