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Why New York's Subway Still Uses OS/2 (tedium.co) 197

Posted by EditorDavid from the Microsoft-meets-IBM dept.
Every day 5.7 million people ride the subway in New York City -- and are subjected to both "the whims of the Metropolitan Transit Authority and the unheard-of reliability of a marginally successful operating system from the early 1990s."

martiniturbide shared this report from Tedium: OS/2 and MTA consultant Neil Waldhauer said in an email, "For a few years, you could bet your career on OS/2." To understand why, you need to understand the timing. Waldhauer continues, "The design is from a time before either Linux or Windows was around. OS/2 would have seemed like a secure choice for the future." So for a lack of options, the MTA went with its best one. And it's worked out for decades, as one of the key software components of a quite complex system...

Despite the failure of OS/2 in the consumer market, it was hilariously robust, leading to a long life in industrial and enterprise systems -- with one other famous example being ATMs. Waldhauer said, "Thinking about all the operating systems in use [in the MTA], I'd have to say that OS/2 is probably the most robust part of the system, except for the mainframe." It's still in use in the NYC subway system in 2019. IBM had long given up on it, even allowing another company to maintain the software in 2001. (These days, a firm named Arca Noae sells an officially supported version of OS/2, ArcaOS, though most of its users are in similar situations to the MTA.)
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Why New York's Subway Still Uses OS/2 More

Why New York's Subway Still Uses OS/2

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  • Easy answer (Score:3)

    by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Monday June 17, 2019 @12:45AM (#58774050)
    their admin wants to play the original Gal Civ before it was modded all to hell.

  • hilariously robust? (Score:3)

    by bloodhawk ( 813939 ) on Monday June 17, 2019 @12:55AM (#58774070)
    my recollection of admin and developing on Os/2 was very different, especially when it came to warp. You were constantly waiting for the next fixpack in the hope that your stability issues would be resolved. Perhaps with no new features in the last 20 years it has had time to stabilise.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by garcia ( 6573 )

      Warp was horrendously unreliable when it arrived but prior versions were robust as all get out compared to the other main choice at the time (Win 3.x).

      I loved it for years and was a strong supporter but I will admit Iâ(TM)m absolutely shocked itâ(TM)s still deployed in so many industrial use cases without being virtualized today.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by dryeo ( 100693 )

        If you need access to the hardware, virtualization isn't the best course. OS/2 is also the hardest OS to virtualize as it uses more features of the i386 then others, for example parts run in ring 2 to support DOS drivers.
        And it does install and run on fairly modern hardware, though it needs a USB3 driver for those systems that don't have any real USB2 ports. Has other limits as well like 2TB disk and partition limits, which is to be expected for an OS designed in the early 90's.

      • compared to Win 3.x sure, most anything would seem reliable. But I remember an awful lot of late nights repairing failed OS/2 2.0 systems as well. I remember having such high hopes for Warp, then warp came out :(

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward

        There were two things which killed OS/2 as a mainstream desktop product or server OS.

        First, companies were shying away from Netware. It was expensive and had strict license keys. Yes, you could run NetWare in an OS/2 DOS "coffin", but that was a cautious exception, as that required additional RAM and drive space (which were at a relative premium in those days.)

        Second, people looked at OS/2 with the ability to run their Windows stuff, compared to just MS-DOS and Windows 3.x, and just decided to keep with W

      • I had the lovely experience of watching the OS Warp release with IBM execs (in South Africa at the time). The exec on stage actually greeted the Microsoft guys in the crowd. Then he proceeded to stick a PCMCIA card into his laptop and .... it crashed. The Microsoft guys and the rest of the crowd (rightly) laughed and found this amusing.

      • OS/2 2.whatever was delightfully reliable, unless you loaded the Windows environment into it. But there was little enough software for OS/2 that most people had to do that, so it was actually a serious problem for desktop use.

        It makes as much sense to run it today as it ever did, however, if you aren't expecting it to be a modern OS, and it does the job you need it to do. I'm not sure how much sense it ever made, but I'm not spectacularly interested in arguing about it either. I imagine that there are few n

      • Warp was horrendously unreliable when it arrived but prior versions were robust as all get out compared to the other main choice at the time (Win 3.x).

