[HN Gopher] The worst-selling Microsoft software product of all ...
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The worst-selling Microsoft software product of all time: OS/2 for
the Mach 20
Author : kungfudoi
Score : 86 points
Date : 2022-12-26 15:53 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (devblogs.microsoft.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (devblogs.microsoft.com)
| johnhattan wrote:
| Oooh I remember having one of these (with OS/2, no less) back
| when I had a side-job as the Microsoft support rep for Texas A&M.
| I was tasked with getting it up and working so I could demo it to
| the department heads who were looking to upgrade lots of old IBM
| XT's.
|
| While DOS with Windows 286 worked okay, OS/2 for Mach20 never
| would get past installation.
|
| I finally told my boss that I was getting nowhere with OS/2. She
| contacted her boss and later relayed to me that OS/2 for Mach20
| had been marked as a "non functional product" and would be going
| away.
|
| The happy ending was that I kept the Mach20 board in my ancient
| PC and used it for my remaining programming classes. It ran Turbo
| Pascal and QuickC for DOS quite well.
| folbec wrote:
| So this makes you a candidate for the ultimate retro-computing
| challenge :
|
| "1 If you're one of those retro-computing archivists, I guess
| this poses an extraordinary challenge even greater than
| possessing a Tandy Video Information System: Can you track down
| one of the three remaining copies of OS/2 for Mach 20?"
| johnhattan wrote:
| Coincidentally, I got a job at Tandy right out of college and
| I got to see the demise of the VIS firsthand.
|
| There was a big warehouse in Fort Worth where un-sellable
| products ended up, so I definitely could've won that
| challenge. They had pallet-loads of brand-new VIS machines
| bundled with all 20-odd games for around $49.
| Damogran6 wrote:
| I miss those days. I worked in the Compute department for the
| DOT and we were always getting proof of concept hardware and
| some of it ended up under my desk.
|
| Boss has a Dec laptop that was _thin_ (Digital Hi Note?)
|
| We had a Dec Alpha running an early version of Windows NT
|
| I had a Dec PC that started out as a 486, then got a Pentium
| 120 upgrade daughter card. (possibly this one, though that
| looks like a Mid tower and the one I had was full-sized)
| http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/43316/Digital-Persona...
|
| Nowadays...your expansion slots are used for your GPU
| and....well....maybe a better WiFi card?
| robk wrote:
| We sold quite a bit of those Dec alphas with nt! (Source: I
| was a qa intern)
| chiph wrote:
| > "non functional product"
|
| More accounting fun! This time around revenue recognition. It
| used to be that you had to ship a physical item to a customer
| in order to recognize the revenue from the sale. So the place I
| worked at back then would send out first-draft manuals to
| customers who had ordered the not-quite-done software. When we
| finished it and it passed testing, we'd send them the actual
| diskettes and an updated manual.
|
| I never heard of any complaints being lodged, so it must have
| been a standard industry practice of the time. Or the
| salespeople had already smoothed the waves with the customers.
| thriftwy wrote:
| I also remember there was some kind of upgrade from 286 to crappy
| 486SX. Or was it from 80386? I saw ads of it bundled together
| with Windows 95 ones.
|
| Meanwhile if you installed Windows 95 on its minimum supported
| 80386/4M RAM system, you could literally die while waiting for it
| to boot. I've personally witnessed it once, luckily was very
| young and had some runway.
|
| And then enjoy horribly distorted greyish 16-color palette.
| marcus0x62 wrote:
| I (vaguely) remember there being a bunch of these half-baked
| upgrade solutions, but are you thinking of the Cyrix 386 to 486
| upgrade?
|
| http://datasheets.chipdb.org/Cyrix/New%20Folder/faq386up.htm
| bitwize wrote:
| There was Pentium OverDrive which could take you from 486 to
| Pentium.
| acheron wrote:
| I had an Overdrive that went from an original Pentium to the
| Pentium-MMX I think, while also doubling clock speed (75 MHz
| to 150!).
| trollied wrote:
| I really liked OS/2 (warp). I often wonder what the computer
| landscape would look like these days if the likes of Commodore
| hadn't completely messed up, or Windows never gained traction.
|
| Operating Systems are in a really weird place right now. I find
| that macOS has regressed somewhat performance-wise (it was very
| impressive on my first mac, a powerbook), as has windows. I've
| just switched my PC to Arch, and I think the Linux desktop
| experience is more or less there these days. The only thing
| holding me back before was Windows-only games, but the recent
| Valve sponsored efforts have proved fruitful, and the likes of
| World Of Warcraft play just great under Proton.
