> OS/2 was a massive leap in the right direction. It was well ahead of its contemporaries of the time.
Agreed. But...
> in the late 80s, computers were rare
I'd dispute that. At the time, I was British. PCs were rare, as in, IBM PC-compatibles. Computers were everywhere.
One view of OS/2 2 in the context of the time was that it made a 386 PC into what the Amiga, Atari ST and Acorn Archimedes already were: full-GUI multitasking computers with sound and decent full-colour graphics, and a fairly rich desktop.
Because Windows 3.x was none of those.
> No-one I knew had an Apple Mac, they were expensive.
Agreed. Businesses only. I met one (1) private owner in that time.
> Windows 95 wasn't as good as OS/2 3.0 (aka Warp)
"Good" is much to narrow a word here.
As an OS design, better? Yes. Better multitasking, better memory management, better filesystem.
As a desktop? No way. Win95 had a much better desktop. Note how every Linux desktop except GNOME 3 and Pantheon is an inferior knock-off of Win95.
Better for ordinary users? No. Win95 was much more compatible, with more hardware and more software.
Better for networking? No. Win95 had a full network stack as stock, dialup and LAN. OS/2 made that an expensive optional extra.
Better for developers? No. MS had lots of cheap dev tools.
Sadly, mostly, OS/2 2.x was only "better" in academic, almost theoretical terms. In the real world for real people, Win95 was better in every way that counted.
It banes me to say it, because I paid for OS/2 2 with my own money, something I've almost never done for software, as I work in the industry.
I used OS/2 Warp which was admittedly very late to the party. I don't remember the desktop being at all worse than Win95. It had TCP/IP, a dial-up stack, Ethernet drivers etc. Silky smooth multi-tasking and didn't crash.
OS/2 had no new games though, no DirectX, only older DOS games worked, and eventually most Windows programs wouldn't run anymore on OS/2 and then I switched to Linux.
But during the Doom era it was pretty standard to boot DOS on a floppy before starting Doom, so what OS you had on the HDD didn't matter too much.
> I used OS/2 Warp which was admittedly very late to the party.
There were 2 versions branded "Warp", OS/2 3 and OS/2 4. Because you said:
> It had TCP/IP, a dial-up stack, Ethernet drivers etc.
... then I think you had 4. Quite a different beast, several versions later.
The main versions were 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 2.0, 2.1, 3.0, 4.0 and then some point releases for the server flavour only.
So it sounds like you came in right at the end, when it was a bit more polished. You didn't see the horrors of the earlier releases.
> I don't remember the desktop being at all worse than Win95.
It was a _lot_ more complicated. Warp 4 had a kinda-sorta taskbar and a hierarchical start menu thing but nothing earlier did. Warp 3 had a CDE-like Launcher floating bar thing.
2.0 and 2.1 had none: no dedicated app launcher at all. Browse the virtual filesystem to your app, or make your own.
The WPS desktop was weird and complex. No "OK" or "Cancel" buttons. You could only drag with the right mouse button, for no good reason. Strange "shadow" icons that worked a bit like symlinks/aliases/shortcuts but were more complicated in incomprehensible ways. A tree view separate from and disconnected from the filer view. Magic system folders you couldn't modify. Lots of weird stuff that was weird for the hell of it rather than any technical reason.
I bought it, I ran it myself, and I liked it, but it was much much more complicated than either Win9x or NT 3.x/4.x, and it didn't need to be.
> Silky smooth multi-tasking and didn't crash.
It was very smooth. It was also quite easy to crash: I played with Fractint a lot, generating fractals, and just changing to one of the undocumented screen modes reliably killed OS/2 with a kernel panic. Even in a full screen VM.
There was also a nastier kind of crash: a single global I/O queue, in a 16-bit process for most of the released versions. If that died or froze, your OS was still running fine but you could no longer interact with it in any way. Including to cleanly shut it down.
No networking as standard, no way to SSH in, no virtual consoles you could switch to with Alt+Ctrl+F2. Just a perfectly working machine that was no longer listening to the world, so you could only power it off and pray to whatever gods you had it would survive.
This failure mode, I think, is why Microsoft made Ctrl+Alt+Del a magic system-request keystroke that the shell could not redefine and no program could override or stay in front of. If your desktop or full screen session locked up or crashed, C-A-D put you back in control. OS/2 had no equivalent.
Only of course the marketing lizards made them change that later. >_<
> Better for ordinary users? No. Win95 was much more compatible, with more hardware and more software.
Not sure about the hardware side, but my understanding of the canonical story why OS/2 lost is exactly because it supported running all Windows software natively?
This let _some_ clean Win32 apps run on 16-bit Windows 3.1. As a demo it bundled the original Freecell game. It's still out there as a free download today, and gets you the original tiny fast Freecell on Win11 64-bit, including on Arm.
IBM had licenses to include full integrated copies of DOS and Windows 3.x with and inside OS/2, called "WinOS2". But it was 16-bit Windows and ran on the OS/2 DOS VM.
Win32s let some apps run, but Win32s didn't work on WinOS2. IBM tweaked WinOS2 to get Win32s working. MS responded by tweaking Win32s so it didn't work.
