8 ms·

The superior OS that was eventually killed by the inferior Windows 95. OS/2 did a lot right. The integrated Windows-Environment was initially better than native

The superior OS that was eventually killed by the inferior Windows 95. OS/2 did a lot right. The integrated Windows-Environment was initially better than native Windows: better process isolation (remember Windows 3.1's cooperative multitasking aka "hangs one hangs all"?), more DOS freespace. The next thing I liked and adopted was Windows 2000, the less-sucking NT. We have come a long way since then!

geocar 9y ago
It also got a lot wrong: OS/2 also had a single threaded event queue the entire time it was a contender. It was also very expensive.
- simonh 9y ago
  We can't have it competing with 'proper' operating systems on IBM proprietary hardware though, can we?
- danieldk 9y ago
  Indeed and a very limited number of drivers, which were also 16-bit (as described in the linked article). I used OS/2 2.1, 3.0, 4.5 and eComStation (latest stint was probably at the beginning of the century). It was a profoundly singly-user system that crashed quite often, putting it pretty much on par with Windows 95/98/ME. Windows NT 4, FreeBSD, and even BeOS were far more stable and modern operating systems than OS/2. NT 4 also had far better application support than OS/2 and BeOS had the nicer GUI, filesystem, better multithreading, etc. Although OS/2 is a bit of youth nostalgia for me, anyone with an objective view would acknowledge that OS/2 was a 16/32-bit patchwork single-user OS that was not ready for the future. Microsoft made the right choice ejecting itself from the project and running with what was originally planned to be OS/2 3.0.
- magoon 9y ago
  Microsoft convinced IBM to use a single message queue despite protest from IBM. Perhaps they were purposely sabatoging the effort, as they clearly wanted their 386 fork (which became Windows NT) to have the upper hand.
  - mcguire 9y ago
    Anecdotally, that was kind of the feeling at IBM about several of the misfeatures of OS/2 in 1990-92, when I worked there with OS/2. Typical conversation: "Why the hell does..." "Microsoft." "Right."
    - JdeBP 9y ago
      And the feeling of mis-features being the other company's fault was mutual. Microsoft people viewed the introduction of more UNIX-like features into MS-DOS/PC-DOS 2 as happening despite the strenuous objections of IBM, for example. People do this. I've seen this happen in places that have nothing to do with IBM or Microsoft. Problems and misfeatures are all the fault of that group of incompetent outsiders in that company over there that we have a business deal with. It is rarely actually true, in my experience.
  - yuhong 9y ago
    In any case, it probably wasn't that hard to fix and OS/2 2.0 would have been a good time to fix it.
- koffiezet 9y ago
  I first used OS/2 2(.11 I think), which was expensive (but my dad bought it). OS/2 3.0 Warp on the other hand was given away for free with a ton of computer magazines...
- JdeBP 9y ago
  > OS/2 also had a single threaded event queue This is another myth, long since debunked (I saw this one debunked in the early 1990s.) to resurface here all of these years later. OS/2 had multithreaded input handling. Every application had its own event queue. Indeed, Presentation Manager allowed every thread in every application, that actually used Presentation Manager, to have its own event queue. A PM thread first created an "anchor block", then using (its handle to) that anchor block created a message queue. What OS/2 had was synchronous input handling. Windows NT has desynchronized input handling. The idea that "OS/2 had a single input queue" whereas "Windows NT has multiple input queues" is an erroneous one based upon an erroneous description of the twain. In fact, both Windows NT and OS/2 have a single system input queue. In Windows NT, this is called the raw input queue, and by the same erroneous logic that OS/2 "had a single input queue" so too does Windows NT, because the queue that people point to as the supposed reason that OS/2 had one queue is the OS/2 equivalent of that raw input queue. It is not the number of queues, and never has been the number of queues. Presentation Manager had multiple event queues. It is the synchronous nature of processing input events versus the desynchronized way of processing them. This deals not in the number of queues at all, but in how the GUI model copes with things that need synchronization amongst multiple applications, such as (for example) all of the messages that fly about under the covers (amongst those multiple queues) as part of a keyboard focus change.
  - geocar 9y ago
    Something else OS/2 got wrong: Thinking anyone cared about the difference between one linked-list or ten linked-lists with a single producer.
Razengan 9y ago
NeXTSTEP seems to have been far ahead of Windows 95 too. I wonder how far Microsoft would have gotten if Steve Jobs hadn't left Apple for a while. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTSTEP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTSTEP Bonus irony: The pioneering PC games Wolfenstein 3D, Doom (with its WAD level editor), Doom II, and Quake (with its respective level editor) were developed by id Software on NeXT machines.
