Something interesting crossed my desk today.  The much-fabled Microsoft OS/2 2.0 SDK beta.

Sadly, this does *NOT* include the operating system, just the C compiler and the SDK bits. As you can see, the C compiler is version 1.00.075, a full year+ before the WindowsNT 3.1 1991 pre-release which had 6.00.080. An interesting thing is that the C compiler can be run from 16bit OS/2.  Unfortunately, the EXE’s produced by the SDK will not run on a production OS/2 system.  The fault lies with the linker & resource compiler.  However swapping those two components out for production versions seems to remedy this and produce working executables.  The only SDK examples that don’t work correctly involve the creation of DLL’s.  I’m sure it is again related to either the linker again, or from some gem I saw in the SDK saying you should always link by ordinal, and never by name.  Apparently a bunch of function calls were going to change name from OS/2 1.2 to 2.0.  It is interesting to me that going from the old Windows 3.1 to NT days we always had so much issues with people calling by ordinal vs the function name.  It broke all the time, but it is funny to see possibly where this bad habit started.

For those who don’t know DLL’s contain a table of functions sorted by NAME, and NUMBER.  The names have to be unique but the number depends on the order in which the DLL is linked together.  And it is very easy for someone to accidentally change the link order, and next thing you know the ordinal are all wrong.

Otherwise, yeah the tools from the MS OS/2 2.0 beta working in 2013.  I do believe that the object files can also be strung together with some DOS Extenders from the era to produce DPMI exe’s.

But I’ll save that exercise for later, like here! targeting OS/2 with Visual Studio 2003!

Thats right I’m talking about the Microsoft OS/2 2.0 beta.

This is the badboy that cost some $2,600 back in 1989/1990 and its stall basically split up the IBM Microsoft OS/2 alliance.

Sadly I don’t have volume 1 (although the binder spine says so, I have to wonder if the binders were reorganized) so I don’t have any media, nor the overview stuff, just the API’s for the UI & Networking and some general API stuff.  There is no mention of SOM or Workplace shell, so clearly this is stuff IBM added on their own.

It seems if MS & IBM had not dragged so slowly with 2.0 it really could have been pushed out in 1990, instead Microsoft basically gave up on Cruiser and pushed forward with Windows 3.0 which it controlled all the way.  And of course if IBM had allowed Microsoft to control the GUI side, OS/2 would have been far more NT’ish from the getgo.  Oh well instead we were denied any decent OS until what? 1994 on the Microsoft side with NT 3.5 although of course it was closer to 1996 with NT 4.0 did it even matter by then.  OS/2 was quite usable at the 2.0 level, but it was delayed with the advent of Windows 3.0 and OS/2 HAD to run Windows apps or it’d never go anywhere.

So here is some camera phone pictures of what materials I have on this rare version.  Naturally if anyone actually has Volume 1 or the media set feel free to contact me!!!

 

I’ve also found these snippits from Infoworld going back to 1989..

One interesting thing seems that once Microsoft abandoned OS/2 2.0 the kernel never seemed to have changed as you still can load 16bit device drivers so it feels as if all development in that space froze until the ill fated botched port to L4.

speaking of the OS/2 2.0 lighthouse, thanks to google images, I just googled it..

It is Cape Neddick Light.

And..

I know it’s silly but I always wanted to know where it was.