I’m not sure if the article had a point, or if it was just scattered fragments of thoughts.
Regardless, I always felt that the death of OS/2 came later, and was due to IBM’s inability or unwillingness to market their products. “We’re IBM! People will flock to us and wait for our release schedule!” But it didn’t happen, and they lost all of their momentum.
The resurfacing of a 1995 Usenet post earlier this month prompted The Reg FOSS desk to re-examine a pivotal operating system flop … and its long-term consequences.
A 1995 Usenet post from Gordon Letwin, Microsoft’s lead architect on the OS/2 project, has been rediscovered. To modern eyes, it looks like an email, but it wasn’t. Usenet was the original social network and this was a public post. In case you don’t recognize Letwin’s name, he was one of the founding staff members of Microsoft – he’s in the famous 1978 Albuquerque photo. He literally wrote the book on OS/2, that book being Inside OS/2.
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When OS/2 finally went 32-bit, as a platform it had already lost the battle. The lack of native apps was not the reason it lost; the lack of native apps was proof that Windows 3 had already won.
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@misk I rememeber downgrading IBM machines from OS/2 to Windows 95 and it was a downgrade and a total waste of machines. The driver issues with Windows were a massive pain in the arse.
OS/2 warp had plenty of driver issues of its own at the time.
Not only driver issues, UI issues. A workmate deleted an image that was being used as a background on the desktop on an office PC, oops presentation manager crashed and it wouldn’t boot to a GUI. That was in Warp 3.
@finley yes I know, I worked for IBM
I had so much hope for this, at the time it seemed to be so much better than Windows, but for me the lack of software was the real killer. I actually still have the install CD sitting here by my monitors. Eventually I switched over to linux because Windows continued failing to impress me after all those years.
