5 ms·

I remember being a big OS/2 user/fan and thinking surely everyone would realize that Win95 was inferior. I was wrong.

by spogbiper 1mo ago

alberth 1mo ago
Wasn't Windows NT based on OS/2, which ended up taking over all of Windows starting with 2000 & XP?
- spogbiper 1mo ago
  Kind of but not really. As I understand it some of the OS/2 dev team at Microsoft was involved in NT (after MS and IBM stopped working on OS/2 together) but they aren't the same code. The NT core is more closely related to DEC VMS than to OS/2. It can be confusing because the name OS/2 was applied to things that are NT at certain points along the way, and NT did have an OS/2 compatibility layer
SoftTalker 1mo ago
Yeah IBM really fumbled OS/2 badly, it was rock solid compared to Windows but the only places I really saw it used were at the old "true blue" companies that bought absolutely everything from mainframes to desktops to printers from IBM. Even their "totally cool way to run your computer" campaign for OS/2 Warp pretty much fell flat. That was the last gasp, never heard about OS/2 after that.
- spogbiper 1mo ago
  I remember that campaign, me and a couple of college buddies convinced an IBM rep that we were an OS/2 User's Group and they sent us a crate full of Warp T-shirts, posters and buttons.
- ssl-3 1mo ago
  They really stuffed it up pretty good. They had it all: Lines of dependable PC hardware, an excellent operating system that was much more advanced than what people were used to, and they were even selling a cost-competitive CPU (the 6x86) with their branding soon-enough. But even with a properly-big marketing budget they just couldn't fit it together. It would have made sense that a person could go to Sears or something, and buy an IBM-branded computer with IBM's CPU and with IBM's flagship operating system running out-of-the-box. As far as I know, that was never a thing that happened. --- I ran OS/2 Warp 3 for awhile -- in text mode at first, because I couldn't afford enough RAM to run the GUI. It worked; I had multiple computers online concurrently with the InJoy software from F/X Communications. I was playing videos, chatting on IRC, browsing the web, and reading Usenet with FreeAgent all at the same time, with multiple hard drives combined into a single namespace with LVM. It was running GNU utilities and other Unix-ey things and had a local rootless X server in the form of Humingbird's eXceed. It was a fun time to do interesting things with computers. Software was still tight enough to get these things done with perhaps whole dozens of megabytes of RAM. A good friend of mine transitioned his shop full of PCs and terminals (which had been based around IGC's VM/386, running MS-DOS programs from a shared box) to OS/2 Warp around the time it came out. OS/2 worked well-enough for him that he kept using it until 2018 when he sold the business and retired, though it had been marginalized to VMs running in Linux by then. But that worked well and provided great continuity: All the little programs and features and bits of custom software (with customer data) that flowed well when they were implemented in the early 1990s continued to flow well until the end.
  - ThrowawayB7 1mo ago
    IBM's PCs were dependable but came at a premium price that was undercut by PC clones. OS/2 might have been superior but it had higher system requirements ($$$) and itself came at a premium price that was undercut by Windows 9x. At the end of the day, it was all about the price. (Linux, being free as in beer, did the same to Windows Server and the other UNIXes not many years after.)
    - SoftTalker 1mo ago
      I wonder if OS/2 was more limited in what hardware it could run on. Hardware vendors made Windows drivers for pretty much everything. Linux did not substitute for Windows Server to any great degree until quite recently. Commercial Unix, yes.
      - spogbiper 1mo ago
        Yes, I recall that not all hardware was supported (or well supported) although it wasn't a huge problem and I was able to find drivers for everything I personally needed. Video drivers that supported the full capabilities of the card were the biggest issue as I recall
GJim 1mo ago
> I remember being a big OS/2 user/fan and thinking surely everyone would realize that Win95 was inferior Power of advertising. If you remember 1995, the advertising for Win95 was huge. Really really huge. Including adverts at sports stadiums, in fashion magazines and the like where nobody would have thought about advertising an operating system FFS! People were buying copies of Win95 who didn't even have a computer because they wanted to be 'part of it'. By contrast, I only ever remember seeing an advert for OS/2 in a single computer magazine.

