4 ms·

> 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 cari

> 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.

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.