A strange digital time capsule
A strange digital time capsule
It’s a hectic news cycle so let’s take a look at an artifact of historical interest that has nothing to do with the current news cycle:
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It was 1993. The Unabomber was still mailing bombs. Bill Clinton was in the White House. The Bosnian war was ongoing. Someone had recently stabbed tennis star Monica Seles. And in July in Houston, Texas, in front of a user group of over a thousand people, a man from Microsoft talked about Windows NT, and a man from IBM talked about their competitive operating system, OS/2.
Technology was undergoing one of its regularly scheduled pivotal changes brought on by mass consumer adoption and speedier CPUs. Now, OS/2 was intended to be a Microsoft/IBM joint production, but Microsoft was seeing such success with Windows that it broke up with IBM struck out on its own. There was beef. DOS was out, and it was clear that 32-bit operating systems with graphical user interfaces were the new thing. (Windows NT would be its own operating system, not a parasite atop DOS like Windows 3.1. OS/2 would jettison PC-DOS. Rebuilding from the ground up.)
There are 1,300 people in the audience. The emcee says: “The Microsoft guys are in suits and ties, and the guy who’s going to demonstrate OS/2 is in a red sport shirt!” Big stuff!
The “Microsoft guy” was named Doug; the IBM representative was named Dave. Everything is kept light and fun. But then, right as the introduction concludes, the emcee snatches utter defeat out of lectern victory: “‘Sit back,” he says, “relax, and enjoy it,’ as Clayton Williams said.” Which turns out to be a joke about sexual assault. The audience offers up a low, ugly groan. The technology industry: The best, but also the worst. After that comes the Microsoft Guy.
He doesn’t do a bad job. He stands up there. He talks about Microsoft. He makes a lot of slightly awkward breathing noises into the microphone. “We feel it’s the most powerful client server on the desktop,” he says. I feel a lot of sympathy for this guy. He’s a chubby guy in a white shirt talking about technology in the 1990s. He talks about processors, and being CPU-bound, and kernel privilege modes, and shows slides like this:
After a muted half-hour he accepts his applause and shuffles off the stage to make room for David Barnes, the representative of OS/2.
Barnes hops on stage and immediately starts praising both Texans and user groups. He speaks two or three times as fast as the Microsoft representative. Wikipedia summarizes it like this:
When Microsoft was readying the first version of Windows NT (designated “Version 3.1”) in 1993, a Texas computer user group (HAL-PC) invited IBM and Microsoft to a public “shootout” between the two operating systems. Videotape of the two demonstrations was later distributed by IBM and Team OS/2 members. Compared to the dynamic presentation given by David Barnes as he put OS/2 through its paces, the Microsoft presenter and NT showed so poorly that Microsoft demanded that all portions of the NT presentation be cut out of the videotapes which IBM was distributing of the event. This resulted in issuance of an edited version of the tape, but hundreds of original (complete) copies had already been released. The uncut version of the “OS/2 — NT Shootout” tape have been dubbed the “OS/2 — NT Shootdown” or “The Shootdown of Flight 31”. The tape has been used to train professional software and hardware presenters who might face user groups.
