OS/2

From: John Wilson <wilson_at_dbit.dbit.com>
Date: Fri May 26 21:13:23 2000

On Fri, May 26, 2000 at 01:29:32PM -0400, Technoid Mutant wrote:
>The market is so steeped in MS-generated ignorance and bigotry against OS/2
>that
>most people in this group have little or no experience with it.

I really don't get how that happened. I jumped on OS/2 when V2.0 came out
(after reading a really positive review, in Comp Shopper I think), but
then felt burned by the bugs in V2.1 beta (how on earth did they break my
text mode "hello world" program?!?!) and bailed. Then, a while later, M$
released WNT and everyone acted as if it was the second coming -- "at last,
a 32-bit GUI-based OS designed for PCs, with true pre-emptive multitasking".
Hmm, where had I seen one of those before, that ran faster in less memory,
came from a more competent vendor, and had a lot more miles on it?

The weird thing is, M$'s absolute stranglehold on the marketplace has really
only been for the last few years. Or at least it seems that way, because
each new height of predatory behavior they get away with makes the previous
rounds seem insignificant. So I don't get how they managed to lock out IBM.
I can understand why early OS/2 didn't make much of a splash, it was a lot of
weight for the relatively wussified 286 CPUs to support. Early Windows was
too big for the PCs of the time too, and it was largely ignored as a result.
But OS/2 V2.0 and the 386+ machines were a very good match for each other.
It deserved to succeed, and at the time Windows was only just starting to
snowball, so OS/2 should have been there in time to really get some market
share.

John Wilson
D Bit
Received on Fri May 26 2000 - 21:13:23 BST