3 ms·

I remember back in the 90s, I was a little kid at the time, maybe 12 years old, and I was so proud that I had Windows 95. An acquaintance of the family then co

by sgt 3y ago

I remember back in the 90s, I was a little kid at the time, maybe 12 years old, and I was so proud that I had Windows 95. An acquaintance of the family then commented that Windows 95 was absolute shit. He had OS/2 Warp and it was superior in every way, especially for power users. Honestly it made me feel quite envious, but he wouldn't explain how I would get hold of OS/2 Warp so I just let it be.

mschaef 3y ago
> He had OS/2 Warp and it was superior in every way, especially for power users. The technology of OS/2 Warp was a better than Win9x, but once you started caring about having native 32-bit software it didn't really matter. Windows ran away with that market in short order, leaving too few options over on OS/2 for most users. In a sense, that was always the OS/2 story... it never did a quite good enough job of both running users' existing software and attracting a big enough space of OS/2 specific software to be differentiated as an OS platform.
- WorldMaker 3y ago
  Yeah, OS/2 Warp was sometimes the best way to run DOS and Windows 3.1 software, but as soon as you had some good or fun Windows 95 software there was never any reason to go back to OS/2 Warp because you probably didn't own any OS/2 specific software.
  - twoodfin 3y ago
    This is all completely correct, but ca. 1995 I managed to pick up what I think was called Lotus “SmartSuite” for OS/2. It included Ami Pro, which I expect I’ll go to my grave believing was the best word processor I ever used. The layout controls in particular were amazing.
- frozenport 3y ago
  Nope. It kept crashing because the GUI message pump was essentially shared. This is just the tip of the iceberge, there were a lot of bad technical decisions that made it unstable.
  - mschaef 3y ago
    Comparing Windows NT with OS/2, I'd totally agree with you. Comparing Windows 95 with OS/2, there was way too much 16-bit legacy in Windows. Major parts of Windows 95 were still 16 bit code and protected with a giant lock serializing all access. Windows 95 was a great tactical solution, but not a great OS.
    - frozenport 3y ago
      Clearly it was more important that a bug in a user mode GUI app didn't render the system unusable compared to having 16 bit code and a few locks in a mostly serial environment. The story of OS/2 is a project that dragged on for decades with the benefits only harvested when Windows NT put a GUI and app ecosystem on it.
jandrese 3y ago
As someone who had OS/2 Warp installed on a machine for a bit I'm somewhat dubious about the claim that it was just plain better than Win95. My memories of OS/2 Warp included locking up the entire GUI when an application (a goddamn notepad application at that!) crashed and finding it amazingly unintuitive in so many respects. On top of that everything it did felt sluggish, even on fast hardware of the era (a Pentium 75 with 16GB of memory). When Windows 95 came out there really wasn't a question as to who was going to be the thing going forward. Even beyond Microsoft's already dominant position in the marketplace.
- qup 3y ago
  > 16GB of memory Speaking of memory, I think yours is failing! Ain't no way!
  - pgeorgi 3y ago
    Indeed: Pentium 75 is P54C and from 1995, while PAE (Address Extension to get beyond 4GB) was only introduced in the Pentium Pro (P6) series in 1995.
  - jandrese 3y ago
    Yeah, 16MB. Orders of magnitude get lost easily when talking about computer technology. Hell, the computer I owned before that (A Commodore 64) had 64KB of memory and that was a lot when it came out. And now 16GB is probably the most common memory size you see on PCs in the wild.

by sgt 3y ago

mschaef 3y ago

> He had OS/2 Warp and it was superior in every way, especially for power users. The technology of OS/2 Warp was a better than Win9x, but once you started caring about having native 32-bit software it didn't really matter. Windows ran away with that market in short order, leaving too few options over on OS/2 for most users. In a sense, that was always the OS/2 story... it never did a quite good enough job of both running users' existing software and attracting a big enough space of OS/2 specific software to be differentiated as an OS platform.

WorldMaker 3y ago
Yeah, OS/2 Warp was sometimes the best way to run DOS and Windows 3.1 software, but as soon as you had some good or fun Windows 95 software there was never any reason to go back to OS/2 Warp because you probably didn't own any OS/2 specific software.
- twoodfin 3y ago
  This is all completely correct, but ca. 1995 I managed to pick up what I think was called Lotus “SmartSuite” for OS/2. It included Ami Pro, which I expect I’ll go to my grave believing was the best word processor I ever used. The layout controls in particular were amazing.
frozenport 3y ago
Nope. It kept crashing because the GUI message pump was essentially shared. This is just the tip of the iceberge, there were a lot of bad technical decisions that made it unstable.
- mschaef 3y ago
  Comparing Windows NT with OS/2, I'd totally agree with you. Comparing Windows 95 with OS/2, there was way too much 16-bit legacy in Windows. Major parts of Windows 95 were still 16 bit code and protected with a giant lock serializing all access. Windows 95 was a great tactical solution, but not a great OS.
  - frozenport 3y ago
    Clearly it was more important that a bug in a user mode GUI app didn't render the system unusable compared to having 16 bit code and a few locks in a mostly serial environment. The story of OS/2 is a project that dragged on for decades with the benefits only harvested when Windows NT put a GUI and app ecosystem on it.

jandrese 3y ago

As someone who had OS/2 Warp installed on a machine for a bit I'm somewhat dubious about the claim that it was just plain better than Win95. My memories of OS/2 Warp included locking up the entire GUI when an application (a goddamn notepad application at that!) crashed and finding it amazingly unintuitive in so many respects. On top of that everything it did felt sluggish, even on fast hardware of the era (a Pentium 75 with 16GB of memory). When Windows 95 came out there really wasn't a question as to who was going to be the thing going forward. Even beyond Microsoft's already dominant position in the marketplace.

qup 3y ago
> 16GB of memory Speaking of memory, I think yours is failing! Ain't no way!
- pgeorgi 3y ago
  Indeed: Pentium 75 is P54C and from 1995, while PAE (Address Extension to get beyond 4GB) was only introduced in the Pentium Pro (P6) series in 1995.
- jandrese 3y ago
  Yeah, 16MB. Orders of magnitude get lost easily when talking about computer technology. Hell, the computer I owned before that (A Commodore 64) had 64KB of memory and that was a lot when it came out. And now 16GB is probably the most common memory size you see on PCs in the wild.