7 ms·

If IBM had given OS/2 to their mainframe division to develop (and hired someone to design a better GUI, with much better icons - these things matter), I think i

If IBM had given OS/2 to their mainframe division to develop (and hired someone to design a better GUI, with much better icons - these things matter), I think it could have been a hit. I was using hypervisor stuff on VM/CMS in the early 1980s and it worked flawlessly (fun to run a vm inside a vm at the time). Of course, you need the hardware to support it, and IBM were too slow on using the latest Intel chips, and should probably have developed their own.

sedatk 2y ago
VM/CMS wasn't known for its great GUI though. So, the reason OS/2 GUI looked bad might actually be because mainframe guys were too involved with its design. OS/2 had few remarkable VM/CMS characteristics that I could remember, including intricate, hierarchical error codes prefixing every error message like "HPL1001A: File not found", and favoring upper-case on file names and configuration files. Not to mention that OS/2 came with XEDIT and REXX which were cornerstones in VM/CMS.
- kjellsbells 2y ago
  In retrospect OS/2 was an OS created for a certain kind of professional user just at the time when the nature of who actually used a computer underwent a fundamental shift. If you were the kind of customer that had a mainframe in the head office, or maybe an AS/400 and some terminals, and your IT stack was tightly managed, OS/2 would have been quite familiar: Redbooks, prescriptive hardware compatibility, Rexx, manuals with every error code documented, and very IBM-ish approaches to development (eg System Object Model). Sadly for IBM they didnt realize that people wanted an OS that was simple to use and would work well enough on any cheapo PC to get things done without needing a managed IT provider or somesuch. I view NT as Microsoft understanding that while they would never want to be IBM, the Win31/Win95 platform was too fragile to be a basis for the future and that they better take on board some of the lessons of OSes like OS/2 and UNIX before their market window slammed shut.
  - sedatk 2y ago
    That's a good observation. Yes, IBM has always seen the money in enterprise and tried to solely focus on that while Microsoft has been able to remain ambivalent successfully. Both Windows 3.1 and Windows for Workgroups 3.11 were great success stories for example. Even PS/2 line could be a great consumer product if IBM weren't so adamant on making it an enterprise product line.
    - hulitu 2y ago
      > Both Windows 3.1 and Windows for Workgroups 3.11 were great success stories for example. Maybe un US. In eastern europe was DOS then Win95
  - SoftTalker 2y ago
    Back in the day, large companies would often be "IBM shops," meaning every piece of technology, from the mainframe to every terminal, every PC, every monitor, every printer was made by IBM, they would run OS/2 on the PCs. I worked at such a place for about a year in the ~1993 time frame. The only time non-IBM tech was approved for purchase was if they simply didn't offer the item needed.
russellbeattie 2y ago
There's no universe in which OS/2 was a hit. IBM was simply delusional. They wanted OS/2 to give them back the monopoly on computing hardware they once had in the early 1980s before the "PC clones" took over the marketplace. That was never going to happen. You can pick from any number of business, technical or marketing decisions - and there are many to choose from - that contributed to its failure, but fundamentally, nothing was going to save OS/2 from its original sin.
- anyfoo 2y ago
  I don't really doubt that that's true for business or marketing decisions, but what exactly were the technical reasons? I don't know too much about OS/2 internals, but what made it worse than, say, NT?
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - fredoralive 2y ago
    It didn't really cause issues for end users, but OS/2 was tied to x86, it actually uses more than two rings and AIUI even Warp 4 still has 16 bit code in various places. One of the reasons for creating NT back when it was "NT OS/2" was as a "Portable OS/2" so that the OS didn't get left behind when one of the upcoming RISC architectures inevitably destroyed x86 (nobody then would expect a clunky CISC like x86 to be on top 30+ years later, or that the nearest challenging RISC would be the chip from the Acorn Archimedes).
    - anyfoo 2y ago
      Hah. It is pretty crazy that the Acorn Archimedes chip won.
  - giamma 2y ago
