| This is hilarious and simultaneously sad. Thanks for the story. I remember working on OS/2 from my internship in college through the first few commercial software jobs after graduation though we used IBM's C/C++ compiler, which may have been shared with Microsoft but the exact origin I don't recall. I very much preferred Borland from my days in Turbo Pascal and Turbo C++ though I can't remember if that was just Intel or Atari ST (68K)? Lots of game-changing software was built on OS/2 at the time because getting that kind of thread performance was nearly impossible since it predated everything else in the late 80's so things like ATM machines, stock trading systems, even things that are still being sold today though I'm sure OS/2 is long gone from the releases: https://www.broadcom.com/products/mainframe/product-portfoli... Pretty amazing for the time given there are things we did there that just haven't lived beyond NT or the like. It's sad that the entire industry seemed to forget about CUA en masse. It would be really useful now with the return of tiling to prominence. |
Turbo Pascal was stunning for its time. A fully functional editor and fast compiler operating from a single 5.25 floppy, which occupied one of the two A/B drives on my university's PCs before hard disks were affordable.
But I have to admit OS/2 felt more like the "adult" OS compared with Windows. To be fair Windows had to load on top of DOS, so it didn't have the luxury of using the PC to its full extent. But still.