> Windows (though technically inferior to OS/2 in many respects, at least until Windows 95) In many respects maybe, but which aspects matter for success is hig

> Windows (though technically inferior to OS/2 in many respects, at least until Windows 95) In many respects maybe, but which aspects matter for success is highly contextual, and some just didn't really matter for the general public. Is the system in protected mode? Does not really matter during that era. What did matter however, was resource consumption. Maybe for speed of legacy programs OS/2 1.x targeting only 286 was not good, compared to even Windows 2.1x which had Windows/386. On the memory front, OS/2 1.1 requested 3MB of RAM. Windows 2.x/386 requested 640kB. Windows 3.1 requested 2MB (or even just 1MB in standard mode). OS.2 2.0 requested 4MB (release date 92). Windows 95 requested 4MB too... So OS/2 was arguably kind of technically inferior to Windows on many other points, and that was the points that were actually important for most people at the time. Windows NT was "far better" (abstracting away e.g. the resources required) than both, but was out of reach of consumer system for years... On the other hand, Mac OS on 68k was quite problematic until its end but it was not what made successes and failures of Mac during that era. The success of Windows was certainly not only about backward compat. It was also about requirements. And price. And add to that, of course, about what was provided by default by nearly all OEMs... Sure OS/2 was with a certain modernist view of things "technically better" than some Windows, but you know what else was even better in 92? A SPARCstation 10 :D