Agreed. I mean, to be fair: It's hard to see how else this story could have played out. OS/2 (1.x and 2.x) were whole new OSes, with the device-driver and com

Agreed. I mean, to be fair: It's hard to see how else this story could have played out. OS/2 (1.x and 2.x) were whole new OSes, with the device-driver and compatibility issues that unavoidably entailed. Secondly, in the era of ISA and EISA slots, PCs weren't really ready for this. MS had the clout to push initiatives like PnP, and PCI really helped too. (As it also helped Linux. I remember the pain of trying to work out the right incantation of linux aha152x=io:230,irq=11 ... or some such nonsense to try to get a Slackware boot floppy to see my SCSI port, on which was the CD-ROM holding Slackware itself.) Win9x was based on DOS, and so bypassed all this. But that couldn't help OS/2. The one trick IBM could have executed that MS did, which would have helped, I tried to explain at the time to OS/2 communities online, to general bafflement. NT could be installed from DOS. Right up to XP, and maybe later. You copy the files from CD to a FAT16 partition, then run WINNT.EXE... just like with Win9x where you run SETUP.EXE. This works very well and you don't need bootable media of the new OS that can access optical media or the network. I deployed a whole network of NT 4 workstations this way. No optical drives, no USB. 1. Boot from DOS. Partition disk. Make a bootable DOS partition small enough to be efficient with FAT16 - say, 511MB. Reboot. 2. Install Netware client. Reboot. 3. Connect to server. Copy NT install files from server to C: drive. 4. CD to C:\WINNT, run WINNT.EXE. WINNT.EXE runs in DOS, builds a new minimal NT system on the C drive. Then it reboots into that, and that formats the NTFS D: drive, and installs the OS into it. It was quick (especially if you ran the SMARTDRV disk cache first) and it saved several thousand pounds in the cost of fitting optical drives across the fleet. That also stops users listening to music or installing their own software, and reduces potential failures, power use, maintenance costs, etc. It means you didn't need to boot into NT to install NT. No compatibility issues, no SCSI or EIDE drivers, no network client, no faffing around modifying boot disks to see the source files to install from. This was 100% perfectly possible for OS/2 but like the short filenames issue, I think it never occurred to them.