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Comment by patrickgzill | Hacker News Reader

Wow, this brings back memories. I was a total OS/2-Head until about 1993 or 1994 when I got both an Yggdrasil Linux CD for my 486, and, a NeXTCube; and from there, ended up a Unix fan.

The problem with installation, was that all development was done on PS/2s. The developers never did much testing on non-MCA (MicroChannel Architecture, a pre-PCI intelligent bus design) hardware.

That is why, for instance, when installing OS.2 2.0 and 2.1 on certain PCs you had to disable the CPUs L2 cache by using the legacy "non-turbo" mode and do part of the installation in 8Mhz AT mode; otherwise the installer would crash and you wouldn't know why.

I think a lot of OS/2 users went to Linux and their disgust for MS' admitted astro-turfing and plain outright lying, fueled Linux adoption.

ADD: OS/2 ran well in 32MB and flew in anything more than that. Unfortunately at that time, 32MB was hundreds of dollars, and some systems couldn't even take that much RAM.

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Hey, nice to meet you .. I also had Yggdrasil (and SLS!) systems back in the days of OS/2, which I very briefly flirted with (IBM compilers, yay!) then seguéd back to MIPS and RISC/OS and Irix and SGI (grr.. why you no make laptop, SGI?!! wtf..) with a bit of a dodgy diversion from Linux in the 90's through NextstepX86, sustained a lusty affair with a BeBox, until .. like a lot of other people .. here I am with my 'best unix workstation ever', an Apple.

Apropos the living-on factor of OS/2 nuts keeping it running, its a good, healthy thing to 'not-abandon' technology.

There is a scale to this.

I personally really like the guys at forum.Defence-force.org, burning the machines in current glory with new code. The Oric-1/Atmos is still a computer, and its values during its market period rose (and fell!), but yet the working machines, today, are still getting new code written for them.

It is actually some sort of utter joy to have new titles for a very old, memorable machine or system, which can still be enjoyed!

Computers don't die. Their users do. Lets hope the kids can still turn every single one, on ..

OS/2 was actually quite good on underpowered hardware if you stuck to console apps running fullscreen. I started with OS/2 2.1 on a 40Mhz 386 with just 8Mb RAM, connecting to BBSes and reading FidoNet with a newsreader called Blue Wave and programming with the Boxer editor. OS/2 Warp was the first shrinkwrapped software I bought, still on floppy disks; I was quite proud of that as a 14 year old, as piracy was rampant in Brazil at the time.

I remember OS/2 was quite popular with both BBS operators and BBS users around here, as it was the easiest way to multitask on a PC in the early 90s. It had a quite vibrant shareware/freeware scene. You did have to be picky about hardware, though, but even here it was easy to find video cards, sound cards and modems that ran just fine.

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