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Os/2 warp was miles ahead of windows 95 technically. The main issue was that it was also a bit too ambitious in terms of system requirements which meant that on

Os/2 warp was miles ahead of windows 95 technically. The main issue was that it was also a bit too ambitious in terms of system requirements which meant that on most systems it was slow as molasses really. Add that to the Microsoft first mover advantage and it was doomed to fail.

nine_k 2y ago
I ran OS/2 v 3 on a machine with 8 megabytes (sic) of RAM quite smoothly. But I had to choose: either I enable TCP/IP networking and disable the Win16 emulator, or the other way around. If I enabled both, the machine started to swap to disk too much. Win95 worked well on such a machine, and even worked tolerably on machines with 4 MB RAM, which were still around. It lacked the nice true multitasking, because it was basically running on a DOS extender, like most large DOS games. But you could run win32 programs, win16 programs, DOS programs, and have TCP/IP and thus access the Internet all at the same time. It was a killer combination. Also, it had a really thought-out GUI, a big upgrade compared to Win 3.1. (Far from the coolness of OS/2 WPS, but...)
- wkat4242 2y ago
  Yeah that's the thing, OS/2 really was way better (at least when Warp came around because the earlier versions were really mediocre). It was really IBM's last try to revert the mistake they had made with Microsoft back in the early days of the IBM PC. They failed to see its potential. The desktop really reminded me of HP/Apollo's VUE (which later got turned into CDE when Sun and IBM joined the project). Especially due to the large "dock".
FirmwareBurner 2y ago
>Os/2 warp was miles ahead of windows 95 technically Did it run DOOM and Quake? I think that's what decided what OS was gonna succeed.
- mathgeek 2y ago
  It did, both in that OS/2 was backwards compatible with DOS, and that the games were ported. https://doomwiki.org/wiki/OS/2 https://doomwiki.org/wiki/OS/2 https://www.os2site.com/sw/games/action/quake/index.html https://www.os2site.com/sw/games/action/quake/index.html

nine_k 2y ago

I ran OS/2 v 3 on a machine with 8 megabytes (sic) of RAM quite smoothly. But I had to choose: either I enable TCP/IP networking and disable the Win16 emulator, or the other way around. If I enabled both, the machine started to swap to disk too much. Win95 worked well on such a machine, and even worked tolerably on machines with 4 MB RAM, which were still around. It lacked the nice true multitasking, because it was basically running on a DOS extender, like most large DOS games. But you could run win32 programs, win16 programs, DOS programs, and have TCP/IP and thus access the Internet all at the same time. It was a killer combination. Also, it had a really thought-out GUI, a big upgrade compared to Win 3.1. (Far from the coolness of OS/2 WPS, but...)

wkat4242 2y ago
Yeah that's the thing, OS/2 really was way better (at least when Warp came around because the earlier versions were really mediocre). It was really IBM's last try to revert the mistake they had made with Microsoft back in the early days of the IBM PC. They failed to see its potential. The desktop really reminded me of HP/Apollo's VUE (which later got turned into CDE when Sun and IBM joined the project). Especially due to the large "dock".

FirmwareBurner 2y ago

>Os/2 warp was miles ahead of windows 95 technically Did it run DOOM and Quake? I think that's what decided what OS was gonna succeed.

mathgeek 2y ago
It did, both in that OS/2 was backwards compatible with DOS, and that the games were ported. https://doomwiki.org/wiki/OS/2 https://doomwiki.org/wiki/OS/2 https://www.os2site.com/sw/games/action/quake/index.html https://www.os2site.com/sw/games/action/quake/index.html