Ground Control Forum

Hey Russell, it's been a long time since MDA - frankly it seems that Ground Control got farther than the winners did

I was having one of my morning self-rambles in the shower today (yes, I talk to myself in the shower - I have my best ideas in the shower, and I work them out by talking them out...), pondering the ways that IBM's OS/2 Warp influenced modern OS design that no one gives them credit for. I should probably give some background about OS/2 for those unfamiliar with it before I delve into my nonsense. Please pardon the massive off-topic section up next:

<begin offtopic ramble>
-- OS/2 History --

OS/2 was IBM & Microsoft's attempt to replace the aging DOS & Windows platform with a modernized OS, with preemptive multitasking, extended memory support, and most of all, a revolutionary GUI, inspired heavily by the Mac OS desktop. The first versions were command-line only, until OS/2 1.1, which brought the Desktop Manager, which was built and designed by Microsoft. For those unfamiliar with the events happened next, it's one of the computing industry's most fiendish betrayals ever.

Unbeknownst to IBM, MS had been building its own successor to the DOS/Windows platform. A skunk works team, led by the genius software engineer Dave Cutler, had built a brand-new OS kernel from the ground up, because Microsoft had felt that IBM was taking too long in developing OS/2, and wanted out of their agreement. The result of this secret project was Windows NT, a brand new kernel featuring all of the technical advances that OS/2 promised, but featuring the ability to run old Windows programs. When they revealed this to the world, they broke off the development of OS/2 2.0 with IBM and went on their own way.

IBM was left with two options - scrap the project and write off the millions poured into it, or jump headlong into it and try and beat MS at their own game. They chose the latter. They threw out the work MS had done on the Desktop Manager (which had already been appropriated by MS for their future projects - you may know it as Win 3.0/3.1's Program Manager), and conducted research studies on UI design, bringing in focus groups to find what a modern UI should feature. If you've ever heard of IBM's Boca Raton research lab, that group was focused on building "a better Windows than Windows."

The result was OS/2 2.0's Workplace Shell - a revolution in GUI design. It took advantage of OS/2 2.0's fully 32-bit underpinnings to offer a bright, vividly-colored interface, with some of the best functionality of both Windows and Mac OS combined.

Later releases of OS/2 added even more GUI revolutions: 3.0 ("Warp") brought the LaunchPad, which was similar to the Dock of NeXT/OS X. However, the LaunchPad built on the NeXT Dock, which only allowed one to launch programs, by allowing users to add files, folders, and drives to the launcher, so they could be accessed quickly at anytime. (I'm sure you'll note that this functionality is part of the OS X Aqua interface, which premiered 5 years after OS/2's LaunchPad... Coincidence? I leave it to you to decide.)

<end offtopic ramble – begin actually useful content>


Warp 4.0 brought another major innovation – the one which is the entire point for this post. Warp 4.0’s major UI feature was the WarpCenter. Resembling the Windows 95 Taskbar, the WarpCenter brought a great deal more functionality. It showed the amount of disk free space on each partition, allowed 1-button logout and screen locking, and had links to system settings. It also had several applets that could be engaged by clicking an icon on the bar – the applets would then pop up, hanging off the WarpCenter. While it was a largely textual and tiny icon display (Warp 4.0 dates back to 1997-1998, when screens with higher resolutions than 1024x768 were essentially non-existent, and graphics hardware couldn’t handle higher resolutions anyway.), it was, in my opinion, the spiritual ancestor to Ground Control.

I believe this is the reason I am so enthusiastic about Ground Control, even though its status is pretty much DOA right now. I come from a Big Blue family – the first computer I had in my room was a PCjr, and I upgraded through three more IBM systems before defecting to Dell when I bought my own computer in 2004. I was raised as a MS hater, and moreover, as an OS/2 lover. While Windows 95 wouldn’t run on my second computer (an IBM PS/2 built on MicroChannel, yet another lovely IBM proprietary standard – it was their answer to the ISA standard. It also had been upgraded from a 33MHz 486 to a blazingly-fast 66MHz IBM Blue Lightning processor – ahh, the good ol’ days.), OS/2 Warp ran perfectly. Pair that with the fact that my father brought home pre-release copies of Warp 4 (the words IBM Confidential bring back so many memories…), and I was a kid in a candy store. (Mind you, this was back when I was 8. I was a quick learner, you might say…)

The WarpCenter was one of my favorite features of the Workplace Shell, and it is one that has never quite been implemented in any current OS. OS X has the Menu Extras for quick access to settings, Windows has the System Tray for similar functionality, and there are various third party utilities to display current system status, but no single system or program has really brought it all together the way OS/2 4.0 did. I spent the past decade searching subconsciously for something similar, but never quite finding anything that fit.

That is, until I saw Ground Control.

Ground Control is the logical extrapolation one might make of what OS/2’s WarpCenter would look like today had IBM continued developing OS/2. With the glassy interface, fully-extensible nature, and design around immediate information display, GC is the first “HUD” I’ve seen that matches the WarpCenter in simplicity, power, and customization.


I know this bizarre, obscenely long (in Word, it currently stretches to three pages), rather off-topic post doesn’t add much to the discussion on GC (which is non-existent right now – last post on this forum was 6 months ago. I get the feeling I might just be talking to myself – and this time not in the shower ), but I just wanted to find some way to put in words why I find Ground Control so appealing. Even in the post-Leopard world, Apple has still not met my needs – instant search is great, but I need something that will “push” info to me, rather than requiring me to “pull” info from the system. The WarpCenter was that for me, and maybe someday, Ground Control will be too.


P.S. Here are some screen captures of OS/2 Warp 4.0, with the WarpCenter at the top of the screen:





And some links to OS/2 & Workplace Shell information:

http://www.guidebookgallery.org/guis/os2
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS/2
http://toastytech.com/guis/os24.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_User_Access - The design principles behind the Workplace Shell, describes some of IBM's research finding about GUI design, fascinating stuff