- QSIITurbo 9y ago
  Apple would've gone nowhere with their pricing with NeXT. NeXT station was basically a Silicon Graphics workstation for developers and cost 8000, about four times as much as a high-end gaming PC that would run Win31 Word and Excel with no problems. So not a computer for the masses. I see the pricing problem happening to OS X at the moment. MS has excelled in getting price, (backwards) compatibility and system requirements correctly. That's why they moved slowly at the time and still do in some regards. OS/2 was merged into Windows NT which is what almost everyone is using on desktop these day. IBM even tried giving OS/2 for free (Warp or 2.1, can't remember, you could get it by sending a coupon to the publisher), but the lack of compatibility and system requirements killed it. I remember booting it on a 486/33 + 8MB, yuck. Contrast that to almost instant startup of DOS and the requirements of an ordinary user. Also, IBM sold PS/2 (or something like that) with OS/2 preinstalled... It booted like forever and there was zero software available for the home-user.
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    > Also, IBM sold PS/2 (or something like that) with OS/2 preinstalled... It booted like forever and there was zero software available for the home-user. And was like 500 € (on today's money) more expensive than a PC compatible with similar specs.
    - brudgers 9y ago
      The big thing the PS/2 had going at introduction was 80386 chips. The big limitation over the long term for consumers was MicroChannel which limited flexibility in configuring systems due to fewer total options; higher prices; and no commodity market for expansion cards.
Esau 9y ago
OS/2, Nextstep, and BeOS were all better than Windows (IMO) and none of them succeeded. Some of it was missteps by the OS vendor but not to be forgotten was Microsoft's deals with PC makers that locked out competition.
- huxley 9y ago
  NEXTSTEP evolved into MacOS X and iOS so it wasn't a total failure
- candiodari 9y ago
  It didn't help that OS2/2.0 actually had higher system requirements than Windows 95. And a higher price. OS2/2.0 required a 386 with 8M memory. Windows 95 only required 4M memory. In practice of course Windows 95's real competition was OS2 Warp after a year or so, and it was even less of a competition. OS2, incidentally would barely run on 8M ram. It was ... workable, but with WordPerfect open in windows 3.0 with a large document, it was not enjoyable. In practice OS2 required 12M memory. Windows 95 with 4M ram was very slow to start, but once started it ran WordPerfect quite acceptably on 4M RAM. It's not quite as bad as those people wondering how windows could possibly have beat the superior unix. Problem is that, like with OS2, windows was quite superior to Unix and OS2 in features available to end users, and the price for those. It provided far more value (things you could do with your pc) for any price. Unless you were developing compilers, perhaps. When comparing value for money, Windows won by a landslide. OS2 and Unix were superior in theoretical and academic features. And today, the reverse is true. Windows actually is a microkernel with message passing. It's not as tiny as something like L4, but it's much smaller than Linux. Microsoft was much more on-point when it came to what the market needed. Today, windows has the academically "superior" kernel. And it matters about as much today as it mattered in 1995.
  - yuhong 9y ago
    MS had to spend a lot of effort fitting Win95 in 4MB. Of course, the Workplace Shell consumed memory too. This is about old builds that used the UI of OS/2 1.2/1.3
  - temac 9y ago
frozenport 9y ago
Except that it crashed a lot.
- mcguire 9y ago
  OS/2 was pretty robust, when I was using it. The front end shell was pretty easy to crash, but the OS would stay up. Unlike Windows NT, which I blue screened when I sat down in front of it that first time.
tzs 9y ago
> The superior OS that was eventually killed by the inferior Windows 95. I'd say it was more killed by IBM's woefully inadequate developer support and indifference to serious marketing. Windows 95 just happened to be the first thing better than Win 3.1 that came along and was actually supported and marketed, and so by default took the market that could have been IBM's. Some examples of how poorly IBM handled developers and marketing. • A columnist in Byte (if I recall correctly...probably Jerry Pournelle) wrote of visiting a major trade show where both Microsoft and IBM had booths. This was after Warp launched, and before Windows 95 launched. He went to the IBM booth, where they were promoting Warp, and asked what he needed to do in order to develop for it. They told him he needed to become a registered developer to get access to the tools and documentation, and give him an application to fill out. The application required explaining in detail what you proposed to developer for Warp, and your business plan, and so on. Fill all that out, and if IBM deemed you worthy you would be allowed to spend a lot of money to buy the SDK. He then went to the IBM booth and ask what he needed to do to develop for Windows 95. Microsoft handed him a CD with the tools and documentation on