|
| It was very interesting for operating systems in the 1990s, and I
| think we're looking at another great period in the 2020s.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| I don't know about the greatness that's coming in the operating
| system space.
|
| There seems to be a lot of focus on taking control from the
| consumer and into the hands of the manufacturer, similar to the
| model used by mobile phones already.
|
| Usually there's ways around it like with Apple's system
| integrity protection and sealed system volume. But attestation
| is also becoming an ever bigger thing and I could see apps
| being blocked on those systems in the future.
| VLM wrote:
| Page 32 of the linked Infoworld magazine shows an entire 286
| computer with a faster clock speed retailing for about twice the
| cost of the Mach 20 board.
|
| It was an interesting era, retail ads for everything from 10 mhz
| 8086 to 20 mhz 386 in the same issue.
| jkuria wrote:
| Not Microsoft BOB? :)
| PreInternet01 wrote:
| Microsoft Bob sold around 58K units, or a whopping 500K% more
| than the subject of the article. Make of that what you will...
| wpietri wrote:
| Wow, this reminds me how "stone knives and bearskins" the old
| days were. "The IBM PC came with five expansion slots, and they
| were in high demand. You needed one for the hard drive
| controller, one for the floppy drive controller, one for the
| video card, one for the printer parallel port, one for the mouse.
| Oh no, you ran out of slots, and you haven't even gotten to
| installing a network card or expansion RAM yet!"
|
| Uphill, in the snow, both ways, etc, etc.
| fencepost wrote:
| I had a 386 AboveBoard IIRC, plus an 8-in-1 for all my I/O
| needs, HD controller, CGA adapter and of course the all
| important 2400 v.42bis modem for getting onto bulletin boards.
| Good times (but not accurate, because no system clock)
| ecpottinger wrote:
| Worse was Micro-channel PCs from IBM, you could not put a card
| in a slot unless you had a driver that supported that
| particular slot. You could have more slots than cards but found
| where you HAD to put one card would conflict with another card
| that needed the same slots.
| wpietri wrote:
| It's amazing we didn't all end up alcoholics, really.
| rainbowzootsuit wrote:
| Tangentially related: My first use of FreeBSD was setting up a
| print server to allow an OS/2 computer running the software for a
| scanning tunneling microscope to output to an Apple LaserWriter.
|
| I also inadvertently made a domain controller mirror with SAMBA
| when fooling around with that.
| karmakaze wrote:
| Non-functional product. This brings back memories of repeatedly
| trying to get NeXTSTEP 3.3 that was in the office to run on x86
| hardware. With help from others who loaned hardware and help put
| together a Digital Research PC with a Vesa-LocalBus video card
| and a SCSI card that worked with various incantations during the
| boot cycles. After many days and many PC's left apart around the
| office, it finally ran and it was all worth it to experience what
| seemed like the future. Interface Builder and the whole NSObject
| system was incredible.
| PreInternet01 wrote:
| The expansion boards mentioned (Microsoft Mach, Orchid Turbo) are
| members of a product category I've ever only seen in ads, _never_
| in real life. Probably because they only made sense, pricing-
| wise, for actual-IBM PCs, not for the clones that pretty much
| everyone was running (often at a much higher clock speeds than
| the 'real' PC/XT or even PC/AT, which in my neck of the woods
| was never that popular: the 386SX was the first must-have upgrade
| due to its insanely higher speed).
|
| That OS/2 for such cards never sold well is not much of a
| surprise: OS/2 1.x was pretty much pointless anyway, and even the
| comparably-more-useful Windows 2.x releases were not exactly
| bestsellers.
|
| I did some OS/2 1.x development on a PS/2 Model 80, a full-height
| tower that was as expensive as it was heavy. It had a real 80386,
| VGA, 2MB RAM, plus a whopping 120MB of disk space. The new
| proprietary MCA bus wouldn't fit any existing expansion cards,
| and a lot of existing (DOS/Windows) software wasn't available in
| the new-fangled 3.5" floppy format either.
|
| Switching the thing on was the best part of the experience: the
| heavy-duty power switch made a _very_ satisfying 'clunk' sound.