        Warp was fine upon release if you were installing it clean on OS/2-optimized hardware, and stuck with the most basic device drivers (like the standard SVGA driver), as you would on the types of industrial control systems the article is talking about.

        It was only more problematic if you were upgrading an existing DOS/Windows system to WARP, and/or needed audio or better video drivers that it was somewhat problematic. But if you were using the system in a closet to run your print server or your voicemail syst

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jimbo ( 1370 )

      I've known research labs to use OS/2 for decades, however many were dedicated to specialized workloads. One ran in text mode, some were older versions.

      Warp seemed stable to me at the time, depending on the PC, perhaps problems were due to drivers or that bolted on NetBIOS stuff...?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dryeo ( 100693 )

        Warp (Warp Connect did) didn't come with NetBIOS, just enough of a stack to allow dial-up over SLIP (PPP support was released soon after).
        What it was was particular about hardware. Your memory modules better be the same for example. I had a 486 with broken 16 bit DMA, it was really unstable until I switched to 8 bit DMA on the sound card.

    • Re: hilariously robust? (Score:4)

      by Antony T Curtis ( 89990 ) on Monday June 17, 2019 @01:24AM (#58774160) Homepage Journal

      It had issues. The SIQ hang issues was one which was never really resolved satisfactorily but then it's not uncommon today for Mac OS to give me the spinning beach ball of doom because it also has a similar SIQ hang, 15+ years later.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sad_ ( 7868 )

      I used to run OS2 for my multinode BBS, it was very stable until it suddenly crashed (which could take a fair amount of time), but when it did crash you'd lose basically everything (complete filesystem corruption, recovery from backups needed). This happened a few times, after which i just decided i had enough of it and switched back to DesqView.

    • Honestly, the things that were less than robust with OS/2 tended to be specific scenarios. You could certainly boot up OS/2 and leave it running for week after week with a basic installation, and find it kept on chugging. It wasn't like Windows '95 or 3.x where memory leaks would render the OS unusable after a while, without a fresh restart as a requirement. (As I recall, WIn 3.x used to have problems simply from the repeated process of opening new windows and closing them again.)

      I had plenty of software

  • Taxpayers are dreading the follow-up announcement (Score:5, Interesting)

    by xxxJonBoyxxx ( 565205 ) on Monday June 17, 2019 @01:01AM (#58774088)
    >> [Gov] still uses [old tech]

    I've seen enough PR blitzes to know what's coming next: an announcement about the no-bid, nine-figure migration contract to a well-connected IT firm. Why DOES New York's subway still use OS/2? Because it still works, and they'd rather spend their money on pensions, salaries and occasionally rail equipment, that's why.
  • This was the OS that hanged if there was a poorly written program that didn't read its messages from the single input queue.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dryeo ( 100693 )

      That was just the graphical interface. Text mode programs and such didn't have the issue and Fixpak 17 for Warp 3 mostly fixed it.

    • This was the OS that hanged if there was a poorly written program that didn't read its messages from the single input queue.

      Which isn't an issue for industrial control applications, which probably only have a simple status UI, and is the only application running on the system, with little to no real user input.

      And I'll note the entire OS didn't hang -- just the UI. Threads continued to run just fine, you simply couldn't interact with the UI when a SIQ hang occurred.

      Not entirely ideal for end-user use (although it did get better in later releases), but for industrial control systems that run only one application and which don't

  • That thing was one seriously well implemented monster. Just serves to show that in the OS market quality is not something end-users can judge.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by dryeo ( 100693 )

      It was memory hungry at a time when memory cost a fortune. I ran it on a 386 with 4 MBs of ram, without the full graphic shell it ran pretty good, but really it needed 8-16 MBs when boxes still came with 2-4MBs.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        Well, yes. But the competition was a bad joke in comparison. Of course, that was back then.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by dryeo ( 100693 )

          But the competition was good enough, ran on most hardware satisfactory if you didn't run too many programs and appeared to be free. And as most programs were targeting the competition...

  • "hilariously robust" (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Antony T Curtis ( 89990 ) on Monday June 17, 2019 @01:20AM (#58774150) Homepage Journal

    "hilariously robust"
    Yep, it sure was. This was back in 1996 when a friend's computer started to have random crashing problems with Windows. He couldn't afford to buy new RAM but OS/2 was somehow able to fence off the bad memory and continue to work reliably. Kinda funny that IBM effectively gave away OS/2 free on a magazine cover disk - applying a fixpack removed the modifications that IBM did to the coverdisc version.

