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Comment by shrubble | Hacker News Reader

A couple things to add:

1. Microsoft got paid about $400 million for their work on OS/2, supposedly, through to v1.3 .

Development of Windows through to v3.0 was much much less. It is safe to say that Microsoft made money from the partnership with IBM.

2. OS/2 installation had a fatal flaw: if your PC had cache memory you had to disable it while the installer copied the files from floppy. It didn't hurt install speed since floppies were the bottleneck but it was very confusing to the newbies to OS/2 that IBM was trying to attract.

3. The Ziff-Davis magazines were pay-to-play in editorial content and they plugged Microsoft as being the better choice all the time. And pre-Internet they were a big source of information.

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The other OS/2 installation fatal flaw was there were 20+ installation diskettes, so your chance of coming across a bad disk halfway through a 2+ hour installation was pretty good.

If you were an OS/2 administrator back in the day, hearing the disk drive start trying to re-read sectors on Disk 18 was a terrifying prospect.

I never got OS/2 installed as a teenager. I had everything set and I had run into everything that could go wrong. The computer store I bought it from and sold for seasonally (At 13) was sure I was just a stupid kid. I brought it into the store after 3 days and it was everyone's personal project to prove me wrong. It never worked.

Add Turbo Pascal, Borland C++ and Windows 3.x to that floppy salad.

The afternoons spent installing software and now they complain an app takes too long.

The first thing I did when I bought software back then was to create backup floppies and always install from the copies. Naturally it did not work with some copy protection schemes.

For Windows you can just copy all the disks to a directory on the HDD and install from there. It goes much faster that way.

Did you ever install Windows NT from the 27 floppies it came on?

Yep, I did.

No, I got my copy already in a CD-ROM.

Who here remembers installing Slackware 1.0 from 24 floppies? Same story, except at least it was free!

A few years later they were passing out free copies of OS/2 CDs as if there was no tomorrow (which, by then there really wasn't...)

Free as in beer unfortunately.

For my first install of Slackware in 1995 or 96, I downloaded 40 floppy disk images and copied them onto floppy disks at University, to install it on a friend's Pentium computer. The very last one ended up corrupted. That was part of the X11 "package". So we ended up without any GUI. But at least we could play Doom on the console!

Haha right! Quake also ran from the console. I spent my high school years working at an ISP NOC in the 90s with one of my responsibilities being to maintain the game server (battle.net & Quake)

many of my teenage years were spent downloading the "A" set of floppies over 28.8k modem, until I befriended somebody at a university who downloaded the whole thing to a QIC tape and just mailed it to me

Win 3.1x had 11 diskettes. So while OS/2 was worse, it wasn't an order of magnitude worse. And after you were done, you were less likely to have to do a clean reinstall.

Installing operating systems back then was much more involved than swapping floppies. The amount of involvement in an OS/2 installation could easily make it an order of magnitude worse. That being said, the results were usually worth it. OS/2 was far less likely to be affected by misbehaving applications, which was a serious problem with Windows 3.x (and, to a lesser degree, Windows 9x).

My stubborn refusal to use Windows during my student days was beneficial in a few cases. While my classmates were getting uninformative general protection faults, I was receiving much more insightful error messages.

I remember in 94 doing an install of an Oracle Forms system we had built - it took 13 or 14 floppy disks to install the multiple oracle products needed.

It took two of us 2 days to install it for 5 systems - we also had to set up a server as they had neglected to buy one :-)

We even took enough cable and nics to build a small network in case they had no suitable network

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