The OS/2 Operating System Didn’t Die… It Went Underground | Hackaday

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One problem with building things using state-of-the-art techniques is that sometimes those that look like they will be "the next big thing" turn out to be dead ends. Next thing you know, that hot new part or piece of software is hard to get or unmaintained. This is especially true if you are building something with a long life span. A case in point is the New York City subway system. Back in the 1990s the transit authority decided to adopt IBM’s new OS/2 operating system. Why not? It was robust and we used to always say "no one ever got fired for buying IBM."

There was one problem. OS/2 was completely eclipsed by other operating systems, notably Windows and — mostly — has sunk from the public view. [Andrew Egan’s] post covers just how the conversion to a card-based system pushed OS/2 underground all over the Big Apple, and it is an interesting read.

The choice of OS/2 might seem odd today. However, you have to remember the operating system landscape back then. Unix wasn’t very commercial, for the most part, and the commercial versions like Xenix and SCO were often encumbered with odd and changing licensing arrangements. MSDOS was hardly suitable for any sort of reliable system, with a patchwork of hacks to get more memory, and multitasking including early versions of Windows which were little more than shells over MSDOS.

We might have suggested QNX, as both operating systems were robust and used a microkernel architecture which had many advantages, especially when fighting hardware limitations.

It seems OS/2 isn’t just the subway system, either. Some old ATM machines still use it and there are probably some other hold outs. In 2006, IBM discontinued the operating system and sold off OS/2 support to Serenity Systems and later acquired by Arca Noae.

While OS/2 doesn’t get the same retrocomputer love as some other operating systems, it was actually ahead of its time. Its failure to take hold wasn’t so much about the technology as it was about business decisions and the market conditions of the day.

If you want a look at modern OS/2 emulation, that does exist. If you think OS/2 is the oldest tech running the subway system, you’d be wrong about that.

72 thoughts on “The OS/2 Operating System Didn’t Die… It Went Underground”

I honestly tried to use OS/2 Warp 3.0 in 1996 for about a month, but then surrendered and switched to Windows-95 :)

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Still have the big red box it came in.* OS/2 software repository and big book too.

*Hear OS/2 is harder to virtualize than other OS.

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Same here. My Aunt worked for IBM and snagged me an OS/2 2.5 or 2.something box. I bought Warp 3 and tried Warp 4, but as with all of them, a lack of applications unfortunately rendered them little more than curiosities. I’ve always been an OS geek… I’d install darn near anything to try out. I’m still bummed that BeOS never succeeded. I actually used that half way primarily for some time. I occasionally check in on Haiku just to see where it stands. Ahhh well, doesn’t look like I’ll be escaping Windows any time soon.

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I was working at IBM when OS/2 first came out and we were using it at our manufacturing location. The biggest problem for OS/2 was IBM itself. Poor support from the execs and poor marketing. Numerous great products at IBM were badly marketed

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Agree. I was working at a Ministery of Education and they bought some 200 IBM desktops with windows preloaded and OS/2 Warp in a CD lost among the packing material.

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Looks like yellowTAB / ZETA went nowhere. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnussoft_ZETA Quite a shame since BeOS had so much potential. It was fast but didn’t have much for software. Had Apple chosen it instead of buying NeXT…

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Try giving HaikuOS a glance.

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I ran my BBS with OS/2 (two lines). Worked so much better there than under Windows 95. At that time Windows didn’t multitask well at all. If one app hung up your machine pretty much did too. Not so with OS/2.

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If I looked around my old shop in the back room there is a floppy disk container with the complete OS2 Warp set of 3. 5 inch floppies. I tried it as well on some of my old machines years ago, having been exposed to it and Unix in college in 95, I still use a Linux version in fact I am on an old MacBook Pro running Mint Linux because the mac os was so far obsolete that it ran like a 386 with windows 95 on it!

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Not anymore. All of the MVMs (Metrocard Vending machines) that I’ve seen the techs argue with are running a very old release of embedded Windows. I still haven’t figured out what sort of embedded OS the card processors and issuers are using however.

ATMs? There is a good chance the ones I don’t use, I try to use Wells Fargo machines all the time, are...