    • My experience was that the OS/2 installer wouldn't even start with a bad memory even if Windows worked just fine.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by kriston ( 7886 )

      I (regrettably) yelled at someone who moved the mouse pointer out of the Windows window and onto the OS/2 desktop even though I specifically told them if they did that the system would crash.

      It crashed. I yelled at them. I apologized for days.

      IBM should have paid more attention to improving the OS and market development. Sure, it was designed to run its "userspace" in subsystems, like Windows NT Windows-on-Windows did much later, but supporting MS Windows it sucked the life out of the project.

  • Memory protection on commodity hardware (Score:5, Interesting)

    by OrangeTide ( 124937 ) on Monday June 17, 2019 @01:23AM (#58774158) Homepage Journal

    Good development tools, for its time, and proper memory protection on i386 made it a good choice for industrial controls in that era. The main drawback to OS/2 today is the lack of support from the original vendor and that the development tools haven't really kept pace. You do see NT kernel and Linux in the same sorts of roles more frequently these days than OS/2, and it may be as simple as it is easier to hire engineers with experience in Linux or Microsoft Windows than with OS/2.

    I'd label OS/2 as not for new designs. But just because software is old doesn't mean it magically loses the ability to meet its original requirements. If it ran a system fine 20 years ago, and the requirements haven't fundamentally changed, then it can continue to fill that role.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dryeo ( 100693 )

      The biggest problem is lack of kernel source, and its a hard kernel to binary patch. But you can buy a decent computer today and as long as it still emulates the BIOS and has a real USB2 port (or you add a card), it'll install and run. Even give you a ram disk to use the memory above 4GBs. HDs and partitions are limited to 2TB as well due to CHS addressing. Limited to 64 cores (I think only tested with 32) as well.

    • OS/2 found a lot of its niche during the 90s for those things that needed "more than a desktop" but "less than an AS/400" - because in the 90's, it was still pretty true that nobody ever got fired buying IBM.

      TFA cites ATMs as being one of those places where OS/2 was used well after Windows ruled the desktop, but the reason wasn't necessarily because the banks wanted to give it up. After all, a computer with a a cash dispenser is probably not a good thing to have running Windows in the era of Blaster and Sasser. However, ATMs started running Windows for a very different reason: the Americans with Disabilities Act. Before the ADA, ATMs only had to comply with whatever the insurance companies were requiring, and OS/2 was on the whitelist. The ADA required that ATMs be accessible to blind people. A fantastic thing to address, but "good idea + government bureaucracy = worst possible solution". I'm sure it's trivial to write a screen reader program for OS/2, there wasn't one for the OS that met the legal criteria, meaning that banks had to start rolling out ATMs that could run the required applications for blind people, which meant that they had to start running Windows.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dwywit ( 1109409 )

        If they'd bought an AS/400, they could have upgraded and/or replaced outdated hardware at any time, and still run their applications to this day.

        AS/400s rock. They just keep working. They ain't fast, but they don't stop.

        • If someone bought an AS/400 these days, they would have an upgrade path today to an IBM iSeries. Yes, the old CISC CPUs were poky, but you really didn't care about that when running a business, and now that AS/400s run on POWER9, there are no performance issues these days.

          Of course, the downside is price. IBM stuff doesn't come cheap.

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by kriston ( 7886 )

            IBM stuff doesn't come cheap.

            When you factor in the cost of man-hours maintaining and porting software to new generations of hardware, you will find that the upward-compatible family of systems designed by IBM Rochester (System/36, System38, AS/400, System i) is a huge bargain.

            Check out Frank G. Soltis' book Fortress Rochester: The Inside Story of the IBM ISeries for details.

    • The current weakness of the OS/2 of today is development tools. If one is making an embedded app, they will be using Linux, an embedded Windows edition, QNX, seL4, INTEGRITY, or another OS that is constantly maintained and updated.

