> and the only drivers were for IBM printers. It's all about the drivers. No OS will get seats without drivers. People always say that no OS will get seats w

> and the only drivers were for IBM printers. It's all about the drivers. No OS will get seats without drivers. People always say that no OS will get seats without applications, which is also true. But because people see that problem, a big company trying to launch an OS, or a migration, will go out of their way to get the important applications. The lack of drivers is more under the radar. So then people are shocked when their shiny new OS doesn't get uptake because too little hardware works with it. Speaking of drivers.... didn't OS/2 drivers run at ring 1? The X86 architecture (and only a few others) support more than 2 rings of security. Most OS's don't bother using more than ring 0 for kernel and ring 3 for user space because then portability will be hamstrung. But OS/2 did not have the BSOD problem of Windows. By far the most common BSOD in the Win95 days was a 0x0E exception -- page fault in the kernel, the fault of a buggy driver that forgot to wire down a page before doing a slow I/O operation. A page fault in ring 1 is valid, and the kernel can handle it.