[flomo]

It is interesting that you are glorifying OS/2 as an alternative to "back room deals, legal technicalities, and old fashioned bullying" when it was the keystone of IBM's naked plot to monopolize the PC industry through patent-locked hardware.

There is the technologist fantasy that in a world without Microsoft, we would be have this wonderful diversity of competing platforms. And then there is the reality that the alternatives were in most cases far worse than Microsoft for customers. And this was obvious to the people paying the bills at the time.