3 ms·

Thanks for the recap but it wasn't needed I was involved in the industry throughout this history and used most of the OSs and other products you mentioned and m

by tssva 2y ago

Thanks for the recap but it wasn't needed I was involved in the industry throughout this history and used most of the OSs and other products you mentioned and more either personally, professionally or both. You still didn't address why an operating system whose development was started in 1985 should have initially targeted a processor which wasn't available in a production PC until late 1986 and wasn't available in large quantities at a reasonable price for a couple of more years. Who exactly would they have been selling OS/2 too? How do you think customers they were selling large quantities of 8086/8088 and 80286 systems to would have reacted to being told they were a dead end for their next gen OS?

lproven 2y ago
OK. I had no way to know that, though. I started my first job in 1988, at an IBM (and Apple and Compaq) dealer. We sold lots of PS/2s, and yes, they were mostly 286s -- and they mostly ran plain DOS, no Windows and definitely no OS/2. 386s were servers. But even then there were a few executives or managers with 386s on their desktops. By just a couple of years later, 386SX boxes were everywhere, including on laptops. I got 2 free Librex machines from my 3rd job, because Nippon Steel pulled out of laptops. I ran OS/2 2.0 on mine and while it wasn't _quick_ it was pretty good. OS/2 1.x was comparable in price to DOS + DESQview386. It didn't sell at all to any of my DOS-using customers in any of my jobs, because they needed their apps. It was expensive and it didn't deliver any benefit. But DESQview did. Not a lot but it was there. QEMM386 was everywhere, and DR-DOS/Novell DOS was quite a hit. MS-DOS 5 and 6 sold great. DOS users would pay a bit extra for stuff that enhanced their use of DOS apps. If OS/2 1 had been a 386 OS, which it nearly was, I think it could have sold to DOS power users. The offer would be: you get multitasking -- and a CD drive and networking without faffing around with memory management. Then on top of that you get a GUI, and you get it with half a dozen DOS apps at once, in 4MB of RAM, and every one of them gets 620kB of available memory. I do reckon we could have sold that, yes. It was close. MS had demo versions that have leaked. MS had a nearly complete 32-bit OS/2 2.0 with Program Manager and File Manager, almost ready to roll in 1990, earlier the same year Windows 3 came out... and that was after wasting ~5 years on 286 OS/2. For a whole new OS to succeed, aim at the hardware available to rich power users the year it launches and available to everyone 2-3 years later. NT 3 needed a nearly £10K PC when it launched but just a few years later it could run well on a bog-standard office PC, like a Pentium 66, so long as you exercised a little care over the choice of components. I know this because I ran it myself in such an office, when everyone else was on WfWg 3.11.

by tssva 2y ago

lproven 2y ago

OK. I had no way to know that, though. I started my first job in 1988, at an IBM (and Apple and Compaq) dealer. We sold lots of PS/2s, and yes, they were mostly 286s -- and they mostly ran plain DOS, no Windows and definitely no OS/2. 386s were servers. But even then there were a few executives or managers with 386s on their desktops. By just a couple of years later, 386SX boxes were everywhere, including on laptops. I got 2 free Librex machines from my 3rd job, because Nippon Steel pulled out of laptops. I ran OS/2 2.0 on mine and while it wasn't _quick_ it was pretty good. OS/2 1.x was comparable in price to DOS + DESQview386. It didn't sell at all to any of my DOS-using customers in any of my jobs, because they needed their apps. It was expensive and it didn't deliver any benefit. But DESQview did. Not a lot but it was there. QEMM386 was everywhere, and DR-DOS/Novell DOS was quite a hit. MS-DOS 5 and 6 sold great. DOS users would pay a bit extra for stuff that enhanced their use of DOS apps. If OS/2 1 had been a 386 OS, which it nearly was, I think it could have sold to DOS power users. The offer would be: you get multitasking -- and a CD drive and networking without faffing around with memory management. Then on top of that you get a GUI, and you get it with half a dozen DOS apps at once, in 4MB of RAM, and every one of them gets 620kB of available memory. I do reckon we could have sold that, yes. It was close. MS had demo versions that have leaked. MS had a nearly complete 32-bit OS/2 2.0 with Program Manager and File Manager, almost ready to roll in 1990, earlier the same year Windows 3 came out... and that was after wasting ~5 years on 286 OS/2. For a whole new OS to succeed, aim at the hardware available to rich power users the year it launches and available to everyone 2-3 years later. NT 3 needed a nearly £10K PC when it launched but just a few years later it could run well on a bog-standard office PC, like a Pentium 66, so long as you exercised a little care over the choice of components. I know this because I ran it myself in such an office, when everyone else was on WfWg 3.11.