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OS/2(eCom Station). Jackson Behling Robert Barclay GROUP ‘I’. A Short History. Microsoft and IBM Buddies?. The name OS/2 is short for “Operating system 2” Microsoft and IBM began to work jointly on OS/2 in 1985
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OS/2(eCom Station) Jackson Behling Robert Barclay GROUP ‘I’
Microsoft and IBM Buddies? • The name OS/2 is short for “Operating system 2” • Microsoft and IBM began to work jointly on OS/2 in 1985 • First iteration was text mode only OS like DOS, but had a very rich API for keyboard and video. • Why was it better than DOS? • Multitasked text sessions ctrl+esc • Protected Mode successor to DOS and MS Windows
The Presentation Manager GUI OS/2 Warp Screenshot • Delivered in 1988 • Almost identical interface to Windows • TCP and Ethernet Support built into the OS • OS/2 was supposed to be the successor to Windows 3.0
The Breakup • Windows 3.0 became huge success • This is probably because most PC manufacturers included this OS on their machines. Which meant that more hardware manufacturers would write drivers for Windows instead of OS/2 • Microsoft and IBM had many small disputes and Microsoft went where the money was. • IBM took OS/2 and optimized it for Servers, while Microsoft took NT OS/2 and developed it into windows NT
32-bit, Dos, and Windows Compatibility • A 32-bit/16-bit hybrid was released in 1992. • With the release of the 80386 Intel processor OS/2 2.0 could run DOS programs within a virtual machine. • Windows 3.x could be ran within that DOS virtual machine because Windows ran on top of DOS
WARP 9! • IBM added the name WARP to all of the later releases of OS/2 because of the popularity of Star Trek during the 90s • Last release by IBM was 4.52 in December 2001 for Desktops and Servers. • IBM stopped selling OS/2 December 23, 2005. And stopped support December 31, 2006
eComStation • Serenity Systems took over development of OS/2 in 2001 under the new name of eComStation • Last full release was in 2004. • The new eComStation 2.0 is still in the Release Canidate stages at this time.
Kernel & System Architecture • Preemptive multitasking. • Multithreading. • Inter-process communication (IPC) features such as shared memory, pipes, queues and semaphores. • Virtual memory support (swapping) - theoretically up to 1GB virtual memory. • Fully protected operation. • Dynamic linking (DLLs). • Support for 16MB physical memory
Protected Mode vs. Real Mode • DOS still ran in real mode at that time, which meant no memory protection, only 1mb of memory to work with, and peripheral hardware had to be accessed directly. • Protected mode was supported by the 286 and newer processors. • Protected mode allows OS/2 to do Virtual memory, paging, and safe multitasking. • Protected mode also protected the System from your OS and bad programs. If a program crashes, it won’t crash your OS or hard lock the system.
OS/2 File System • Originally used the FAT file system. • The Fat File system was not adequate for server based performance. • Developed HPFS as an alternative to boot performance, and solve some of the inherent issues with FAT.
HPFS • OS/2 Native File System. Support for long file names (up to 254 characters) and mixed-case file names. • Directory positioned through the disk. Fat had it clumped at one end. • Faster file creation. More efficient use of disk space, since files are stored on a per-sector basis instead of using multiple-sector clusters. • Allocation of individual sectors at 512 bytes. Better performance due to overall design, including an internal architecture designed to keep related items closer to each other on the disk volume. • Less fragmentation of data over time, and less need to defragment the file system. • Uses more system memory.
Death of HPFS • Considering how much more advanced it was than FAT, one might have thought that HPFS would have become quite popular. Unfortunately, HPFS was tied inextricably to OS/2, and for a number of reasons, many of them related to the politics between IBM and Microsoft, OS/2 never really became what it could have been. As interest in OS/2 died, so did support for HPFS. Many of the features of HPFS appear to have been incorporated into NTFS by Microsoft, or at least NTFS has some definite similarities to HPFS.