[billygoat]

Ah yes, I was an OS/2 evangelist for years, trying to get all my coworkers and friends to switch to it after 2.1 came out, I guess around 1992-1993ish.

We used OS/2 almost exclusively at the civil engineering firm I worked for at the time, building computer simulations of traffic flow and transit ridership models for cities around the U.S.; our clients all had regular PCs on their desktops and we needed to run clean 32-bit software since the simulations required a flat memory memory model. Programming for OS/2 (using Fortran, lol) was such a revelation back then. It was my first job out of college and I was so naive and enamored with this amazing tech and couldn't understand why everyone around me was using these clunky and crash-prone OSes from Microsoft!

OS/2 with its new UI and great compilers was a dream. And no one ever mentions how you could make the window for each individual folder have a different background color! I spent a lot of time playing with this instead of writing code :-)

I can't even recall how many weekends I spent at friend's houses trying to get display drivers and printer drivers to work on friend's home computers. It was one of my first real tech disillusionments.

Of course we all know how it worked out in the end: by late 1994 this weird thing linux (slackware I think?) captured my attention, and in 1995 we could compile 32-bit programs at work for our clients that targeted Windows 95.

Together those two things meant the end of OS/2 for me, and like so many others I didn't much think about it ever again.

[p_l]

I remember treating folders with custom backgrounds as "multiple desktops" when maximalized, though that might have been 2.x specific thing as I don't think I used it in 3.0 and 4.0.

For me, OS/2 ended around the time my father finally switched full time to NT4, and sometime later I got my own PC with Win95 OSR2

[wdb]

Same here :)

We had Delphi for OS/2 named Sibyl, we used Describe/2 as word processor, we had ObjectDesktop for prettier Desktop. The excitement that Navigator became available and would replace IBM WebExplorer. I had great times with OS/2.