OS/2

From: Bill Pechter <pechter_at_pechter.dyndns.org>
Date: Sun May 28 04:37:48 2000

> On Fri, May 26, 2000 at 01:29:32PM -0400, Technoid Mutant wrote:
> 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.

Err... the early v2 OS/2 didn't have drivers for most of the hardware
(IBM had to convince people to write 'em -- unlike MS who said write 'em
or get locked out of the market since it's going to be preloaded on
piles of PC's)

OS/2 ran mostly on PS/2's back in the 2.x days. It took until 2.11 for
the beast to stablize and take hold as a business platform (mostly at
IBM using sites).

>
> 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.

It's the APPS and the moving Win32s target they tried to support.
The killer was when MS made Office not run under OS/2.

> 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.

OS/2 was slow -- glacial on the early 386's without a LOT of memory
16meg was VERY rare then). IBM used it internally (v2.11) on PS/2 25's
with 12-16mb. It was slow loading and glacial loading apps. Many
secretaries booted it with all their windows apps loaded so they didn't
have to wait for programs to load. They often ran Ami Pro v3.1 under win3.1
since the Lotus Smartsuite was BEHIND the windows version for features.

Boot time took almost 5 minutes. It didn't crash, however.
OS/2 really didn't show it's stuff until the 486's. IBM went to Pentium
100+ desktops with 32mb of memory and IP networking 3 1/2 years ago.
They dropped the Lotus SmartSuite96 on it with the mix of Windows and
it reallw worked well.

I liked it so much I purchased it for home (along with Corel's
WP Office 2000 (for Win9x and Linux) just to have the alternatives
to MSOffice. Got to support someone other than MS.

I'd bet they're switching to WinNT or Win9x (laptops) and going to
Microsoft Word for customer compatibility in a lot of cases. We were
one of the first bunches of IBM'ers to do it 3 years ago (due to IBMGS
putting us out to support a major NJ manufacturer of Baby Shampoo and
Band-Aids (tm) which was not to be named. 8-)

>
> John Wilson
> D Bit
>

Bill

-- 
bpechter_at_monmouth.com      |     Microsoft: Where do you want to go today?
                           |     Linux:     Where do you want to go tomorrow?
                           |     BSD:       Are you guys coming, or what?
Received on Sun May 28 2000 - 04:37:48 BST

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