MS OS/2 Videos

From Open Watcom

Contents 1 Introduction 2 The Tapes 3 Videos 4 Notes

Introduction

In the second half of 1987, Microsoft held a series of OS/2 Software Developers Conferences. The conferences were geared towards ISVs interested in porting existing applications or writing new applications for the upcoming OS/2 operating system.

The first conference was held in June 1987, several months before OS/2 was officially released (December 1987). At that point, the features and most of OS/2's implementation have crystallized, with the exception of the GUI. The Presentation Manager was not released until November 1988 as part of OS/2 1.1.

Sidebar: For those unfamiliar with history, it may be worth pointing out that OS/2 was co-developed by IBM and Microsoft, based on their Joint Development Agreement signed in 1985. Much like with DOS versions prior to 5.0, Microsoft did not sell OS/2 directly to end users. Instead, OEMs could license OS/2 from Microsoft to ship with their hardware. IBM, on the other hand, did sell OS/2 directly.

The Tapes

Microsoft provided attendees of the OS/2 Software Developers Conference with video recordings of the speakers. There were eight VHS tapes; the content of the tapes is now available for download. The videos were recorded at a rehearsal for speakers shortly before the conference in Seattle which was scheduled for June 2-4, 1987 (see original press release).

There are two sets of videos available, low-bandwidth and high-bandwidth. The low-bandwidth videos, predictably, use more aggressive compression to achieve smaller file sizes at the cost of quality.

The high-bandwidth videos are in original video quality, that is to say, the quality of 20-year old NTSC VHS tapes, back from the day when things like VHS tapes were still Made in USA. All the noise, fuzziness, ghosting, blurry images, and hissy audio is present on the original tapes. Due to the idiosyncrasies of NTSC color coding (Never The Same Color), the hue may be slightly off. The original tapes do have inexplicably varying quality and some look a lot better than others. However, the overall quality is quite acceptable, with imperfect yet clear audio and slightly blurry yet legible text in the video.

The content of individual video segments has varying relevance two decades later. Steve Ballmer's opening segment is worth seeing, if only for its historical value. Mark Mackaman's talk gives a good picture of what OS/2 1.x was. Gordon Letwin's talks explain many aspects of OS/2 design and implementation that are not immediately obvious. Manny Valen's talks are less interesting, but do show Windows 2.0 in all its glory (or lack thereof). John Butler's long talk might still be of interest to OS/2 GPI developers, since the design of GPI (Graphics Programming Interface) has not changed much since its inception. Mel Kanner's talks are probably least relevant, since they deal with the nuts and bolts of 16-bit OS/2 application development, although the information on GUI application development is still applicable. John Pollock's talks may be of interest to OS/2 GUI developers, because they explain how the Presentation Manager works. Mark Zbikowski's talk should be interesting to OS/2 device driver developers, since the physical device driver interface changed only little, and most of the concepts are still valid (with the exception of real-mode support). The most interesting point of Darryl Rubin's talk may be a mention of the almost unknown Multitasking MS-DOS 4.0, also known as OEM MS-DOS 4 (not the same thing as PC-DOS/MS-DOS 4.0!).

Videos

Following is a listing of the VHS tape contents. The descriptions were taken from the original tapes and the listed running times may not be entirely accurate. To view the videos, you will need a computer capable of playing AVI files and have DivX video and MPEG Layer III audio codecs installed. The videos are known to be viewable on Windows and Mac OS X.

• Tape 1
  • A. Introduction (Steve Ballmer: 37:50) - high quality, 199MB or low quality, 47MB
  • B. Overview of OS/2 (Mark Mackaman: 42:40) - high quality, 188MB or low quality, 36MB
• Tape 2
  • C. System Foundation (Gordon Letwin: 56:51) - high quality, 211MB or low quality, 52MB
  • D. I/O Services and the Family API (Anthony Short: 45:46) - high quality, 164MB or low quality, 37MB
• Tape 3
  • E. Introduction to the User Interface (Manny Vellon: 42:48) - high quality, 225MB or low quality, 42MB
  • F. OS/2 Device Drivers (Mark Zbikowski: 31:50) - high quality, 126MB or low quality, 29MB
• Tape 4
  • G. OS/2 Programming Model (John Pollock: 32:00) - high quality, 102MB or low quality, 27MB
  • H. Application Architecture (Mel Kanner: 57:50) - high quality, 206MB or low quality, 51MB
• Tape 5
  • I. OS/2 Design Concepts (Gordon Letwin: 42:00) - high quality, 263MB or low quality, 58MB
  • J. Building Your Application--The Mechanics (Mel Kanner: 62:27) - high quality, 281MB or low quality, 57MB
• Tape 6
  • K. OS/2 Application Services (John Pollock: 42:00) - high quality, 146MB or low quality, 36MB
  • L. Support Services (Kent Sander: 17:54) - high quality, 103MB or low quality, 15MB
  • M. Windows 2.0 vs. Windows Presentation Manager (Manny Vellon: 55:06) - high quality, 237MB or low quality, 57MB
• Tape 7
  • N. Device-independent Graphics for OS/2 (John Butler: 118:34) - high quality, 342MB or low quality, 95MB
• Tape 8
  • N. Device-independent Graphics for OS/2 (continued) (John Butler: 21:00) - high quality, 79MB or low quality, 18MB
  • O. LAN Manager (Darryl Rubin: 77:00) - high quality, 314MB or low quality, 65MB

Notes

If you have additional information about the conference, or perhaps even attended it, you are most welcome to add to this page.

For the curious, here is a list of the equipment used in digitizing the tapes:

• Sony SLV-E9 VCR with NTSC 4.43 aka PAL60 support
• ATI Radeon X1950XT graphics card with ViVo
• A home-built PC with Intel Core 2 Duo CPU
• VirtualDub running on Windows 2000 Professional
• LAME mp3 audio and Xvid video compressors