Preview version of Microsoft OS/2 was sold for $650 on eBay

News
By Christopher Harper
published

eBay user the.collectionist donated 20% of the proceeds to The Internet Archive.

Photo from the.collectionist's listing of a pre-release OS/2 SDK.
(Image credit: the.collectionist on eBay)

On February 20th, The Register received word from reader Brian Ledbetter that he had purchased a prerelease copy of the IBM / Microsoft OS/2 Software Development Kit from eBay. Specifically, it was "Version 2.0 Prerelease 2 (for Prerelease 1 Users)", and an eBay user made the original listing called the.collectionist, who has previously sold other rare software finds.

According to the original eBay listing and its final pricing of $650 (after two bids), the.collectionist will donate 20% of the proceeds from the sale to The Internet Archive. This is a sensible move for someone who seems similarly dedicated to preserving software history based on past sales. Plus, prospective OS/2 researchers who want to try it out can acquire it from The Archive. I'm just saying. 

We'll give you a quick breakdown for those unfamiliar with OS/2 and operating system history in general. OS/2 was a joint operating system project by IBM and Microsoft, which was intended for IBM's own Personal System/2 (PS/2) PCs. If you've ever seen the old circular ports used by keyboards and mice on old PCs, those are also called PS/2 ports— because they're inherited from this.

While OS/2 comes after the original IBM PC DOS and MS-DOS, we know today that the partnership between IBM and Microsoft would not last in that form. Microsoft eventually stopped working with IBM in 1992 when it dropped Windows 3.1, a direct competitor of the OS/2 software IBM paid it to make. 

As you're most likely reading this on a Windows PC or Android smartphone, you can probably see how things panned out— Microsoft has dominated the PC OS market for a long time.

Of course, IBM is still a reasonably significant name in the PC market. Having played such an instrumental part in creating the earliest operating systems and producing hardware like the original "ThinkPad" laptop design before selling its PC division to Lenovo, it's hard to imagine the current landscape without IBM.

If you're reading this before April 15, 2024, and wish to dig into OS/2 computing history, you're also advised to check out the Hobbes OS/2 Archive while it still exists. The Hobbes OS/2 Archive is the longest-lived host of OS/2 software, but the decades have finally caught up to it, and it's set to close in April.

Christopher Harper
21 Comments Comment from the forums
  • OneMoreUser
    Funny how the article in a way illustrates why OS/2 didn't get a foothold and Windows did. People saw the two as competitors, but only OS/2 was an operating system and only on the surface was there a similarity.

    OS/2 was great, ahead of its time in a way and a proper multitasking operating system. In contrast Windows back then was essentially a graphics interface running on top of DOS, it allowed for task switching (and it stayed like that for some years).

    With Windows if a program crashed your computer froze and you had to reboot, in OS/2 you just closed the program that crashed and anything else you had running was unaffected. It is something we taken for granted for a while, but back then it was a miracle. And there was lots of other advantages to OS/2, you could even run a Windows sessions on it, allowing you to kill a crashed Windows without having to reboot the whole system.

    My take on why OS/2 didn't become the standard is that most peoples computers back then wasn't big enough to take advantage of OS/2, unless you were a high end user of sorts putting OS/2 on your machine would essentially drag it down as you did not have the RAM and the CPU power it needed. Some tried regardless, found OS/2 to be slow not realizing the reason and then tried Windows 3.1 which ran better on smaller machines so OS/2 got a bad rep. because people was ignorant.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    OneMoreUser said:
    Windows back then was essentially a graphics interface running on top of DOS
    This point gets overstated. Yes, Windows did run atop of DOS, rather than instead of it. However, that doesn't mean Windows programs were limited to doing only what you could do in DOS. For instance, with Windows 3.x running on a 386, programs could easily use megabytes of memory without having to jump through the same hoops as in DOS.

    What it actually means to "run on top of DOS" is basically that:
    You had to start DOS first, then launch Windows from DOS.
    DOS runtime services remained resident. I think Windows could use these, to some extent, rather than going directly to the hardware. I'm not sure it did, especially if you look at how basic DOS services really were. Likewise, I think Windows programs could theoretically use DOS interrupts to go beneath the OS, but unless you were running a program in a DOS box, that usually wasn't done.
    OneMoreUser said:
    With Windows if a program crashed your computer froze and you had to reboot,
    This isn't true of Windows 3.x, at least. My knowledge of earlier Windows versions is much more limited.

    Windows 3.x indeed had memory protection! The 286 introduced "Protected Mode", which the OS could use to prevent different programs from stepping on each other. If you had actually used Windows 3.x for any amount of time, you probably remember getting "General Protection Fault" error messages, when a program would crash. All you needed to do was restart the program, not restart Windows or reboot the machine!

    OneMoreUser said:
    My take on why OS/2 didn't become the standard is that most peoples computers back then wasn't big enough to take advantage of OS/2,
    Windows became more popular than OS/2 probably because of Microsoft's aggressive marketing and ruthless business practices.

    OS/2 actually died when IBM lost a court case vs. Microsoft about running Windows programs inside OS/2. After that, IBM quickly broke off OS/2 development and discontinued the OS. What's so galling about that is I think it involved people actually having Windows installed on a separate partition and IBM not even being allowed to run Windows programs by loading some Windows system DLLs from that other partition!
    Reply
  • derekullo
    OneMoreUser said:
    Funny how the article in a way illustrates why OS/2 didn't get a foothold and Windows did. People saw the two as competitors, but only OS/2 was an operating system and only on the surface was there a similarity.

