Research Stream: OS/2 1.0 Explorations

This is an upcoming set of streams to document the early versions of OS/2 including the IBM, Microsoft, and Extended Edition. The goal is to create a baseline summary of everything OS/2 is and was intended to be. Unfortunately, there's relatively little surviving from the OS/2 1.x era, and even less of the 16-bit console era.

Exploring OS/2 1.0

As Microsoft (and likely IBM) strongly believed in dog-fooding, the goal is to create example environments representing what is known about how they used. Microsoft originally made OS/2's software development kit available to

Microsoft Developer on OS/2

Microsoft used OS/2 fairly extensively in-house as it was an early adopter of the 80286, and OS/2 was used to develop itself, and Windows NT, as well as several well known applications such as Word for Windows. In effect, OS/2 is a fairly solid development platform, and provides a lot more flexibility and customization than DOS of the era.

The goal is to create an example VM with the following components

• Microsoft OS/2 1.0 running on a 80286
• Microsoft Word
• Microsoft Multiplan
• Microsoft Mail (either native OS/2 or DOS version)
• Microsoft C Programmers Workbench
• OS/2 SDK 1.0

Internally, among other things, Microsoft used the M editor, originally for DOS, with an OS/2 port being made as SDKED, which is important since OS/2 1.0 doesn't ship with an editor. SDKED should be on the SDK, but even a DOS copy of MEP should be used if needed.

For good measure of the following third-party applications. These should be 8088 based, and period correct from 1985-1988ish.

• WordStar for DOS
• Rogue

Questions To Answer

• What was OS/2 1.0 like to use?
• Was OS/2 a decent development platform?
• Is this an upgrade from DOS (especially Multiuser DOS 4)?
• What problems were visible here that were only obvious with hindsight?