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1/ IBM’s OS/2 vs Microsoft's Windows was an important period in the history of PCs and computing. People who were not around then too often have a false view of what happened (e.g. MSFT head fake) and even people who were there can have different recollections (Rashomon effects).
2/ Understanding OS/2 requires understanding the original MSFT-IBM contracts for DOS (there were several over the years). In the summer of 1980 IBM approached Microsoft about creating an operating system for a PC. Microsoft had 80 employees and would have sales of $8M that year.
3/ Bill Gates: "IBM wanted to bring its PC to market in less than a year. In order to meet this schedule it had to abandon doing all the hardware and software itself. This created essentially open architecture, easy to copy." IBM paid MSFT a one-time fee of $80,000 for MS-DOS.
4/ BG: "By making the bus, software and everything licensable by other people, IBM [allowed] the whole industry could rally around 16-bit computing.” IBM did not have an exclusive license or control of future MSFT operating system enhancements.
5. Bill Gates: “Microsoft’s goal was not to make money directly from IBM, but to profit from licensing MS-DOS to computer companies that wanted to offer machines more or less compatible with the IBM PC.” Gates had seen this cloning happen before with the Altair/Altair Basic.
6/ Bill Gates: “Some argue IBM should have kept the PC architecture proprietary… [They] are missing the point. IBM became the central force in the PC industry precisely because [of] its open architecture.” [quote from Bill's book "The Road Ahead"]
7/ What IBM didn’t understand is how powerful independent clone makers would become once the positive feedback loops were created based on the open PC standard. IBM’s reaction to its failure to have control over the PC was the root cause of its decision to create OS/2.
8/ When the OS/2 Joint Development Agreement” was signed MSFT believed it was wise to agree to write the software for IBM under contract because of IBMs market power at that time. BG: “At the time, we were going to just port Windows on top of OS/2.” Everything was in the open.
9/ Sinofsky: “OS/2 was a newly architected OS designed to be more capable than MS-DOS while also enabling a different level of control and importantly a relationship to the rest of the IBM product line (e.g., Common User Access).”
10/ Ballmer: “[OS/2] was what we used to call ‘Riding the Bear.' You had to stay on the bear’s back. The bear would twist and turn and try to throw you off, but we were going to stay on the bear, you just had to be with the bear, otherwise you would be under the bear.”
11/ Bill Gates: "OS/2 is part of 'Systems Applications Architecture,' where supposedly everything on the mainframe, all of that complexity, you just made it identical on the PC. The same graphics model [for everything], the Presentation Manager. It just didn't catch on.”
12/ Bill Gates: “OS/2 was a schizophrenic product. We kept saying, ‘Let's add features. ... Let's do the 386 version.’ But IBM made some commitment to some 286 customer. A compromised piece of technology was the result.”
13/ Sinofsky: “Really important to understand the IBM commitment to 286. Completely compatible with how IBM thought of a hardware investment as long term. By 1990 Microsoft development was “all in” on the 386 for Windows (not 32 bit yet but 386)." Windows 3.1 required 386.
14/ Sinofsky: “By OS/2 3.0 it would support a protect mode kernel, be 32 bit native, and have the ability to have multiple 'personalities' including an OS/2 personality and a Windows personality (and PM and DOS) which was consistent with also supporting MIPS and later AMD64.”
15/ Mike Maples Sr: “Microsoft was there with both Windows and OS/2 applications. IBM, WordPerfect, Lotus were saying − we're only going to do OS/2 applications. All of the upstarts were doing Windows, which required less resources and customers were embracing it.”
16/ Higgins: “PS/2-OS/2 first shipped sans Presentation Manager, which was late. This took some of the sex appeal out of the launch. Mircorosft was worried we were behind on OS/2 apps. Lotus came out with 123/G before MSFT Excel for OS/2, but had very few features that mattered.”
17/ Bill Gates: “We started a parallel effort to do, what at the time was called OS/2 3.0, starting from scratch, even though we'd give it that same name. That later became, as IBM and Microsoft went their own way, the product that shipped in 1993 as Microsoft Windows NT.”
18/ Bill Gates: “IBM is proposing to take over the definition of PC desktop operating systems. They have a plan to design the operating system so that their hardware Micro Channel architecture and applications are tied in.” PC Week, June 24, 1991
19/ Bill Gates: “OS/2 is tied to IBM using software to regain hardware market share….Only one operating system can get the momentum. It’s really too late for another operating system to come along even if it could live up to all the claims that have been made.” April, 1992
20/ Bill Gates: "We even proposed to IBM that they buy part of Microsoft– I think it was 30%– and they turned us down. At every stage of our relationship, they had project groups doing work to wipe us out. We stayed ahead, but it wasn’t simple.” Computerworld, May 24, 1993
21/ This Tweetstorm about OS/2 vs Windows pairs with another Tweetsorm I recently wrote on the history of Excel vs Lotus: threadreaderapp.com/thread/1079101… The Microsoft apps teams had their own battles going on.
