When I gave up on my Amiga, I thought hard about OS/2; but I was a college kid without a ton of disposable income, so I built a DIY PC and stuck a $99 OEM copy

When I gave up on my Amiga, I thought hard about OS/2; but I was a college kid without a ton of disposable income, so I built a DIY PC and stuck a $99 OEM copy of Windows 95 on it. Soon after that I switched to Linux, and rarely looked back (I've almost always had at least one PC laying around that could boot to Windows for audio work and games). Rexx was one of the reasons I liked the looks of OS/2. ARexx had been shipping with Amiga OS since 2.04, and while I only occasionally used it directly, it enabled a lot of cool stuff between applications (directly sharing data between apps was neat, and ahead of its time). Honestly, I don't think UNIX was actually better on that front, at the time. I never actually used it on OS/2, but on Amiga OS it was sort of universally accepted as The Way for applications to interact and for users to automate their applications. Even today, we have tons of scripting languages, often integrated into bigger applications, but not a lot of standardization between them. So, there's a lot of friction in getting a program that uses, say, Lua as its scripting and automation language, to communicate with a program that uses, say Scheme or Python or Perl or Ruby. UNIX had the command line with pipes paradigm, which I guess was universal-ish, but didn't play well with big GUI apps. So, yeah, Rexx was pretty neat, for sure. It might even be a useful source of inspiration today (even if the language is a little clunky compared to modern scripting languages).