RE: 19 March 1985: Happy Death Day, IBM PCJr.

[Kevin McAleavey <kevinmca () nsclean com>]

 FUNNY you should mention that!  :)

 I was around for the "red box" and the "blue box" and talked with one of the early developers of OS/2 and that shotgun 
wedding in Redmond. Seems Microsoft spent their hard work on the GUI while IBM's folks handled the drivers and "under 
the hood" stuff. Most importantly, the kernel itself and memory management. That "cooperative multitasking" and 
"isolated virtual addresses" stuff. Microsoft had been playing for years with "hardware abstraction" and brought THAT 
layer to the OS/2 project.

 Sad thing though, the Beemers and the Beanies just didn't get along and Microsoft insisted on keeping the two "partner 
crews" in the dark as to what each other was doing. When the marriage went on the rocks, each party pretty much had 
developed their own stuff and had kept most of it from each other. So IBM walked with pretty much the GUI they walked 
in with for OS/2 but also had the stable kernel and numerous other pieces they'd largely worked on.

 Microsoft had the HAL and the GUI but very little as far as the kernel stuff went. IBM introduced OS/2 which had the 
problem of requiring that someone write a specific driver for any new device (like Linux) which made OS/2 appear 
"finicky and colicky" if it encountered any hardware it didn't know. THAT was probably what hurt OS/2 more than 
anything else. At the time, bright and shiny GUI's didn't matter - at least to corporates.

 Microsoft had the advantage of their virtual device driver code (HAL) and a pretty GUI (by ancient standards) from 
Windows 3.1 ... but that was ALL they had. Microsoft's pieces of the OS/2 project (plus the IBM 32 bit code structures) 
became .... (drum roll, please!) ... Windows NT!  

 They're still working on it.      :)

 But HAD OS/2's people been able to come up with a workable HAL on their own or had parted ways with Microsoft in such 
a way that they had that HAL code - with everything else about OS/2, they could have hired some of those kids who went 
to work for Steve Jobs instead, had a functional "plug and play" kernel, the world could have been VERY different now. 
OS/2 was rock stable ... so long as it liked your machine. Heh.

At 10:01 PM 3/18/06, Unca Larry wrote:
> IIRC, the announcement of the PS/2 and MicroChannel was April 2 or
> thereabouts in 1987, so we're coming up on that ignominious anniversary as
> well, which also was the official birth of the OS/2 relationship with
> Microsoft. Talk about "did not bode well for IBM"
>
> Larry Seltzer
> eWEEK.com Security Center Editor
> http://security.eweek.com/
> http://blog.ziffdavis.com/seltzer
> Contributing Editor, PC Magazine
> larryseltzer () ziffdavis com 
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: funsec-bounces () linuxbox org [mailto:funsec-bounces () linuxbox org] On
> Behalf Of Fergie
> Sent: Saturday, March 18, 2006 9:38 PM
> To: funsec () linuxbox org
> Subject: [funsec] 19 March 1985: Happy Death Day, IBM PCJr.
>
> Via The History Channel Online and Wikipedia.
>
> [snip]
>
> On this day in 1985, IBM pulled the plug on its floundering home computer,
> the PCjr. First introduced in November of 1983, the PCjr had been created to
> fuel IBM's efforts to rule the consumer computer market. In its initial
> press packet for the PCjr, IBM touted the computer as a "compact, low-cost"
> machine for "personal productivity applications, learning and
> entertainment."
>
> However, the hype and putatively puny price couldn't induce people to buy
> the machine: after sixteen months on the market, consumers had snapped up
> but 240,000 units. The failure of the PCjr did not bode well for IBM: during
> the ensuing years, the company struggled to make the transition from its
> traditional realm of business computing to the burgeoning home user market.
>
> [snip]
>
> http://fergdawg.blogspot.com/2006/03/19-march-1985-happy-death-day-ibm-pc.ht
> ml
>
> - ferg
>
>
> --
> "Fergie", a.k.a. Paul Ferguson
> Engineering Architecture for the Internet  fergdawg () netzero net or
> fergdawg () sbcglobal net  ferg's tech blog: http://fergdawg.blogspot.com/
>
>
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