| The duration of the BIOS memory test and the OS/2 boot process
| were less fun, and software development was downright horrible:
| despite the US$ 5000 price tag, the OS/2 SDK was extremely
| limited and slow, and only used the 386 as a slightly faster 286
| (whereas DOS-based tooling at the time would let you do some
| _pretty_ interesting things already).
| tom_ wrote:
| You could get similar products for the non-PC compatible
| computers that were popular in the UK, especially during the
| late 80s/early 90s period when PC software was worth having but
| the hardware was still comparatively expensive.
|
| - Amiga: http://amiga.resource.cx/exp/a2386sx - Atari ST:
| https://www.atarimagazines.com/startv4n12/pcditto2.html
|
| - Acorn Archimedes:
| https://chrisacorns.computinghistory.org.uk/32bit_UpgradesA2...
|
| - BBC Micro:
| https://chrisacorns.computinghistory.org.uk/Computers/Master...
|
| I used Amiga and Archimedes PC cards in the 90s - couldn't tell
| you which ones - and have seen a BBC Master 512 in use. I admit
| I've never actually seen an ST hardware emulator though.
|
| (I used the software-based pc ditto on an ST in the 90s, which
| did a decent job of being a IBM XT, albeit one running at about
| 1 MHz. But I'm sure it would have run very nicely on a Falcon
| or TT030.)
| karmakaze wrote:
| Probably after the era of PC/XT upgrades, the 386SLC had the
| clock speeds and on-die cache that made close to the DX.
|
| I really enjoyed my time developing on OS/2 1.2 and later 1.3
| with the IBM intern-developed VESA SVGA driver. It was
| multitasking that really worked. My first PC was a clone 386DX
| with socketed cache chips, 8MB RAM, and 11 MHz overclocked ISA
| bus to make the video updates faster.
|
| My next PC was a PS/2 Model 77 running OS/2 (and later Win NT).
| It was so hard finding an MCA SoundBlaster-compatible card (by
| Piper Research) so I could play Doom.
| thewebcount wrote:
| I started home computing in the late 70's to early 80's. Over
| the years I've found that when I get to the point that I need
| to upgrade one part of the computer, it's almost never worth
| it. It's usually time to upgrade the whole thing. When I would
| replace or upgrade a single part, it would extend me for maybe
| 6 months before I ran into another piece needing an upgrade.
|
| These days, I tend to buy higher end computers and use them for
| a long time. For example, I just retired my 2013 Mac Pro this
| last week. It was running fine, but can't update to the latest
| OS and some of my critical software needs the latest OS to run,
| or will shortly. If it weren't for that, I probably would have
| waited another year or two to upgrade.
| Moto7451 wrote:
| That 2013 Mac Pro can actually keep on chugging with the
| latest OS care of OpenCore Legacy Patcher. Thankfully Apple
| doesn't seem too inclined to force these into e-waste/retro
| computing.
| FullyFunctional wrote:
| It took me too long to understand this, but I'll toss in one
| exception to your rule: storage (short term and long term).
| I've found that it's frequently useful and economical to
| upgrade long term storage; eg. the HDs/SSDs until recently
| were on a price curve such that you were better off
| postponing buying more until you needed it. And quite a few
| of my systems have gotten a RAM bump midlife (where prices
| had come down). Alas, as more as more systems now come with
| soldered down memory, I usually max it out for longevity.
| classichasclass wrote:
| Mac CPU upgrades were a big market, though. In the 68K era you
| had things like Daystar cards and the Radius Rocket, and Apple
| themselves made a PPC 601 card. Sonnet even made them for
| allegedly unupgradeable machines, like the 7200 G3 upgrade that
| took over a PCI slot. The extension shunted everything to the
| CPU on the card and disabled the 601 soldered to the board.
| skissane wrote:
| > OS/2 1.x was pretty much pointless anyway
|
| It was the base for LAN Manager, IBM/Microsoft's answer to
| Netware. Never anywhere near as popular as Netware, but some
| people used it.
|
| OS/2 1.x Extended Edition also had some mainframe integration
| bits (Communications Manager). Useful stuff if you needed to
| talk to an IBM mainframe.
| GnarfGnarf wrote:
| We once made the mistake of stepping through a program in
| Microsoft Programmer's Workbench debug mode. Caused a problem
| which could only be fixed by re-installing OS/2 (26 diskettes).
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(page generated 2022-12-26 23:01 UTC)