    At the time of OS/2 vs NT, NT needed a huge amount of ram to work, while OS/2, even though more greedy than Windows 3 or Windows 9.5 was still cheaper. The system was very good, stable, snappy. The main issue was the lack of software. Microsoft made deals with all hardware vendors and whenever people bought a personal computer they would find Windows pre-installed. At that time most of the people did not know what an operating system was, they just thought of a PC as an appliance, and most believed that Windows was the only option, that PC=Windows. Plus, computer and software were quite expensive, so why buy another operating system when your new PC comes with Windows for free. There are articles over the internet that claim that Microsoft, to kill OS/2, made deals with PC makers (HP, Compaq etc.) giving them OEM Windows licenses for free as long as they did not offer OS/2 as an alternative purchase choice to the end users, which basically meant 99% of people did not even know OS/2 existed. You would then find OS/2 in airports, banks, public transport etc. (all big organizations who were IBM customers) but it was not known by regular users. This said the main weakness of OS/2 was the SIQ [1], single-input-queue. The user interface had a single queue for dispatching UI events, and due to a poor design, a single badly written UI program that got stuck while processing a call from the event loop, would freeze the whole OS/2 user interface. This was improved in later releases but never completely solved, even though admittedly in the last years of OS/2 this type of issues became quite rare. [1] https://www.os2world.com/wiki/index.php/Databook_for_OS/2_%E2%80%93_Chapter_2_%E2%80%93_Inside_OS/2_Warp#The_Single_Input_Queue_Dilemma https://www.os2world.com/wiki/index.php/Databook_for_OS/2_%E...
VincentEvans 2y ago
OS/2 competed against Windows 3.1 - and I don’t recall it visually looking at all inferior.
- Narishma 2y ago
  It looked worse than Windows 3.1 IMO.
  - anyfoo 2y ago
    Hmm, tough call. I remember it looking "more professional", in some ways even more logical, but overall I'd say Windows 3 (and yeah, especially 3.1/WfW 3.11) was more "pleasing". That was mostly the color scheme, I think.
  - sigzero 2y ago
    Nah, OS/2 was visually better.
  - sedatk 2y ago
    OS/2 looked more modern than Win3.1 because, well, it was newer, but also because of the increased use of "gray 3D slab" style which meant modern at the time (see OSF/Motif). But the design language was less uniform in OS/2 despite that it was based on Presentation Manager standard like Win3.1. The generous use of colors in OS/2 made it look like a kindergarten scrapbook, rather than a serious desktop OS. Maybe, they thought people would find it friendlier that way, and it might have even looked friendlier. Yet, Win95 looked way more professional than OS/2 because the design language (fonts, conservative color use in UI elements and more incorporation of gray 3D style in the UI) was simply more elegant. That was mostly because of the influence of NeXTSTEP in the design of Win95 though, so thanks, Steve Jobs, I guess? :) Not to mention completely innovative paradigms in Win95 like "Start" menu and taskbar which made it to 2024 and became the de-facto standard of desktop UX.
    - anyfoo 2y ago
      > The generous use of colors in OS/2 made it look like a kindergarten scrapbook Are we still talking about OS/2 2.x? I somehow remember it to be more "somber", and a very quick search seems to confirm that, though it's not conclusive. https://www.classic-computers.org.nz/blog/images/2009-10-3-os2.2-screen.jpg https://www.classic-computers.org.nz/blog/images/2009-10-3-o...
akira2501 2y ago
The "support elements" on the mainframe, which are just a laptop connected to some internal buses and power controls, did run OS/2 for many years. You could IPL the machine right from the Warp desktop. It was neat. They also continued VM with VM/370, VM/ESA and z/VM operating systems which are equally rock solid systems. Aside from these IBM did actually go big on Intel systems but they got completely blindsided by clone manufacturers and entirely failed to see what cloud infrastructure would do to their impressive mainframe lineups.
lproven 2y ago
> I think it could have been a hit. I have written about this in some depth, and it should be published on the Register at Yule. Can't link to it as it's not up yet. Yes, it could have been a hit -- if IBM had grasped the nettle firmly and made OS/2 1.x a 386-native OS. After OS/2 1.x flopped, it was too late. IMHO.
- tssva 2y ago
  I’m not sure how targetting a processor which was very expensive and available in low quantity from a single source at the time would have made OS/2 1.0 a success. 386 systems didnt start landing on regular users desk until a couple of years later when prices fell and the chips became available in quantity including being available from non-Intel foundries. Even Compaq who introduced the 1st 386 systems sold many more 286 based systems for years after introducing the Deskpro 386. Tieing OS/2 1.0 to the 386 at the time would have just condemned it to failure in a different manner. That doesn’t even take into account that OS/2 was supposed to be the OS for the new PS/2 systems introduced at the same time which consisted mainly of 286 based systems.
