Last week the OS/2 Museum received a rather interesting donation: a thick spiral bound document titled Third party commitment to IBM’s OS/2 Version 2.0, and labeled IBM COMDEX/SPRING ’92.
The binder is a collection of about 250 press releases that coincided with the release of OS/2 2.0 and also with the COMDEX trade show in early April 1992 (the press releases are dated April 6, 1992). The interesting thing is that each press release is printed on the respective company’s letterhead paper, using a wide range of paper weights and types; it is apparent that each company printed their own press release, mailed it to IBM, and then someone at IBM bound them into an official looking document. It is unclear how many copies of this document were made. There could conceivably be the only one copy in existence.
The document is a veritable who’s who of early 1990s PC world, predominantly software (Adobe, Attachmate, Borland, Citrix, Corel, Ingres, Lotus, Novell, SAP, Symantec, Watcom, WordPerfect, ZSoft) but also hardware (Accton, ATi, Cirrus Logic, Digital, Fujitsu, Intel, Logitech, Matrox, NCR, Racal-Datacom, Tseng). The companies range from one person operations (Hamilton Laboratories) to huge corporations. Only Microsoft was mysteriously missing.
For details, please refer to the scanned OS/2 2.0 third party commitment document.
Scanning the document was a bit of a challenge. The press releases were printed on paper that was not just several different shades of white, but also yellow-ish to yellow, gray, and blue. The scanning software by default treats the light yellow paper as yellowed with age, and tries to turn it to white. I had to turn down the scanner settings to let the images come through more or less unmodified.
The document feeder in my scanner did an excellent job dealing with perforated paper of various thickness. I feared that I would have to feed the sheets into the scanner one by one, but fortunately that was not the case. Very useful given that there were over 270 sheets total.
While checking the scanned document for completeness, I came across a minor mystery. Several of the companies listed in the table of contents were nowhere to be found–for example Snow Software which should be right between Simple Systems Corp. and SofNet. Since the pages are not numbered, it’s impossible to tell if someone tore out the missing press releases, or if they never made it to the binder in the first place.
The document is an interesting piece of history, a snapshot of the PC computing scene in the early 1990s, and IBM’s plans for OS/2 when version 2.0 was released.
Strangely enough, the TOC contains entries for pages that are not included in the document. There’s nothing for Essex Systems, Objective Solutions and Snow Software.
Yes, that is mentioned in the blog post. The pages are just not there. But in the absence of any page numbering, it’s impossible to tell if the pages were ever there.
My personal guess—the missing entries were never there because they didn’t get mailed on time or got stuck in the mail somewhere or lost somewhere on the way.
The only PC manaufacturers are Apricot and NCR, who coincidentally both produced MicroChannel systems at the time.
There’s also DEC and their DECpc.
I wonder how many of the products mentioned in these press releases actually made it to market…
Heh…I looked in the document’s index and found “Softool Corporation.” I then scrolled down to page 231 and found the announcement, dated April 6, 1992, of CCC/Manager for OS/2 2.0.
That was me. I did that. (Rich Hug, VP of the IBM Business Unit, quoted in that press release, was my manager.)
I had been working, with one other developer, on the CCC/Manager product for (16-bit) Windows. I got a beta copy of OS/2 2.0 (including a huge box of documentation), a new workstation, and my own office, and was asked to make CCC/Manager work on OS/2. Pretty heady for an engineer just a couple years out of college by then.
Then, when I had made significant progress towards getting it working, I received another gift: a copy of the Windows NT July 1992 Preliminary SDK, and I was asked to make CCC/Manager work on that as well. I got the same source code to work on both, but it was significantly changed from the original 16-bit source.
Now here’s another irony for you: After I left the company, Softool was acquired by Platinum Technologies…which was acquired by Computer Associates…which was acquired by Broadcom…which later also acquired VMware…which had previously acquired Carbon Black…where I started working a bit over five years ago. So my past eventually caught up with me. 🙂
Cool story, thank you!
Hi Michal Necasek… I think at one time we used to work together.