I remember being a big OS/2 user/fan and thinking surely everyone would realize that Win95 was inferior. I was wrong.

alberth 1mo ago

Wasn't Windows NT based on OS/2, which ended up taking over all of Windows starting with 2000 & XP?

spogbiper 1mo ago
Kind of but not really. As I understand it some of the OS/2 dev team at Microsoft was involved in NT (after MS and IBM stopped working on OS/2 together) but they aren't the same code. The NT core is more closely related to DEC VMS than to OS/2. It can be confusing because the name OS/2 was applied to things that are NT at certain points along the way, and NT did have an OS/2 compatibility layer

SoftTalker 1mo ago

Yeah IBM really fumbled OS/2 badly, it was rock solid compared to Windows but the only places I really saw it used were at the old "true blue" companies that bought absolutely everything from mainframes to desktops to printers from IBM. Even their "totally cool way to run your computer" campaign for OS/2 Warp pretty much fell flat. That was the last gasp, never heard about OS/2 after that.

spogbiper 1mo ago
I remember that campaign, me and a couple of college buddies convinced an IBM rep that we were an OS/2 User's Group and they sent us a crate full of Warp T-shirts, posters and buttons.
ssl-3 1mo ago
They really stuffed it up pretty good. They had it all: Lines of dependable PC hardware, an excellent operating system that was much more advanced than what people were used to, and they were even selling a cost-competitive CPU (the 6x86) with their branding soon-enough. But even with a properly-big marketing budget they just couldn't fit it together. It would have made sense that a person could go to Sears or something, and buy an IBM-branded computer with IBM's CPU and with IBM's flagship operating system running out-of-the-box. As far as I know, that was never a thing that happened. --- I ran OS/2 Warp 3 for awhile -- in text mode at first, because I couldn't afford enough RAM to run the GUI. It worked; I had multiple computers online concurrently with the InJoy software from F/X Communications. I was playing videos, chatting on IRC, browsing the web, and reading Usenet with FreeAgent all at the same time, with multiple hard drives combined into a single namespace with LVM. It was running GNU utilities and other Unix-ey things and had a local rootless X server in the form of Humingbird's eXceed. It was a fun time to do interesting things with computers. Software was still tight enough to get these things done with perhaps whole dozens of megabytes of RAM. A good friend of mine transitioned his shop full of PCs and terminals (which had been based around IGC's VM/386, running MS-DOS programs from a shared box) to OS/2 Warp around the time it came out. OS/2 worked well-enough for him that he kept using it until 2018 when he sold the business and retired, though it had been marginalized to VMs running in Linux by then. But that worked well and provided great continuity: All the little programs and features and bits of custom software (with customer data) that flowed well when they were implemented in the early 1990s continued to flow well until the end.
- ThrowawayB7 1mo ago
  IBM's PCs were dependable but came at a premium price that was undercut by PC clones. OS/2 might have been superior but it had higher system requirements ($$$) and itself came at a premium price that was undercut by Windows 9x. At the end of the day, it was all about the price. (Linux, being free as in beer, did the same to Windows Server and the other UNIXes not many years after.)
  - SoftTalker 1mo ago
    I wonder if OS/2 was more limited in what hardware it could run on. Hardware vendors made Windows drivers for pretty much everything. Linux did not substitute for Windows Server to any great degree until quite recently. Commercial Unix, yes.
    - spogbiper 1mo ago
      Yes, I recall that not all hardware was supported (or well supported) although it wasn't a huge problem and I was able to find drivers for everything I personally needed. Video drivers that supported the full capabilities of the card were the biggest issue as I recall

GJim 1mo ago

> I remember being a big OS/2 user/fan and thinking surely everyone would realize that Win95 was inferior Power of advertising. If you remember 1995, the advertising for Win95 was huge. Really really huge. Including adverts at sports stadiums, in fashion magazines and the like where nobody would have thought about advertising an operating system FFS! People were buying copies of Win95 who didn't even have a computer because they wanted to be 'part of it'. By contrast, I only ever remember seeing an advert for OS/2 in a single computer magazine.