it. • Later, once both operating systems were out, Microsoft continued to make it much easier for developers to get on board. I remember walking into Egghead (a major retail software store in the '90s for those too young to remember when we actually bought software from brick and mortar stores) and seeing for sale at retail Microsoft's Visual C++ and MSDN. You could just walk into Newegg, put down some cash, and walk out with everything you need to get started writing software on you Windows 95 box. How about for OS/2? Nothing from IBM. You could buy Watcom C/C++, which was cross platform (it supported DOS, Win 3.x, Win 95, Win NT, some 32-bit DOS extenders, and OS/2, and maybe even Novell Netware), and Watcom had licensed a subset of the OS/2 developer documentation and included it on the Watcom CD, so you could at least get reasonably started, but you'd be back to applying to IBM for developer status if you wanted to go farther. • There was very little promotion of OS/2 at retail. Walk into Egghead or Computer City or CompUSA and you'd find the latest Windows on an endcap near the front of the store. You'd find OS/2 on the bottom shelf in the darkest corner in the most remote part of the store. Why? Because IBM did not pay for in-store promotion of OS/2. In retail stores shelf placement is for sale. You want your product on an endcap, or on a chest height shelf in a high traffic part of the store? You get that by paying for an in-store promotion campaign. • Microsoft would watch what new things developers were doing for Windows 95, and would pick some and promote them. Microsoft understood that it was applications that people wanted, not operating systems, so promoting Windows 95 only applications that people would want also promoted Windows 95. IBM did much less of this. I recall a little of it for some business software, but they didn't do much for consumer software, especially games. Overall IBM seemed pretty indifferent to what most OS/2 developers were doing. • This doesn't fall under developer support or marketing, but another big problem was hardware support. I remember at one point I was trying to multi-boot between Windows, OS/2, Linux, and FreeBSD, and it was going fine for everything except OS/2. I could not get OS/2 to go beyond 640x480 with my video card. I went down to Computer City and bought another card that supposedly had better OS/2 support. No luck. CC had a good exchange policy so I swapped that for something else. Nope. I had to go through many cards before finally finding one that worked. Most of the cards had been fine in Linux and FreeBSD (and of course Windows). It was only OS/2 that was a nightmare. IBM's attitude on hardware seemed to be "We're IBM. We're big and important! So all you hardware manufacturers need to sign up to our device developer programs and then write drivers for your hardware!". The hardware manufacturers attitude was "Yeah, we'll get right on that...when you've got a significant market share". IBM should have have made a list of the top 5 or 10 graphic cards, network cards, sound cards, and so on, and put together a group within the OS/2 group that would sign up for the appropriate developer programs from those card's manufacturers, and then write OS/2 drivers for those cards to ship with OS/2. Someone whose computer contained cards that were all top 10 in their category should have been able to run OS/2 out of the box. In fact, that "We're IBM. We're big and important!" attitude seemed to permeate their entire handling of OS/2. They expected us to beat a path to their door and beg for the privilege to develop for, sell, or use OS/2. Microsoft (and Apple, BTW) had much better attitude. • What's really annoying about all this is that Warp was out well before Windows 95, and Warp did an excellent job of running DOS and Windows 3 software. When I had to do DOS or Windows development back then I did it on Warp because it made a better DOS and Windows development and test environment than did native DOS and Windows. Microsoft was starting to tout the advantages of 32-bit software ahead of the Windows 95 launch in order to push people toward upgrading. IBM should have jumped all over that, pointing out that you didn't need to wait for Windows 95 to get 32-bit. Get Warp now and you can start using 32-bit now, while keeping all your current 16-bit stuff. Position it as having all the 32-bit advantages of Windows 95, but with better support for your existing 16-bit stuff.
drsim 9y ago
OS/2 Warp was extremely slow to boot on my 486DX2-66 (16MB RAM if I remember correctly). It was our family's first computer and the joke was we could turn the computer on, make a cup of tea and do a bunch of chores before it was ready to use. Hardly any software (not to mention games!) was available for OS/2. We only used Lotus natively. The fact you could run Windows 3.11 from within OS/2 saved it from being discarded earlier. I set up dual boot into Windows 3.11 and it loaded an order of magnitude faster. OS/2 was perhaps technically architected better, but for real-world home use: useless.
yuhong 9y ago
The entire OS/2 2.0 fiasco is one of my favorite topics. One thing I'd like to point out is that Win95's dependence on DOS allowed Caldera to continue to sue MS.

