Comment by patrickg_zill | Hacker News Reader

Comment by patrickg_zill | Hacker News Reader

So OS/2 had some advantages:

1. Desktop was far advanced to what Windows 3.1 had; full drag and drop that worked, apps/services could extend the desktop, etc.

2. Ability to run crashy Win16 and later Win32s programs separately from each other, each in their own protected memory space.

3. All this ran in 16-32 RAM. That is MB of RAM. 128MB for OS/2, which gives you a command line Linux environment or possibly a very constrained GUI, would be huge for an OS/2 install (at that time).

2 things IBM did not fix:

1. Cursor could be locked up for a while in certain cases (like the spinning rainbow on earlier OSX) - NT never had it because mouse ran in a seperate thread.

2. Microsoft ran rings around them PR-wise.

Re: Linux. 16MB could run a reasonable X environment in the early 90s. I sometimes ran it in 8, but that was kind of marginal. Maybe you'd call it very constrained in not including Gnome or KDE, but it didn't feel that way.

I remember running FVWM quite comfortably back then on 16MB. I dual-booted with Windows 95, which also ran quite smoothly.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MuLinux -> 4 MiB with X11 on a 386 and 20MiB or diskless with 16 MiB of RAM

* On 1998 I ran SuSE 5.3 with KDE and GNOME (even Gnome 1 over KDE 1.x !!) on a machine with 16 or 32 MiB of RAM and a AMD 486DX5 at 133Mhz . And was working fine.

You really needed 16MB of RAM for it to run well and that cost an arm and a leg back then. I remember scraping together enough to upgrade to 8MB just to get it running reasonably without swapping constantly.

At the time 128MB was a lot or RAM for a Linux box too, although its GUIs weren't very capable.

That OS/2 2.0 fiasco is one of my favorite topics, particularly the parts relating to Microsoft.

Linux and OS/2 ran on similar specs. Used both of them (triple booting with DOS etc) with 10 MB of ram happily and without too much of swap trashing with XFree86 and even with the early KDE.

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