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by caspper69
566 days ago
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It wasn't just memory requirements that hurt OS/2. I'd argue one of the biggest hurdles was IBM couldn't stop being IBM for even one second to do any reflection on the realities in the PC market. They still thought they were going to have a renaissance with 386 PS/2 systems for goodness sakes. And man were they expensive. $195 for OS/2 2.0. That's about $434 in 2024 dollars, and the PS/2 systems that ran it best started north of $2k if memory serves. No one outside of corporate and the biggest enthusiasts were shelling out that kind of money for "a better DOS than DOS" (cough Desqview cough) or "a better Windows (3.1) than Windows (3.1)" (irrelevant and not that impressiive imho). Love them or hate them, Microsoft has always been good at hitting the 75th percentile, aka "good enough" and "cheap enough". They proved (conclusively) that customers will put up with a mountain of shit if you cost half of what your competitors do. Plus they knew how to make ISVs a lot of money too. IBM just couldn't get it's head out of it's ass, I mean the 1960s. And for the record, I salivated over OS/2. I scored a beta of 2.0 when I was 14 off of a BBS associate. I had an IBM laser printer, IBM typewriters, an original IBM PC. I thought back then that IBM meant quality (and to be fair, it did). But they didn't get it and Microsoft did. Windows 95 had pizzaz and hype, the CD had Weezer's Buddy Holly video (video!). They were working to get games running right under 95. They were courting all of the biggest application vendors. They were doing shit. IBM? Too busy being IBM. |
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Yeah but...
If OS/2 1.x had been a 386 OS and delivered on the promise: great DOS compatibility, multitasking including of DOS apps, and built-in networking, with a passable GUI based on Windows 2...
I think it could have been a hit.
I was there, supporting this stuff in production back then.
DOS was a PITA and getting networking working on DOS and still having enough of that all-important first 640kB of RAM left to run anything was hard. I was a master of it. My skills at it landed me several jobs.
NT made all that disappear. RAM was just RAM, each DOS session got all of a virtual instance's RAM dedicated just to it -- and a network drive looked like a local drive. It was like black magic. It was amazing.
Big drives, with a solid filesystem. Long file names. TCP/IP in the box, as standard.
NT 3.1 was amazing stuff, but that was in 1993 and you needed a £5000 PC with 32MB to run it.
OS/2 2.0 delivered this, smaller and faster, in a quarter of the RAM, the year before...
It was amazing. It was a phase shift in the industry. But the networking was extra, TCP/IP was extra, etc. etc.
And it was late. I just wrote about the beta of MICROSOFT OS/2 2.0:
https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/11/trying_ms_prerelease_...
This stuff was ready in 1990.
But if IBM hadn't screwed the project in 1985 or so, OS/2 1.0 could have done that in 1987 or so.
Before Linux (1991), before Windows 3 (1990), before 386BSD (1989).
It could have been the amazing thing that the hype promised. The tech was there and it worked. It could have been got ready in the 1980s.
A PC industry controlled by IBM would be no better than one controlled by Microsoft and it would have been more expensive.
But we all suffered years more of the crap of DOS and DOS memory management and Windows 3.x, because IBM fscked up.
I don't know what would have happened.
Maybe it would have forced the Unix folks to adopt Arm 20 or 30 years earlier and make RISC boxes that were cheaper and cooler-running than x86? Maybe those expensive IBM OS/2 x86 machines would have forced BSD onto Arm and what happened 25Y later with Apple kit happened a generation before with Acorn kit.
I am 100% not saying it would have been a better world... but it would have been a much more different one than the closed narrow imaginations today portray.