geocar 9y ago

It also got a lot wrong: OS/2 also had a single threaded event queue the entire time it was a contender. It was also very expensive.

simonh 9y ago
We can't have it competing with 'proper' operating systems on IBM proprietary hardware though, can we?
danieldk 9y ago
Indeed and a very limited number of drivers, which were also 16-bit (as described in the linked article). I used OS/2 2.1, 3.0, 4.5 and eComStation (latest stint was probably at the beginning of the century). It was a profoundly singly-user system that crashed quite often, putting it pretty much on par with Windows 95/98/ME. Windows NT 4, FreeBSD, and even BeOS were far more stable and modern operating systems than OS/2. NT 4 also had far better application support than OS/2 and BeOS had the nicer GUI, filesystem, better multithreading, etc. Although OS/2 is a bit of youth nostalgia for me, anyone with an objective view would acknowledge that OS/2 was a 16/32-bit patchwork single-user OS that was not ready for the future. Microsoft made the right choice ejecting itself from the project and running with what was originally planned to be OS/2 3.0.
magoon 9y ago
Microsoft convinced IBM to use a single message queue despite protest from IBM. Perhaps they were purposely sabatoging the effort, as they clearly wanted their 386 fork (which became Windows NT) to have the upper hand.
- mcguire 9y ago
  Anecdotally, that was kind of the feeling at IBM about several of the misfeatures of OS/2 in 1990-92, when I worked there with OS/2. Typical conversation: "Why the hell does..." "Microsoft." "Right."
  - JdeBP 9y ago
    And the feeling of mis-features being the other company's fault was mutual. Microsoft people viewed the introduction of more UNIX-like features into MS-DOS/PC-DOS 2 as happening despite the strenuous objections of IBM, for example. People do this. I've seen this happen in places that have nothing to do with IBM or Microsoft. Problems and misfeatures are all the fault of that group of incompetent outsiders in that company over there that we have a business deal with. It is rarely actually true, in my experience.
- yuhong 9y ago
  In any case, it probably wasn't that hard to fix and OS/2 2.0 would have been a good time to fix it.
koffiezet 9y ago
I first used OS/2 2(.11 I think), which was expensive (but my dad bought it). OS/2 3.0 Warp on the other hand was given away for free with a ton of computer magazines...
JdeBP 9y ago
> OS/2 also had a single threaded event queue This is another myth, long since debunked (I saw this one debunked in the early 1990s.) to resurface here all of these years later. OS/2 had multithreaded input handling. Every application had its own event queue. Indeed, Presentation Manager allowed every thread in every application, that actually used Presentation Manager, to have its own event queue. A PM thread first created an "anchor block", then using (its handle to) that anchor block created a message queue. What OS/2 had was synchronous input handling. Windows NT has desynchronized input handling. The idea that "OS/2 had a single input queue" whereas "Windows NT has multiple input queues" is an erroneous one based upon an erroneous description of the twain. In fact, both Windows NT and OS/2 have a single system input queue. In Windows NT, this is called the raw input queue, and by the same erroneous logic that OS/2 "had a single input queue" so too does Windows NT, because the queue that people point to as the supposed reason that OS/2 had one queue is the OS/2 equivalent of that raw input queue. It is not the number of queues, and never has been the number of queues. Presentation Manager had multiple event queues. It is the synchronous nature of processing input events versus the desynchronized way of processing them. This deals not in the number of queues at all, but in how the GUI model copes with things that need synchronization amongst multiple applications, such as (for example) all of the messages that fly about under the covers (amongst those multiple queues) as part of a keyboard focus change.
- geocar 9y ago
  Something else OS/2 got wrong: Thinking anyone cared about the difference between one linked-list or ten linked-lists with a single producer.

Razengan 9y ago

NeXTSTEP seems to have been far ahead of Windows 95 too. I wonder how far Microsoft would have gotten if Steve Jobs hadn't left Apple for a while. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTSTEP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTSTEP Bonus irony: The pioneering PC games Wolfenstein 3D, Doom (with its WAD level editor), Doom II, and Quake (with its respective level editor) were developed by id Software on NeXT machines.