Repeat multiple times until MS hit a way to stop it working at all.
So, apart from a few trivial apps that ran on older versions of Win32s, you could not run any Win32 apps on OS/2.
So, Microsoft moved the market to 32-bit as fast as it could, first with NT 3.1, then NT 3.5 which introduced the VFAT disk format and long file names, then with the consumer-focussed Win95, then with NT 3.51.
So all the cool new apps ran on Win32 and OS/2 was frozen out of the market.
It could only run win3.x application natively (and faster too). Then they even lost that. By that point win32 apps were starting to become the norm. Then the icing on the cake was win9x was 70ish dollars. While getting a copy of os2 usually started around 150 and it was wildly picky about the hardware it ran on. I too bought that thing. Suffered thru installing 20 floppy disks and usually a segfault or two during install (making you start over). The PM was kind of cool. But 9x was way better polished. You can tell MS did its homework with usability testing.
Smaller, cheaper, faster, much better UI, vastly better driver and app support.
No, the multitasking wasn't as good, but it was pretty good TBH. Compared to Windows 3.x it was amazing.
As a loyal OS/2 user who spent £300 odd on boxed copies of OS/2 2.0 and then 2.1, I switched to the unfinished beta version of Windows 95 because it was that much better.
A trivial but telling example:
On HPFS, OS/2's native filesystem, you got long file names. But DOS didn't. A DOS VM under OS/2 could see HPFS drives (just as if they were network drives) but any file or folder that was not an 8.3 character name was just... invisible.
I made a folder called `D:\DOCUMENTS` (note, 9 letters) instead of my old DOS `D:`DOCS` and put a file into it, and I couldn't open it in Word 6 because it could only see names up to 8 letters.
No way round. IBM never thought of this.
On VFAT in NT 3.5 and Win95 and all later versions, long filenames are automatically truncated and a short name shown to DOS and Win16 API calls.
The name was truncated to 6 characters, then a tilde `~`, then a 1 for the first long name with that 6 letters, then ~2 for the second, ~3 for the third.
(I never found out what happened if there were >9.)
If you installed MS Office 95 it went into Program Files (PROGRA~1) as OFFICE.
But if you installed Office 97, they leant in to their new long filenames:
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office
From dos:
C:\PROGRA~1\MICROS~1.
That's why I sometimes use MICROS~1 as a cynical nickname for Microsoft. It's from their own product on their own OS.
Microsoft thought about what would happen if a DOS app accessed a LFN. IBM didn't.
Wonder if that would show the folder icon or think it is an asm file.
Think NT still has a flag where you can get that behavior for older applications if you need it. Think the prog fsutil lets you set it. Never had a need to do it though.
> Wonder if that would show the folder icon or think it is an asm file.
Oh, I'm sure it'd work fine, but I wanted "Documents" just because it looked nice.
I get LFNs now! Let's use them!
[5 min later]
Oh.
> Think NT still has a flag where you can get that behavior for older applications if you need it.
I am _fairly_ sure it's still there and on by default. Before Windows did tab-completion (badly), I used PROGRA~1 and so on as shorter-to-type versions. It was handy. I didn't have to think at all for those examples: they're burned into my muscle memory.
> Wonder if that would show the folder icon or think it is an asm file.
Oh, I'm sure it'd work fine, but I wanted "Documents" just because it looked nice.
«
I get LFNs now! Let's use them!
[5 min later]
Oh.
»
> Think NT still has a flag where you can get that behavior for older applications if you need it.
I am _fairly_ sure it's still there and on by default. Before Windows did tab-completion (badly), I used PROGRA~1 and so on as shorter-to-type versions. It was handy. I didn't have to think at all for those examples: they're burned into my muscle memory.
Agreed. But...
> in the late 80s, computers were rare
I'd dispute that. At the time, I was British. PCs were rare, as in, IBM PC-compatibles. Computers were everywhere.
One view of OS/2 2 in the context of the time was that it made a 386 PC into what the Amiga, Atari ST and Acorn Archimedes already were: full-GUI multitasking computers with sound and decent full-colour graphics, and a fairly rich desktop.
Because Windows 3.x was none of those.
> No-one I knew had an Apple Mac, they were expensive.
Agreed. Businesses only. I met one (1) private owner in that time.
> Windows 95 wasn't as good as OS/2 3.0 (aka Warp)
"Good" is much to narrow a word here.
As an OS design, better? Yes. Better multitasking, better memory management, better filesystem.
As a desktop? No way. Win95 had a much better desktop. Note how every Linux desktop except GNOME 3 and Pantheon is an inferior knock-off of Win95.
Better for ordinary users? No. Win95 was much more compatible, with more hardware and more software.
Better for networking? No. Win95 had a full network stack as stock, dialup and LAN. OS/2 made that an expensive optional extra.
Better for developers? No. MS had lots of cheap dev tools.
Sadly, mostly, OS/2 2.x was only "better" in academic, almost theoretical terms. In the real world for real people, Win95 was better in every way that counted.
It banes me to say it, because I paid for OS/2 2 with my own money, something I've almost never done for software, as I work in the industry.