  - lproven 2y ago
    Here's how I put it in 2010: What if OS/2 v1 had been a 386 product? I think it might have done quite well. OTOH, and I loved OS/2 - I have spent more cash on OS/2 than all other PC software put together in my entire computing life; possibly more than on anything except Spectrum games, and maybe more even than that! - but even as a fan, it was a pig to install, a pig to network, a pig to install drivers, etc. etc. When I tried the Windows 4 beta, I was dazzled. THIS is how it should be. It Just Worked, and setup & tweaking was a dream. Explorer, so elegant! Device Manager - I nearly wept for joy. No 2000-line CONFIG.SYS file! No separate windows for the directory tree and the directory contents! WPS, elegant & sophisticated? My arse it was. Half-assed Mac ripoff. And for all OS/2's alleged reliability, Fractint could kill it easily, the whole machine. Win95 was no better, and as the 32-bit apps & shonky drivers piled up, considerably worse. Then came the horrors of Win98. And SE. And ME. But at first, even the beta of Windows 4 was about as good. And DOS drivers worked at a push. And DOS games and things. The long-filenames-on-FAT hack was a hack, but it worked. Make a long filename on HPFS, look for it from a DOS window or WinOS2 - gone! Invisible! You can't have it, mate, tough. Then they hacked that to give us FAT32, and lo, it worked and was just like the old days. Incremental steps, no big bangs. But when the state of the art was the horrors of Windows 3.x on DOS - even DR-DOS, optimised until it bled with QEMM - or the driver-less and app-less incompatible nightmare of NT 3.1 or 3.5 (if you could afford a £2500 PC to run it well) - OS/2 really actually was "a better DOS than DOS, a better Windows than Windows". But I still wonder... If OS/2 1 had been a 386 OS, and had swept away Quarterdeck QEMM and DesqVIEW, killed the infant BSD4.4-Lite on 386, ensured that Windows 3.0 had been aborted... If it had used V86 mode to flawlessly multitask DOS apps, boot DOS and its drivers off a floppy for those troublesome programs for near-perfect compatibility... Well... Program Manager and File Manager, which in the 1990s everyone thought were Windows 3.0 innovations but actually came from OS/2 1... They weren't so bad. I kinda liked them, actually. Had them tuned for a very efficient, convenient GUI. Loads of custom hotkeys for launching and switching apps, which always damned well worked, unlike on Explorer when if Windows was narked it would just ignore you, or launch 876 extra copies of your app then fall to its knees and die. It coulda been a contender. In 1987, we knew no better. We might have gone for it. But knowing what I do now about OS/2 2 compared to Windows 95... I am not sure that we were not a whole lot better off with what we got than what might have been. I remember impotently screaming abuse at a Warp Connect box, just trying to get it on my LAN and on the Internet via dial-up at the same time. Either Win95 or NT 3 were vastly better than that. OS/2 was, in a horrible way, more DOSsy than DOS. Everything was hand-configured in a vast ASCII config files, which you had to hand-massage into perfection with excruciating care. Then, if you were particularly masochistic, optimise for performance. I never did get Warp 3 to drive the graphics cards and the sound cards of my two 486 laptops at the same time. One or the other, but not both. And one of them was a bloody IBM! I would in an odd way have liked to see OS/2 thrive, but you know... Despite my irrational nostalgia for it, on the whole, when Windows 95 gave us plug-and-pray, I mean, plug-and-play, and power management and suspend/resume and so on, and then NT4 gave us a vaguely modern GUI... Then Windows 2000 brought it all together into a single whole, which if not exactly seamless by any means, did slap enough makeup on Frankenstein's Monster to make it look presentable... Sorry to say it, but I think we were better off. I know, heresy, praise for Microsoft from one of the "Linux Taleban". Shocking. Of course, after that it all went a bit wrong. I know everyone loves XP in hindsight, but with all the bloat, I wasn't and am not so sure. Themes? Really? Do I need that? I know, I can oh-so-intuitively switch to Windows Classic in Display Preferences, then run SERVICES.MSC and stop the THEMES service and disable it... But I can't uninstall Movie Maker or IE or any of the other cruft, no way José. I can't move the hibernation file to another drive or partition. Then came Vista and we learned to love XP. Then came 7, and everyone loves Windows again, except for those of us who found it handy to run a command-line app full-screen occasionally. I think I'll stick to Linux, thanks. https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/22311.html https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/22311.html