QSIITurbo 9y ago
Apple would've gone nowhere with their pricing with NeXT. NeXT station was basically a Silicon Graphics workstation for developers and cost 8000, about four times as much as a high-end gaming PC that would run Win31 Word and Excel with no problems. So not a computer for the masses. I see the pricing problem happening to OS X at the moment. MS has excelled in getting price, (backwards) compatibility and system requirements correctly. That's why they moved slowly at the time and still do in some regards. OS/2 was merged into Windows NT which is what almost everyone is using on desktop these day. IBM even tried giving OS/2 for free (Warp or 2.1, can't remember, you could get it by sending a coupon to the publisher), but the lack of compatibility and system requirements killed it. I remember booting it on a 486/33 + 8MB, yuck. Contrast that to almost instant startup of DOS and the requirements of an ordinary user. Also, IBM sold PS/2 (or something like that) with OS/2 preinstalled... It booted like forever and there was zero software available for the home-user.
- pjmlp 9y ago
  > Also, IBM sold PS/2 (or something like that) with OS/2 preinstalled... It booted like forever and there was zero software available for the home-user. And was like 500 € (on today's money) more expensive than a PC compatible with similar specs.
  - brudgers 9y ago
    The big thing the PS/2 had going at introduction was 80386 chips. The big limitation over the long term for consumers was MicroChannel which limited flexibility in configuring systems due to fewer total options; higher prices; and no commodity market for expansion cards.

Esau 9y ago

OS/2, Nextstep, and BeOS were all better than Windows (IMO) and none of them succeeded. Some of it was missteps by the OS vendor but not to be forgotten was Microsoft's deals with PC makers that locked out competition.

huxley 9y ago
NEXTSTEP evolved into MacOS X and iOS so it wasn't a total failure
candiodari 9y ago
It didn't help that OS2/2.0 actually had higher system requirements than Windows 95. And a higher price. OS2/2.0 required a 386 with 8M memory. Windows 95 only required 4M memory. In practice of course Windows 95's real competition was OS2 Warp after a year or so, and it was even less of a competition. OS2, incidentally would barely run on 8M ram. It was ... workable, but with WordPerfect open in windows 3.0 with a large document, it was not enjoyable. In practice OS2 required 12M memory. Windows 95 with 4M ram was very slow to start, but once started it ran WordPerfect quite acceptably on 4M RAM. It's not quite as bad as those people wondering how windows could possibly have beat the superior unix. Problem is that, like with OS2, windows was quite superior to Unix and OS2 in features available to end users, and the price for those. It provided far more value (things you could do with your pc) for any price. Unless you were developing compilers, perhaps. When comparing value for money, Windows won by a landslide. OS2 and Unix were superior in theoretical and academic features. And today, the reverse is true. Windows actually is a microkernel with message passing. It's not as tiny as something like L4, but it's much smaller than Linux. Microsoft was much more on-point when it came to what the market needed. Today, windows has the academically "superior" kernel. And it matters about as much today as it mattered in 1995.
- yuhong 9y ago
  MS had to spend a lot of effort fitting Win95 in 4MB. Of course, the Workplace Shell consumed memory too. This is about old builds that used the UI of OS/2 1.2/1.3
- temac 9y ago

frozenport 9y ago

Except that it crashed a lot.

mcguire 9y ago
OS/2 was pretty robust, when I was using it. The front end shell was pretty easy to crash, but the OS would stay up. Unlike Windows NT, which I blue screened when I sat down in front of it that first time.

