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Comment by mark_l_watson | Hacker News Reader

I really liked OS/2. I could run several varieties of DOS under it and early Windows - very flexible when I needed to develop using several operating systems.

The real reason OS/2 was not widely adopted? Maybe this: the first time OS/2 was booted after an install, the bootup time took a very, very long time. I was once in a computer store and some guy was practically screaming at the sales people. He had bought OS/2, installed it, and the next time he used it hit the one time only long bootup time. He was ranting how he immediately took it off and reinstalled Windows. There must have been at least 10 other customers who heard this.

I wonder how often this scenario happened.

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I don't think it was because of the quality of OS/2 itself. It's always the applications that make or break a platform. I remember trying OS/2 Warp and the OS itself did impress me. But most of my favorite games and applications did not run on it. After a while there was nothing that kept my interest so i went back to Windows.

Huh, funny. I always think it's interesting how boot times have increased over the years regardless of Moore's law. My Apple ][ took about 6 seconds to boot, yet a modern PC or Mac takes much longer (and even longer to shutdown, usually)

My Sinclair ZX Spectrum clone, on an 8 bit CPU at 3.5 MHz, 64 kB total memory, used to "boot" in a second or so.

Never used OS/2, so maybe you can clarify this for me:

I thought that one of the limitations of OS/2 was that while it could run DOS programs, it could only run one DOS program at a time (in addition to a number of native ones). Is that correct?

I don't think that's correct but can't remember well enough to say so definitively. You could certainly have multiple DOS and Windows programs "running" but whether they were all active simultaneously or not I can't remember.

No, OS/2 2.0 and later could run any number of DOS and Windows 3.1 applications at once. I'm not sure about the 1.x series. You're probably remembering Windows 9x's feature of being able to automatically reboot into MS-DOS for running games.

You are correct.

On an 80286, OS/2 could only run a single instance of DOS due to that processor's lack of a true virtual 8086 mode.

It is similar to how now a number of websites and individuals measure Windows boot performance on first/second boot, without giving various internal windows boot optimization procedures like Prefetch and ReadyBoot time to kick in.

I wonder how often something similar to this scenario has happened when new Linux users have to wait a long time for their system to finish fscking on every 30 reboots, and asking how to skip it or keep it from happening gets responses along the lines of "ura luser", "lol you turn off your computer?", and "xyz has been banned from #linux (go back to Windows)".

Probably not that often. Usually it tells you to press a key to skip it. If they bothered to read that it's fscking then they would know how to skip it in the majority of cases. (I know that GNOME and XFCE do this. Pretty sure KDE does too when I used it.)

In the case of OS/2 This sounds like a problem that could have been solved with a well placed printf call during the boot routine. (Like say; at the the beginning.)

OS/2 was nowhere close to being as stable as Linux. There were all kinds of normal usage scenarios which cause the system to lock or crash. (OS/2 had the same "49.7 day bug" as Windows and nobody noticed for years.)

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