sedatk 2y ago

VM/CMS wasn't known for its great GUI though. So, the reason OS/2 GUI looked bad might actually be because mainframe guys were too involved with its design. OS/2 had few remarkable VM/CMS characteristics that I could remember, including intricate, hierarchical error codes prefixing every error message like "HPL1001A: File not found", and favoring upper-case on file names and configuration files. Not to mention that OS/2 came with XEDIT and REXX which were cornerstones in VM/CMS.

kjellsbells 2y ago
In retrospect OS/2 was an OS created for a certain kind of professional user just at the time when the nature of who actually used a computer underwent a fundamental shift. If you were the kind of customer that had a mainframe in the head office, or maybe an AS/400 and some terminals, and your IT stack was tightly managed, OS/2 would have been quite familiar: Redbooks, prescriptive hardware compatibility, Rexx, manuals with every error code documented, and very IBM-ish approaches to development (eg System Object Model). Sadly for IBM they didnt realize that people wanted an OS that was simple to use and would work well enough on any cheapo PC to get things done without needing a managed IT provider or somesuch. I view NT as Microsoft understanding that while they would never want to be IBM, the Win31/Win95 platform was too fragile to be a basis for the future and that they better take on board some of the lessons of OSes like OS/2 and UNIX before their market window slammed shut.
- sedatk 2y ago
  That's a good observation. Yes, IBM has always seen the money in enterprise and tried to solely focus on that while Microsoft has been able to remain ambivalent successfully. Both Windows 3.1 and Windows for Workgroups 3.11 were great success stories for example. Even PS/2 line could be a great consumer product if IBM weren't so adamant on making it an enterprise product line.
  - hulitu 2y ago
    > Both Windows 3.1 and Windows for Workgroups 3.11 were great success stories for example. Maybe un US. In eastern europe was DOS then Win95
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  Back in the day, large companies would often be "IBM shops," meaning every piece of technology, from the mainframe to every terminal, every PC, every monitor, every printer was made by IBM, they would run OS/2 on the PCs. I worked at such a place for about a year in the ~1993 time frame. The only time non-IBM tech was approved for purchase was if they simply didn't offer the item needed.

russellbeattie 2y ago

There's no universe in which OS/2 was a hit. IBM was simply delusional. They wanted OS/2 to give them back the monopoly on computing hardware they once had in the early 1980s before the "PC clones" took over the marketplace. That was never going to happen. You can pick from any number of business, technical or marketing decisions - and there are many to choose from - that contributed to its failure, but fundamentally, nothing was going to save OS/2 from its original sin.

anyfoo 2y ago
I don't really doubt that that's true for business or marketing decisions, but what exactly were the technical reasons? I don't know too much about OS/2 internals, but what made it worse than, say, NT?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- fredoralive 2y ago
  It didn't really cause issues for end users, but OS/2 was tied to x86, it actually uses more than two rings and AIUI even Warp 4 still has 16 bit code in various places. One of the reasons for creating NT back when it was "NT OS/2" was as a "Portable OS/2" so that the OS didn't get left behind when one of the upcoming RISC architectures inevitably destroyed x86 (nobody then would expect a clunky CISC like x86 to be on top 30+ years later, or that the nearest challenging RISC would be the chip from the Acorn Archimedes).
  - anyfoo 2y ago
    Hah. It is pretty crazy that the Acorn Archimedes chip won.
- giamma 2y ago
  At the time of OS/2 vs NT, NT needed a huge amount of ram to work, while OS/2, even though more greedy than Windows 3 or Windows 9.5 was still cheaper. The system was very good, stable, snappy. The main issue was the lack of software. Microsoft made deals with all hardware vendors and whenever people bought a personal computer they would find Windows pre-installed. At that time most of the people did not know what an operating system was, they just thought of a PC as an appliance, and most believed that Windows was the only option, that PC=Windows. Plus, computer and software were quite expensive, so why buy another operating system when your new PC comes with Windows for free. There are articles over the internet that claim that Microsoft, to kill OS/2, made deals with PC makers (HP, Compaq etc.) giving them OEM Windows licenses for free as long as they did not offer OS/2 as an alternative purchase choice to the end users, which basically meant 99% of people did not even know OS/2 existed. You would then find OS/2 in airports, banks, public transport etc. (all big organizations who were IBM customers) but it was not known by regular users. This said the main weakness of OS/2 was the SIQ [1], single-input-queue. The user interface had a single queue for dispatching UI events, and due to a poor design, a single badly written UI program that got stuck while processing a call from the event loop, would freeze the whole OS/2 user interface. This was improved in later releases but never completely solved, even though admittedly in the last years of OS/2 this type of issues became quite rare. [1] https://www.os2world.com/wiki/index.php/Databook_for_OS/2_%E2%80%93_Chapter_2_%E2%80%93_Inside_OS/2_Warp#The_Single_Input_Queue_Dilemma https://www.os2world.com/wiki/index.php/Databook_for_OS/2_%E...