tzs 9y ago

> The superior OS that was eventually killed by the inferior Windows 95. I'd say it was more killed by IBM's woefully inadequate developer support and indifference to serious marketing. Windows 95 just happened to be the first thing better than Win 3.1 that came along and was actually supported and marketed, and so by default took the market that could have been IBM's. Some examples of how poorly IBM handled developers and marketing. • A columnist in Byte (if I recall correctly...probably Jerry Pournelle) wrote of visiting a major trade show where both Microsoft and IBM had booths. This was after Warp launched, and before Windows 95 launched. He went to the IBM booth, where they were promoting Warp, and asked what he needed to do in order to develop for it. They told him he needed to become a registered developer to get access to the tools and documentation, and give him an application to fill out. The application required explaining in detail what you proposed to developer for Warp, and your business plan, and so on. Fill all that out, and if IBM deemed you worthy you would be allowed to spend a lot of money to buy the SDK. He then went to the IBM booth and ask what he needed to do to develop for Windows 95. Microsoft handed him a CD with the tools and documentation on it. • Later, once both operating systems were out, Microsoft continued to make it much easier for developers to get on board. I remember walking into Egghead (a major retail software store in the '90s for those too young to remember when we actually bought software from brick and mortar stores) and seeing for sale at retail Microsoft's Visual C++ and MSDN. You could just walk into Newegg, put down some cash, and walk out with everything you need to get started writing software on you Windows 95 box. How about for OS/2? Nothing from IBM. You could buy Watcom C/C++, which was cross platform (it supported DOS, Win 3.x, Win 95, Win NT, some 32-bit DOS extenders, and OS/2, and maybe even Novell Netware), and Watcom had licensed a subset of the OS/2 developer documentation and included it on the Watcom CD, so you could at least get reasonably started, but you'd be back to applying to IBM for developer status if you wanted to go farther. • There was very little promotion of OS/2 at retail. Walk into Egghead or Computer City or CompUSA and you'd find the latest Windows on an endcap near the front of the store. You'd find OS/2 on the bottom shelf in the darkest corner in the most remote part of the store. Why? Because IBM did not pay for in-store promotion of OS/2. In retail stores shelf placement is for sale. You want your product on an endcap, or on a chest height shelf in a high traffic part of the store? You get that by paying for an in-store promotion campaign. • Microsoft would watch what new things developers were doing for Windows 95, and would pick some and promote them. Microsoft understood that it was applications that people wanted, not operating systems, so promoting Windows 95 only applications that people would want also promoted Windows 95. IBM did much less of this. I recall a little of it for some business software, but they didn't do much for consumer software, especially games. Overall IBM seemed pretty indifferent to what most OS/2 developers were doing. • This doesn't fall under developer support or marketing, but another big problem was hardware support. I remember at one point I was trying to multi-boot between Windows, OS/2, Linux, and FreeBSD, and it was going fine for everything except OS/2. I could not get OS/2 to go beyond 640x480 with my video card. I went down to Computer City and bought another card that supposedly had better OS/2 support. No luck. CC had a good exchange policy so I swapped that for something else. Nope. I had to go through many cards before finally finding one that worked. Most of the cards had been fine in Linux and FreeBSD (and of course Windows). It was only OS/2 that was a nightmare. IBM's attitude on hardware seemed to be "We're IBM. We're big and important! So all you hardware manufacturers need to sign up to our device developer programs and then write drivers for your hardware!". The hardware manufacturers attitude was "Yeah, we'll get right on that...when you've got a significant market share". IBM should have have made a list of the top 5 or 10 graphic cards, network cards, sound cards, and so on, and put together a group within the OS/2 group that would sign up for the appropriate developer programs from those card's manufacturers, and then write OS/2 drivers for those cards to ship with OS/2. Someone whose computer contained cards that were all top 10 in their category should have been able to run OS/2 out of the box. In fact, that "We're IBM. We're big and important!" attitude seemed to permeate their entire handling of OS/2. They expected us to beat a path to their door and beg for the privilege to develop for, sell, or use OS/2. Microsoft (and Apple, BTW) had much better attitude. • What's really annoying about all this is that Warp was out well before Windows 95, and Warp did an excellent job of running DOS and Windows 3 software. When I had to do DOS or Windows development back then I did it on Warp because it made a better DOS and Windows development and test environment than did native DOS and Windows. Microsoft was starting to tout the advantages of 32-bit software ahead of the Windows 95 launch in order to push people toward upgrading. IBM should have jumped all over that, pointing out that you didn't need to wait for Windows 95 to get 32-bit. Get Warp now and you can start using 32-bit now, while keeping all your current 16-bit stuff. Position it as having all the 32-bit advantages of Windows 95, but with better support for your existing 16-bit stuff.

drsim 9y ago

OS/2 Warp was extremely slow to boot on my 486DX2-66 (16MB RAM if I remember correctly). It was our family's first computer and the joke was we could turn the computer on, make a cup of tea and do a bunch of chores before it was ready to use. Hardly any software (not to mention games!) was available for OS/2. We only used Lotus natively. The fact you could run Windows 3.11 from within OS/2 saved it from being discarded earlier. I set up dual boot into Windows 3.11 and it loaded an order of magnitude faster. OS/2 was perhaps technically architected better, but for real-world home use: useless.

yuhong 9y ago

The entire OS/2 2.0 fiasco is one of my favorite topics. One thing I'd like to point out is that Win95's dependence on DOS allowed Caldera to continue to sue MS.