> One of the other concurrent goals at the time was to remove Microsoft code from OS/2. Developers on the team were classified into those who had seen Microsoft code and those who had not. Even seeing the MS code was immediate disqualification from writing anything new, and this was actively enforced.

IBM has always been super cautious about intellectual property. I am an opensource committer at Eclipse Foundation (which was created by IBM) and there is a strict IP review process. A copy/paste from stackoverflow is not allowed.

> I'd always wanted to be excited about OS/2, and the IBM job was about as close as I got. My day to day PC at the job was an ancient (1988-era) PS/2 Model 80, and it ran even the current versions of OS/2 surprisingly well.

I started using OS/2 Warp on a 486 66Mhz with 4GM RAM, it was running pretty smooth for me.