      It would be nice to see OS/2 open sourced somehow. I'm sure there is a lot of entangled IP in the code, but with a clean room rewrite, the code likely could be made into something that is more usable. From there, add tools for various embedded applications (kiosks, digital sign

  • So long as your I/O ports are hermetically sealed then it's fine to run an old stable OS like OS/2. However, the real problem here is if your stable software will only run on old hardware that was not designed to run for decades on end. When your hardware fails then you are up a creek without a paddle... but they will sell you one for a very pretty penny.

    To avoid being held captive, they should to buy an embedded system that is designed to run for eternity and then either port the software or run OS/2 in

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by dryeo ( 100693 )

      You just buy a new box. Neil who is referenced in the summary can set you up but basically you need good hardware, BIOS emulation and some USB2 ports. And need the latest AOS (ArcaOS) which is basically OS/2 4.52 with updates.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by guruevi ( 827432 )

      Intel still sells the 286 and 386s. Industrial computers haven't changed in pricing or features for that matter. Sure you can get brand new Industrial Computers with Corei7 but the heat management of a TDP 180W chip vs a 10W 386 chip is immense in these situations.

  • Where is the money going that would have provided subway related upgrades?
    To pay for decades of other unrelated city services.

  • ... and a valid alternative to Linux on server platforms, too.

    Because of imaging needs, I gave up on OS/2 on the desktop back in the early noughties, but I continued to run an OS/2 machine as a production internet web/mail/file/application server until two years ago. It was mainly errors and stability problems in OS/2 ports of necessary standard software (Apache/PHP/MySQL) that forced me to go to Linux, as compatibility with PHP webapps had become a game of luck, even making frequent reboots necessary due t

  • Sigh. (Score:3)

    by ledow ( 319597 ) on Monday June 17, 2019 @03:41AM (#58774354) Homepage

    Because, obviously, you wouldn't buy a billion-dollar MTA system with hardware integration that didn't include complete specifications of the hardware interface and necessary protocols/signals, so that you could easily start to replace small parts of it bit by bit, testing it against the original implementation until you were happy that it performed the same actions, and then start to replace parts of the system with something vaguely modern and compatible and continue to be able to do so into perpetuity, would you?

    I mean, nobody would be that stupid, right? To be tied into the exact piece of software that was given on deployment for systems that - in other countries - traditionally operate for decades, even centuries at a time?

    Hell, even places like the London Underground revamp their computer control suites and signalling every decade or so and they're always pleading poverty. And that, quite literally, been running for over a century (though, obviously, not computer-controlled all that time).

    I get the "if it ain't broke" mentality, but the thing is that at some point I guarantee that it *was* broke... and they just kept buying the same parts over and over and over again at great expense. And even on the tiniest scale, you could have had a plan in place after the first few of those to code up some other replacement.

    Hell, you could probably run the entire thing on embedded devices nowadays. Get the damn things custom-made, so you're holding the blueprints and have no real "software" to deal with beyond those bits you want to.

    I'm not suggesting IoT the thing, but you could at least have started to say "Let's contract out producing a modern replacement for this control machine and its software."

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dwywit ( 1109409 )

      Wow, you've got all the answers. NYC should hire you.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by geekoid ( 135745 )

      Thanks for letting us know you are clueless about industrial system. Would have saved everyone a lot of time if you just lead with that.

      ""Let's contract out producing a modern replacement for this control machine and its software.""

      It's adorable you think that's all that is involved. Like the running system won't rely on anything else but that.

      Simply, adorable.

      "but the thing is that at some point I guarantee that it *was* broke"

      oh, do you now? lol.

  • The article mentions the mainframe backend, but I think this was a big part of OS/2 at the time in some areas. TCP/IP as networking wasn't as pervasive as it is now, IBM was using SNA, and of course had good support built in with OS/2. So if you were relying on stuff like APPC connections to mainframe then OS/2 would have been sold heavily for such things. I can recall having windows libraries to act as an LU6.2 device in windows, so it wouldn't have been unique feature, but I would imagine buying mainfra

  • I loved OS/2 (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 17, 2019 @07:18AM (#58774806)

    When I switched from OS/2 to Windows 95, at first I was delighted by Windows 95's new user interface, with the Start menu and taskbar, which were not common at that time. Long filenames had been used in OS/2 for years, as was preemptive multitasking. But OS/2 had amazing settings for its applications. A graphical representation of a notebook grouped all sorts of settings on different "pages" of the spiral bound notebook. Underneath, OS/2's extended attributes allowed all sorts of data to be stored for each file. And OS/2's system object model was much, much better than Windows' common object model. Move a file on OS/2 that had a link to it; the link automatically updated to the new location. Do the same thing in Windows 95, and it would show a moving flashlight icon as it spent a very long time trying to search the hard drive for where the target file had been moved.

