2 ms·
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 most
by 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.