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Comment by johnhattan | Hacker News Reader

Oooh I remember having one of these (with OS/2, no less) back when I had a side-job as the Microsoft support rep for Texas A&M. I was tasked with getting it up and working so I could demo it to the department heads who were looking to upgrade lots of old IBM XT's.

While DOS with Windows 286 worked okay, OS/2 for Mach20 never would get past installation.

I finally told my boss that I was getting nowhere with OS/2. She contacted her boss and later relayed to me that OS/2 for Mach20 had been marked as a "non functional product" and would be going away.

The happy ending was that I kept the Mach20 board in my ancient PC and used it for my remaining programming classes. It ran Turbo Pascal and QuickC for DOS quite well.

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So this makes you a candidate for the ultimate retro-computing challenge :

"¹ If you’re one of those retro-computing archivists, I guess this poses an extraordinary challenge even greater than possessing a Tandy Video Information System: Can you track down one of the three remaining copies of OS/2 for Mach 20?"

Coincidentally, I got a job at Tandy right out of college and I got to see the demise of the VIS firsthand.

There was a big warehouse in Fort Worth where un-sellable products ended up, so I definitely could've won that challenge. They had pallet-loads of brand-new VIS machines bundled with all 20-odd games for around $49.

> "non functional product"

More accounting fun! This time around revenue recognition. It used to be that you had to ship a physical item to a customer in order to recognize the revenue from the sale. So the place I worked at back then would send out first-draft manuals to customers who had ordered the not-quite-done software. When we finished it and it passed testing, we'd send them the actual diskettes and an updated manual.

I never heard of any complaints being lodged, so it must have been a standard industry practice of the time. Or the salespeople had already smoothed the waves with the customers.

I miss those days. I worked in the Compute department for the DOT and we were always getting proof of concept hardware and some of it ended up under my desk.

Boss has a Dec laptop that was _thin_ (Digital Hi Note?)

We had a Dec Alpha running an early version of Windows NT

I had a Dec PC that started out as a 486, then got a Pentium 120 upgrade daughter card. (possibly this one, though that looks like a Mid tower and the one I had was full-sized) http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/43316/Digital-Persona...

Nowadays...your expansion slots are used for your GPU and....well....maybe a better WiFi card?

We sold quite a bit of those Dec alphas with nt! (Source: I was a qa intern)

Were you on the phone with IBM troubleshooting their OS/2 port? I would think it was available.

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