    After various versions of Windows kept crashing, and after my Windows XP machine would not boot up because I (gasp!) uninstalled too many programs at once without rebooting in between, and my Windows XP registry subsequently got corrupted, I finally came to my senses and switched to Linux around 2002. I have run Linux as my primary operating system ever since and never looked back.

    I still miss OS/2, however.

  • Yeah OS/2 was almost unbelievably stable for workstations, but I presume they have some needs for file and print services. They don't seem too worried about running operating systems that are well beyond support lifecycles, I'm surprised they aren't running netware for the server roles.

  • IBM chief: Microsoft killed OS/2 (Score:4, Informative)

    by QuietLagoon ( 813062 ) on Monday June 17, 2019 @09:21AM (#58775122)
    Blast from the past: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/bus... [bbc.co.uk]

    The deposition and testimony provided by Garry Norris - IBM's chief negotiator with Microsoft before and after the introduction of Windows 95 - has provided a cornucopia of fascinating evidence in the Microsoft trial. Much of it was previously unknown or unconfirmed.

    His evidence showed how Microsoft effectively controlled IBM's PC hardware and software businesses by making the price of Windows considerably higher than for other comparable PC makers.

    Mr Norris described in detail to Philip Malone, counsel for the Department of Justice, five cases where Microsoft had succeeded in modifying, or had attempted to influence, IBM's choice of software to load on its PCs. These were with OS/2, Lotus Notes, Lotus Smartsuite, World Books, Netscape's browser, and the version of Windows.

    IBM's competitive operating system OS/2 was a significant challenger in 1994 and 1995 to Windows 3.x and then Windows 95.

    As a consequence of its alleged Windows monopoly and IBM's need to include Windows with some PCs because its customers wanted it, the licence price has grown and grown:

    In 1995 IBM paid Microsoft $40m for Windows

    In 1996, after the launch of Windows 95, it was $220m

    By 1997, after Microsoft insisted that IBM would have to pay higher prices if it wished to license Windows NT 4, IBM paid Microsoft $330m for Windows

    In 1998 this increased to $440m

    Mr Norris said that PC manufacturers who wanted to license OS/2 were threatened by Microsoft. Compaq was one of these, and IBM was informed of Microsoft's intimidation by Compaq vice-president Mike Clark. As a consequence, Compaq did not license OS/2.

    It was revealed that Bill Gates was "surprised" that IBM was not prepared to "jointly and exclusively promote Microsoft products [and] reduce shipments of OS/2".

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by geekoid ( 135745 )

      I worked for a vendor who was threatened by MS sales people that they would pull licensing if they also sold OS/2

  • Back in the early / mid 90s I worked for a pretty popular provider of financial analysis. Our publishing system used two machines running DOS and the system was redundant, with a backup system; six machines in total, back when a computer still cost a lot of money. When Win95 was being released we got our hands on an early copy to benchmark agains the DOS machines but they ran way too slow under Win95. We setup an OS/2 machine and were able to run BOTH of the DOS executables on the same machine with almos
  • I'll always have fond memories of OS/2. It was the first OS I installed, the first GUI I used, and I tried to proselytize it to anyone who'd listen while in grade school that it was superior to Windows. It had some cool features and was easy to use (I think I was 10 when I started using it). I played DOS games on it and I remember it shipped with a game where you tried to catch a cat with your mouse pointer (you could adjust the speed, which I did once to some insane level and my dad got mad while he tri

  • We obsess over the latest and greatest in this industry, and certainly in some fields that is very important, but, not unlike farming, sometimes the newest tool is best and sometimes there's little advantage over that old tractor on the barn.

    That said, while I was interested to hear the MTA is still using OS/2, the linked article itself is pretty tedious (as advertised), spinning a sentence's worth of information over many paragraphs, something that seems obsolete in the age of Twitter.

  • Bad software ages, good software matures.

    No reason to through out working software for the sole reason of "IT's old".

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