Workplace OS

Objective By 1990, IBM acknowledged the software industry to be in a state of perpetual crisis. This was due to the chaos from the inordinate complexity of software engineering inherited by its legacy of procedural programming practices since the 1960s. Large software projects were too difficult, fragile, expensive, and time-consuming to create and maintain; they required too many programmers, who were too busy with fixing bugs and adding incremental features to create new applications. Different operating systems were alien to each other, each of them running their own proprietary applications. IBM envisioned "life after maximum entropy" through "operating systems unification at last" Personalities provide environment subsystems to applications. Taligent, and OpenDoc. to workstations to large 64-bit servers and supercomputers. IBM saw the easy portability of the Workplace OS as creating a simple migration path to move its existing x86 (DOS and OS/2) customer base onto a new wave of standard reference PowerPC-based systems, such as the PC Power Series and the Power Macintosh. Creating a unique but open and industry-standard reference platform of open-source microkernel, IBM hedged its company-wide operating system strategy by aggressively attempting to recruit other operating system vendors to adopt its microkernel as a basis for their proprietary operating systems. ==History==

Development GUTS In January 1991, there was an internal presentation to the IBM Management Committee of a new strategy for operating system products. This included a chart called the Grand Unification Theory of Operating Systems (GUTS), which outlined how a single microkernel underlying common subsystems could provide a single unifying architecture for the world's many existing and future operating systems. It was initially based in a procedural programming model, not object-oriented. based entirely on Apple's Pink project from 1987. There, GUTS's goals were greatly impacted and expanded by exposure to these similar goals—especially advanced in the areas of aggressive object-orientation, and of software frameworks upon a microkernel. IBM's optimistic team saw the Pink platform as being the current state of the art of operating system architecture. IBM wanted to adopt Pink's more object-oriented programming model and framework-based system design, and add compatibility with legacy procedural programming along with the major concept of multiple personalities of operating systems, to create the ultimate possible GUTS model. Ostensibly, this would have allowed Taligent's operating system (implemented as a Workplace OS personality) to execute side-by-side with DOS and OS/2 operating system personalities. In 1993, InfoWorld reported that Jim Cannavino "has gone around the company and developer support for a plan to merge all of the company's computing platforms—ES/9000, AS/400, RS/6000, and PS/2—around a single set of technologies, namely the PowerPC microprocessor, the Workplace OS operating system, and the Taligent object model, along with a series of open standards for cross-platform development, network interoperability, etc." By 1995, Workplace OS was becoming notable for its many and repeated launch delays, with IBM described as being inconsistent and "wishy washy" with dates. This left IBM's own PowerPC hardware products without a mainstream operating system, forcing the company to at least consider the rival Windows NT. In late 1994, as Workplace OS approached its first beta version, IBM referred to the beta product as "OS/2 for the PowerPC". As the project's first deliverable product, this first beta was released to select developers on the Power Series 440 in December 1994. A second beta was released in 1995. By 1995, IBM had shipped two different releases of an application sampler CD for the beta OS. Preview launch In mid 1995, IBM officially named its planned initial Workplace OS release "OS/2 Warp Connect (PowerPC Edition)" for a special product request through their IBM representative, who then relayed the request to the Austin research laboratory. but it is still a very incomplete product intended only for developers. Its installer only supports two computer models, the IBM PC Power Series 830 and 850, which have PowerPC 604 CPUs of , of RAM, and IDE drives. Contrary to the product's "Connect" name, the installed operating system has no networking support. Full networking functionality is described within the installed documentation files, and in the related book ''IBM's Official OS/2 Warp Connect PowerPC Edition: Operating in the New Frontier'' (1995) — all of which the product's paper booklet warns the user to disregard. The kernel dumps debugging data to the serial console. The system hosts no compiler, so developers are required to cross-compile applications on the source-compatible OS/2 for Intel system, using MetaWare’s High C compiler or VisualAge C++, and manually copy the files via relocatable medium to run them. At this point, the several-year future roadmap of Workplace OS included IBM Microkernel 2.0 and was intended to subsume the fully converged future of the OS/2 platform starting after the future release of OS/2 version 4, including ports to Pentium, Pentium Pro, MIPS, ARM, and Alpha CPUs. ==Reception==

Industrial reception Reception was enthusiastically but skeptically mixed, as the young IT industry was already constantly grappling with the second-system effect, and was now presented with Workplace OS and PowerPC hardware as the ultimate second system duo to unify all preceding and future systems. On November 15, 1993, InfoWorlds concerns resembled the Osborne effect: "Now IBM needs to talk about this transition without also telling its customers to stop buying all the products it is already selling. Tough problem. Very little of the new platform that IBM is developing will be ready for mission-critical deployment until 1995 or 1996. So the company has to dance hard for two and maybe three years to keep already disaffected customers on board." In 2013, Ars Technica retrospectively characterized the years of hype surrounding Workplace OS as supposedly being "the ultimate operating system, the OS to end all OSes ... It would run on every processor architecture under the sun, but it would mostly showcase the power of POWER. It would be all-singing and all-dancing." Internal analysis In January 1995, four years after the conception and one year before the cancellation of Workplace OS, IBM announced the results of a very late stage analysis of the project's initial assumptions. This concluded that it is impossible to unify the inherent disparity in endianness between different proposed personalities of legacy systems, resulting in the total abandonment of the flagship plan for an AIX personality. In May 1997, one year after its cancellation, one of its architects reflected back on the intractable problems of the project's software design and the limits of available hardware. Academic analysis In September 1997, a case study of the history of the development of Workplace OS was published by the University of California with key details having been verified by IBM personnel. These researchers concluded that IBM had relied throughout the project's history upon multiple false assumptions and overly grandiose ambitions, and had failed to apprehend the inherent difficulty of implementing a kernel with multiple personalities. IBM considered the system mainly as its constituent components and not as a whole, in terms of system performance, system design, and corporate personnel organization. IBM had not properly researched and proven the concept of generalizing all these operating system personalities before starting the project, or at any responsible timeframe during it — especially its own flagship AIX. IBM assumed that all the resultant performance issues would be mitigated by eventual deployment upon PowerPC hardware. The Workplace OS product suffered the second-system effect, including feature creep, with thousands of global contributing engineers across many disparate business units nationwide. The Workplace OS project had spent four years and $2 billion (or 0.6% of IBM's revenue for that period), which the report described as "one of the most significant operating systems software investments of all time" and "one of the largest operating system failures in modern times". ==See also==