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OS/2's big problem was it needed 8MB of RAM to run acceptably. 4MB (the stated minimum requirement) was just enough to boot it up and, maybe, run one very ligh
by metric10 15y ago
OS/2's big problem was it needed 8MB of RAM to run acceptably. 4MB (the stated minimum requirement) was just enough to boot it up and, maybe, run one very light weight application (with the HD thrashing trying to swap memory in and out). Things where worse with Win-OS/2, which was a full copy of Windows 3.1 running in a VM. You really needed 16MB to take true advantage of OS/2 multitasking capabilities. IBM should have billed it as a workstation OS until consumer hardware caught up, just as Microsoft did with Windows NT.
- InclinedPlane 15y agoThat's exactly why Windows 95 succeeded. At the time 4mb of RAM was a lot. But pure 32-bit OSes like NT and OS/2 ran 16-bit apps in their own full VMs. Which is great from a design perspective but lousy for end-user performance on average hardware since it meant about 4mb of overhead per app. Win95 ran all 16-bit apps in a shared VM and used a few other quick and dirty tricks to keep RAM usage low even if you were running lots of 16-bit apps. The end result was a system that traded maintenance cost and stability for better support for older apps on more modest hardware. In the end it turned out to be one of the most successful software products in history, even though it gave MS so much technical debt it took them nearly a decade to work through it.