    OS/2 was great, ahead of its time in a way and a proper multitasking operating system. In contrast Windows back then was essentially a graphics interface running on top of DOS, it allowed for task switching (and it stayed like that for some years).

    With Windows if a program crashed your computer froze and you had to reboot, in OS/2 you just closed the program that crashed and anything else you had running was unaffected. It is something we taken for granted for a while, but back then it was a miracle. And there was lots of other advantages to OS/2, you could even run a Windows sessions on it, allowing you to kill a crashed Windows without having to reboot the whole system.

    My take on why OS/2 didn't become the standard is that most peoples computers back then wasn't big enough to take advantage of OS/2, unless you were a high end user of sorts putting OS/2 on your machine would essentially drag it down as you did not have the RAM and the CPU power it needed. Some tried regardless, found OS/2 to be slow not realizing the reason and then tried Windows 3.1 which ran better on smaller machines so OS/2 got a bad rep. because people was ignorant.
    Never used OS/2 but if it required a high powered PC to run it at that time and those computers costed an exorbitant amount of money,$4000+, then I wouldn't say people giving OS/2 a bad rap were ignorant, just price conscious.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    derekullo said:
    Never used OS/2 but if it required a high powered PC to run it at that time and those computers costed an exorbitant amount of money,$4000+, then I wouldn't say people giving OS/2 a bad rap were ignorant, just price conscious.
    I don't really know too much about the hardware requirements, TBH. As far as I knew, it would run on a similar machine that Windows supported. Probably a 386 was the baseline. Maybe it wanted more RAM... I think hardware requirements weren't onerous for the early-to-mid 90's, though.

    I knew a guy who switched from Linux to OS/2, actually. He was much more fanatical about OS/2 than he ever was about Linux. I don't recall him having a particularly high-end PC, but it was a long time ago.

    At my first job, I joined shortly after they switched from OS/2 Warp to Windows NT. I forget exactly why they switched, but it might've had something to do with better aligning ourselves with what customers used. At the time, I recall some of the developers being sad about the switch, saying they preferred to develop under OS/2. A lot of them would've been coming from a background of developing under various UNIX flavors, FWIW.
    Reply
  • COLGeek
    I ran OS/2 for a couple years, back in the day. Application support was bad and expensive. Super solid OS.
    Reply
  • NedSmelly
    I ran OS/2 Warp for a year or two. Driver support was an issue for the Trident video card and my printer. Took some searching on a BBS for something that worked - so it wasn’t a straightforward out-of-box experience. Also prevented lots of Real Mode DOS games from working. So whilst it was very stable, it had to be used within fairly strict boundaries. IMO it wasn’t ready for mainstream consumer sales.

    Edit: I actually think IBM incorporating Windows compatibility was a strategic error. MS Word and Excel still hadn’t gained market dominance, and they could have pushed Lotus much harder in the SMB space through bundling discounts etc. It was pre-Win95 and had so much going for it - long fie names, memory stability, and Big Blue corporate support.
    Reply
  • OneMoreUser
    bit_user said:
    <SNIP>

    Windows 3.x indeed had memory protection! The 286 introduced "Protected Mode", which the OS could use to prevent different programs from stepping on each other. If you had actually used Windows 3.x for any amount of time, you probably remember getting "General Protection Fault" error messages, when a program would crash. All you needed to do was restart the program, not restart Windows or reboot the machine!

    <SNIP>
    Clearly we remember differently, but it is a long time ago so there is that.

    As for the protected mode and all that it did not change the multitasking problem, the thing is that with Windows back then a program had to essentially pass the torch voluntarily and if a program crashed it could freeze the whole system. With OS/2 the OS was in control of the torch.
    Look up up cooperative and preemptive multitasking to learn more, the later came with Windows 95 while OS/2 was preemptive from 2.0 (or maybe earlier).
    Reply
  • Darkoverlordofdata
    We used to use os/2 in IT because it ran Xwindows, so you could connect to unix systems easier than using citrix on windows. That is actually a picture of the SDK not the OS. It was used to create programs on windows that would then run on os/2, Never went anyware after MS and IBM had a fallout over licensing. Same old story,
    Reply
  • bit_user
    OneMoreUser said:
    As for the protected mode and all that it did not change the multitasking problem, the thing is that with Windows back then a program had to essentially pass the torch voluntarily and if a program crashed it could freeze the whole system. With OS/2 the OS was in control of the torch.
    Look up up cooperative and preemptive multitasking to learn more, the later came with Windows 95 while OS/2 was preemptive from 2.0 (or maybe earlier).
    I know the legacy Windows products didn't have preemptive multitasking. They used an event loop model. I've written enough legacy Windows programs to know that much.

    One of the main selling points of Windows NT was that it had preemptive multitasking. In fact, this was so heavily emphasized that I had initially wondered if "NT" was a misprint and perhaps the actual name was Windows MT.
    Reply
  • Dr3ams
    From 1999 to 2001 I worked as a network administrator in the Lufthansa Campus Project. In that project we staged and installed 6,000 workstations and 800 servers in 400 cities in 100 countries. The three operating systems installed on the workstations were OS/2, Windows NT and later Windows 2000. The servers were staged and delivered with Novell Netware. The choice of operating systems was made locally by Lufthansa admins. Along with some workstations with Windows, all of the OS/2 installs were in the United States and Britain. No other Lufthansa locations in other countries requested OS/2.
    Reply