"Driven from every other corner of the earth, Freedom of Thought and The Right of Private Judgement in matters of conscience direct their course to this happy country as their last asylum." Samuel Adams - 1776
OS Nostalgia overwhelms me....or maybe it's the flu...
Published on May 18, 2009 By Korwyn In Personal Computing

As I look at the RC of Windows 7, I have to wonder (longingly) where - no how - did IBM screw up so badly? I'm not just talking about the loss of their OS/2 user base (which they screwed over), but all the smaller developers that invested so much into OS/2, which was the most stable PC OS platform (except for AmigaOS) for its time, with application segmentation that is still not even approached by Windows. And Win32s wasn't such a bad API. Really...it wasn't. Honest.

 

Not to mention that was my first introduction to Galactic Civilization and Stardock. I still have (someplace) my GalCiv for OS/2.

 

It is a shame though. I thought for sure IBM would pull out when the Air Force and Navy bought ~300,000 copies of OS/2, but instead that turned out to be the end.

 

 

 


Comments (Page 1)
2 Pages1 2 
on May 18, 2009

Because I can: My unprofessional opinion:

OS/2 sucked.

 

on May 18, 2009

 You're breakin' my heart. Besides, you're young enough you probably barely remember OS/2 anyway.

on May 18, 2009

Hmm.. I dunno, I remember it distinctly and imo... OS/2 sucked

on May 18, 2009

Korwyn is quite correct. OS/2 outperformed Windows in every aspect. I could play 3-4 instances of doom on my old 486DX2/66 and not even make it sweat. Not to mention running a Renegade BBS with much greater effeciency than I could on Win.

on May 18, 2009

I'll take MSDOS 5.........with Quarterdeck installed......

Big Blue blew it out their wazzu too often.....I'm surprised they're stil in business period.

on May 18, 2009

Hmm.. I dunno, I remember it distinctly and imo... OS/2 sucked

 

From a UI aspect I mean't.. of course

on May 18, 2009

OS/2 was awesome. If OS/2 had won out, we would be far better off today.

on May 18, 2009

we would be far better off today.

'we' as in Stardock....or 'we' as in Joe Public?....

on May 18, 2009

The real question to ask is how shitty OS/2 would be today if they were still around.  Companies have a habit of degrading in quality.  I doubt OS/2 today would be the clean system it was then.

on May 18, 2009

Microsoft and Apple are the bumbling cartoon super villain equivalents of the computer software industry.

on May 18, 2009

I don't remember OS/2. My first intro was win3.1 and that I thought sucked big time. Then along came win95, 98 98SE and the rest is history. The only one I really liked was 98SE. Had that and 95 plus 2000 and NT4.0 on a homebuilt out of junk parts. All on a AMD running at 500 mhz. That was back in 99.

on May 18, 2009

I did not put that +6  in there. It's supposed to be as in Kay 6. What's goin' on??

 

I give up!!!

on May 18, 2009

The joys of emoticons.  Whether you want one or not, you get one when you do the right character combination.

on May 18, 2009

@ Frogboy

My point of view is not technical, just business.  OS/2 was DOA.  MS had already outmaneuvered the Blue.  I'm no fanboy of Gates, but was happy to see the wingtiped, white shirted clones of Perot take a hit.  In the 70's they were the most arrogant, got my hand in your pocket people I have ever experienced.

did you see it differntly?

on May 18, 2009

  OS/2 i have seen, my grandfather still has a copy in a box, i think the pc it was on is gone though.

MAC is now the new unix and "feels" nice to move around in, very very nice to use. Better hardware specs too on their pc's even though they are higher priced, but i suppose if i wanted a bmw or a ford, i could always say i was overspending. 

Windows 7 looks like the first version M$ has gotten really right since 98SE, though its still early to tell, all the reviews from users seem to say it is really what Vista should have been.

Amiga, i'm afraid i dont know, other than the articles online, but it did seem awesome from what i read.

Ubuntu looks pretty cool, but i cant run my school programs on it. 

I sometimes dream of a computer like a MAC, that will run anything.  Or maybe a web machine where all the programs are run in whatever os box they need. 

Used to read a couple years ago that Google was working on that, never found out what happened to it. But that would be nice.

One of these days we will all sit back and say "remember when computers used to run their own os?" and it will all seem like old fashioned, you know?   

That would be cool, but well... we will probably have to wait for that, unless some little startup comes along and does it and blows everyone else out of the water... 

Like Apple and MS and Amiga did in the beginning. 

-Teal

 

p.s i wonder what that little startup company name is?  

 

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