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Os/2

Scali said:
Ofcourse NT4 is a 'special edition' of Windows. The non-NT versions did not support SMP.
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Every NT4 box included support for SMP. Earlier versions of NT had support for SMP but it was trickier to get it installed. OS/2 SMP required convincing an IBM rep that one deserved the product.

The major difference between OS/2 SMP and NT SMP was NT did a better job of insulating programs from the vagaries of multiple processors. OS/2 SMP required some programs be adjusted to work.
 
krebizfan said:
Every NT4 box included support for SMP.
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Yes, but the point was that not all versions of Windows are NT4.

krebizfan said:
OS/2 SMP required convincing an IBM rep that one deserved the product.
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Is that so? From what I understood, IBM bundled that version with their SMP hardware. If you bought a single-CPU system, you'd get the regular OS/2, but what were you going to do with the SMP version anyway?

krebizfan said:
The major difference between OS/2 SMP and NT SMP was NT did a better job of insulating programs from the vagaries of multiple processors. OS/2 SMP required some programs be adjusted to work.
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Which probably explains why IBM abandoned it.
Some sources claim that the SMP code was mostly the work of one person, who had left the company. Which resulted in a major headache for maintaining the codebase.
 
krebizfan said:
It was common to buy a server with multiple CPU sockets but only install one CPU in it. Sometime later, it would become obvious that a second processor should be added.
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A machine with multiple sockets is an SMP machine to me, regardless of the number of CPUs installed.
You mean to say that IBM didn't bundle the SMP version with these SMP-capable machines if you ordered them with only one CPU installed? That would be quite the failure on IBM's behalf.

krebizfan said:
MS made it comparatively simple; https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/156358
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Since unlike IBM, Microsoft did not build and sell its own hardware, its entire business was dependent on their software being simple to install/upgrade.
It's a completely different business model.
 
Scali said:
Since unlike IBM, Microsoft did not build and sell its own hardware, its entire business was dependent on their software being simple to install/upgrade.
It's a completely different business model.
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That is the whole reason the wheels fell off IBM's plan to market OS/2. Microsoft delivered everything most users wanted "in the box". IBM delivered "half an operating system". So you want SMP, then that will be another wodge of money, you want to share files and folders, that's another option, oh and you want TCP/IP, we can do that but its really hard, so that will be more than the OS cost you in the first place...

.. don't get me wrong, I like OS/2, but IBM tried to package it like a Mainframe where every option costs an arm and leg, rather than as a commodity OS that had everything bundled.
 
Scali said:
A machine with multiple sockets is an SMP machine to me, regardless of the number of CPUs installed.
You mean to say that IBM didn't bundle the SMP version with these SMP-capable machines if you ordered them with only one CPU installed? That would be quite the failure on IBM's behalf.
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IIRC, IBM shipped the non-SMP version of OS/2 with any system that only had a single CPU. Made sense since OS/2 SMP could not run some software and I think SMP had problems booting if a only one processor was installed.

It has been far too long, I don't remember if the asymmetrical MP versions of Lan Server and some SQL products could run on SMP OS/2. I know IBM's had a big push in 1993 to migrate Personal Server 295s from AMP OS/2 1.3 to SMP 2.1. I never heard of anyone implementing it.
 
Looks like an OS/2 system won't be hard to find at all then, which is nice. I'll probably look into it after I get my TS1000 workings.
 
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