VincentEvans 2y ago

OS/2 competed against Windows 3.1 - and I don’t recall it visually looking at all inferior.

Narishma 2y ago
It looked worse than Windows 3.1 IMO.
- anyfoo 2y ago
  Hmm, tough call. I remember it looking "more professional", in some ways even more logical, but overall I'd say Windows 3 (and yeah, especially 3.1/WfW 3.11) was more "pleasing". That was mostly the color scheme, I think.
- sigzero 2y ago
  Nah, OS/2 was visually better.
- sedatk 2y ago
  OS/2 looked more modern than Win3.1 because, well, it was newer, but also because of the increased use of "gray 3D slab" style which meant modern at the time (see OSF/Motif). But the design language was less uniform in OS/2 despite that it was based on Presentation Manager standard like Win3.1. The generous use of colors in OS/2 made it look like a kindergarten scrapbook, rather than a serious desktop OS. Maybe, they thought people would find it friendlier that way, and it might have even looked friendlier. Yet, Win95 looked way more professional than OS/2 because the design language (fonts, conservative color use in UI elements and more incorporation of gray 3D style in the UI) was simply more elegant. That was mostly because of the influence of NeXTSTEP in the design of Win95 though, so thanks, Steve Jobs, I guess? :) Not to mention completely innovative paradigms in Win95 like "Start" menu and taskbar which made it to 2024 and became the de-facto standard of desktop UX.
  - anyfoo 2y ago
    > The generous use of colors in OS/2 made it look like a kindergarten scrapbook Are we still talking about OS/2 2.x? I somehow remember it to be more "somber", and a very quick search seems to confirm that, though it's not conclusive. https://www.classic-computers.org.nz/blog/images/2009-10-3-os2.2-screen.jpg https://www.classic-computers.org.nz/blog/images/2009-10-3-o...

akira2501 2y ago

The "support elements" on the mainframe, which are just a laptop connected to some internal buses and power controls, did run OS/2 for many years. You could IPL the machine right from the Warp desktop. It was neat. They also continued VM with VM/370, VM/ESA and z/VM operating systems which are equally rock solid systems. Aside from these IBM did actually go big on Intel systems but they got completely blindsided by clone manufacturers and entirely failed to see what cloud infrastructure would do to their impressive mainframe lineups.

lproven 2y ago

> I think it could have been a hit. I have written about this in some depth, and it should be published on the Register at Yule. Can't link to it as it's not up yet. Yes, it could have been a hit -- if IBM had grasped the nettle firmly and made OS/2 1.x a 386-native OS. After OS/2 1.x flopped, it was too late. IMHO.

tssva 2y ago
I’m not sure how targetting a processor which was very expensive and available in low quantity from a single source at the time would have made OS/2 1.0 a success. 386 systems didnt start landing on regular users desk until a couple of years later when prices fell and the chips became available in quantity including being available from non-Intel foundries. Even Compaq who introduced the 1st 386 systems sold many more 286 based systems for years after introducing the Deskpro 386. Tieing OS/2 1.0 to the 386 at the time would have just condemned it to failure in a different manner. That doesn’t even take into account that OS/2 was supposed to be the OS for the new PS/2 systems introduced at the same time which consisted mainly of 286 based systems.
- lproven 2y ago
  Here's how I put it in 2010: What if OS/2 v1 had been a 386 product? I think it might have done quite well. OTOH, and I loved OS/2 - I have spent more cash on OS/2 than all other PC software put together in my entire computing life; possibly more than on anything except Spectrum games, and maybe more even than that! - but even as a fan, it was a pig to install, a pig to network, a pig to install drivers, etc. etc. When I tried the Windows 4 beta, I was dazzled. THIS is how it should be. It Just Worked, and setup & tweaking was a dream. Explorer, so elegant! Device Manager - I nearly wept for joy. No 2000-line CONFIG.SYS file! No separate windows for the directory tree and the directory contents! WPS, elegant & sophisticated? My arse it was. Half-assed Mac ripoff. And for all OS/2's alleged reliability, Fractint could kill it easily, the whole machine. Win95 was no better, and as the 32-bit apps & shonky drivers piled up, considerably worse. Then came the horrors of Win98. And SE. And ME. But at first, even the beta of Windows 4 was about as good. And DOS drivers worked at a push. And DOS games and things. The long-filenames-on-FAT hack was a hack, but it worked. Make a long filename on HPFS, look for it from a DOS window or WinOS2 - gone! Invisible! You can't have it, mate, tough. Then they hacked that to give us FAT32, and lo, it worked and was just like the old days. Incremental steps, no big bangs. But when the state of the art was the horrors of Windows 3.x on DOS - even DR-DOS, optimised until it bled with QEMM - or the driver-less and app-less incompatible nightmare of NT 3.1 or 3.5 (if you could afford a £2500 PC to run it well) - OS/2 really actually was "a better DOS than DOS, a better Windows than Windows". But I still wonder... If OS/2 1 had been a 386 OS, and had swept away Quarterdeck QEMM and DesqVIEW, killed the infant BSD4.4-Lite on 386, ensured that Windows 3.0 had been aborted... If it had used V86 mode to flawlessly multitask DOS apps, boot DOS and its drivers off a floppy for those troublesome programs for near-perfect compatibility... Well... Program Manager and File Manager, which in the 1990s everyone thought were Windows 3.0 innovations but actually came from OS/2 1... They weren't so bad. I kinda liked them, actually. Had them tuned for a very efficient, convenient GUI. Loads of custom hotkeys for launching and switching apps, which always damned well worked, unlike on Explorer when if Windows was narked it would just ignore you, or launch 876 extra copies of your app then fall to its knees and die. It coulda been a contender. In 1987, we knew no better. We might have gone for it. But knowing what I do now about OS/2 2 compared to Windows 95... I am not sure that we were not a whole lot better off with what we got than what might have been. I remember impotently screaming abuse at a Warp Connect box, just trying to get it on my LAN and on the Internet via dial-up at the same time. Either Win95 or NT 3 were vastly better than that. OS/2 was, in a horrible way, more DOSsy than DOS. Everything was hand-configured in a vast ASCII config files, which you had to hand-massage into perfection with excruciating care. Then, if you were particularly masochistic, optimise for performance. I never did get Warp 3 to drive the graphics cards and the sound cards of my two 486 laptops at the same time. One or the other, but not both. And one of them was a bloody IBM! I would in an odd way have liked to see OS/2 thrive, but you know... Despite my irrational nostalgia for it, on the whole, when Windows 95 gave us plug-and-pray, I mean, plug-and-play, and power management and suspend/resume and so on, and then NT4 gave us a vaguely modern GUI... Then Windows 2000 brought it all together into a single whole, which if not exactly seamless by any means, did slap enough makeup on Frankenstein's Monster to make it look presentable... Sorry to say it, but I think we were better off. I know, heresy, praise for Microsoft from one of the "Linux Taleban". Shocking. Of course, after that it all went a bit wrong. I know everyone loves XP in hindsight, but with all the bloat, I wasn't and am not so sure. Themes? Really? Do I need that? I know, I can oh-so-intuitively switch to Windows Classic in Display Preferences, then run SERVICES.MSC and stop the THEMES service and disable it... But I can't uninstall Movie Maker or IE or any of the other cruft, no way José. I can't move the hibernation file to another drive or partition. Then came Vista and we learned to love XP. Then came 7, and everyone loves Windows again, except for those of us who found it handy to run a command-line app full-screen occasionally. I think I'll stick to Linux, thanks. https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/22311.html https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/22311.html