Not to mention that OS/2 came with XEDIT and REXX which were cornerstones in VM/CMS.
If you were the kind of customer that had a mainframe in the head office, or maybe an AS/400 and some terminals, and your IT stack was tightly managed, OS/2 would have been quite familiar: Redbooks, prescriptive hardware compatibility, Rexx, manuals with every error code documented, and very IBM-ish approaches to development (eg System Object Model).
Sadly for IBM they didnt realize that people wanted an OS that was simple to use and would work well enough on any cheapo PC to get things done without needing a managed IT provider or somesuch.
I view NT as Microsoft understanding that while they would never want to be IBM, the Win31/Win95 platform was too fragile to be a basis for the future and that they better take on board some of the lessons of OSes like OS/2 and UNIX before their market window slammed shut.
Even PS/2 line could be a great consumer product if IBM weren't so adamant on making it an enterprise product line.
Maybe un US. In eastern europe was DOS then Win95
They also continued VM with VM/370, VM/ESA and z/VM operating systems which are equally rock solid systems. Aside from these IBM did actually go big on Intel systems but they got completely blindsided by clone manufacturers and entirely failed to see what cloud infrastructure would do to their impressive mainframe lineups.
I have written about this in some depth, and it should be published on the Register at Yule. Can't link to it as it's not up yet.
Yes, it could have been a hit -- if IBM had grasped the nettle firmly and made OS/2 1.x a 386-native OS.
After OS/2 1.x flopped, it was too late. IMHO.
What if OS/2 v1 had been a 386 product? I think it might have done quite well.
OTOH, and I loved OS/2 - I have spent more cash on OS/2 than all other PC software put together in my entire computing life; possibly more than on anything except Spectrum games, and maybe more even than that! - but even as a fan, it was a pig to install, a pig to network, a pig to install drivers, etc. etc.
When I tried the Windows 4 beta, I was dazzled. THIS is how it should be. It Just Worked, and setup & tweaking was a dream. Explorer, so elegant! Device Manager - I nearly wept for joy. No 2000-line CONFIG.SYS file! No separate windows for the directory tree and the directory contents!
WPS, elegant & sophisticated? My arse it was. Half-assed Mac ripoff.
And for all OS/2's alleged reliability, Fractint could kill it easily, the whole machine. Win95 was no better, and as the 32-bit apps & shonky drivers piled up, considerably worse. Then came the horrors of Win98. And SE. And ME.
But at first, even the beta of Windows 4 was about as good. And DOS drivers worked at a push. And DOS games and things. The long-filenames-on-FAT hack was a hack, but it worked. Make a long filename on HPFS, look for it from a DOS window or WinOS2 - gone! Invisible! You can't have it, mate, tough.
Then they hacked that to give us FAT32, and lo, it worked and was just like the old days. Incremental steps, no big bangs.
But when the state of the art was the horrors of Windows 3.x on DOS - even DR-DOS, optimised until it bled with QEMM - or the driver-less and app-less incompatible nightmare of NT 3.1 or 3.5 (if you could afford a £2500 PC to run it well) - OS/2 really actually was "a better DOS than DOS, a better Windows than Windows".
But I still wonder... If OS/2 1 had been a 386 OS, and had swept away Quarterdeck QEMM and DesqVIEW, killed the infant BSD4.4-Lite on 386, ensured that Windows 3.0 had been aborted... If it had used V86 mode to flawlessly multitask DOS apps, boot DOS and its drivers off a floppy for those troublesome programs for near-perfect compatibility...
Well... Program Manager and File Manager, which in the 1990s everyone thought were Windows 3.0 innovations but actually came from OS/2 1... They weren't so bad. I kinda liked them, actually. Had them tuned for a very efficient, convenient GUI. Loads of custom hotkeys for launching and switching apps, which always damned well worked, unlike on Explorer when if Windows was narked it would just ignore you, or launch 876 extra copies of your app then fall to its knees and die.
It coulda been a contender. In 1987, we knew no better. We might have gone for it.
But knowing what I do now about OS/2 2 compared to Windows 95... I am not sure that we were not a whole lot better off with what we got than what might have been.
I remember impotently screaming abuse at a Warp Connect box, just trying to get it on my LAN and on the Internet via dial-up at the same time. Either Win95 or NT 3 were vastly better than that.
OS/2 was, in a horrible way, more DOSsy than DOS. Everything was hand-configured in a vast ASCII config files, which you had to hand-massage into perfection with excruciating care. Then, if you were particularly masochistic, optimise for performance. I never did get Warp 3 to drive the graphics cards and the sound cards of my two 486 laptops at the same time. One or the other, but not both. And one of them was a bloody IBM!
I would in an odd way have liked to see OS/2 thrive, but you know... Despite my irrational nostalgia for it, on the whole, when Windows 95 gave us plug-and-pray, I mean, plug-and-play, and power management and suspend/resume and so on, and then NT4 gave us a vaguely modern GUI... Then Windows 2000 brought it all together into a single whole, which if not exactly seamless by any means, did slap enough makeup on Frankenstein's Monster to make it look presentable...
Sorry to say it, but I think we were better off.
I know, heresy, praise for Microsoft from one of the "Linux Taleban". Shocking.
Of course, after that it all went a bit wrong. I know everyone loves XP in hindsight, but with all the bloat, I wasn't and am not so sure. Themes? Really? Do I need that? I know, I can oh-so-intuitively switch to Windows Classic in Display Preferences, then run SERVICES.MSC and stop the THEMES service and disable it... But I can't uninstall Movie Maker or IE or any of the other cruft, no way José. I can't move the hibernation file to another drive or partition.
Then came Vista and we learned to love XP.
Then came 7, and everyone loves Windows again, except for those of us who found it handy to run a command-line app full-screen occasionally.
I think I'll stick to Linux, thanks.
Again how could it have been a contender in 1987 targeting 386 systems which for the most part didn't exist and didn't exist in quantity at a reasonable price for a few more years after?
First, in the early to mid 1980s, cheap PCs were all 8088/8086 machines (we called the XT class hardware). That was the baseline even when you could buy faster because it was so expensive.
Then, from the mid-1980s, 80286 PCs came along (called AT-class kit). DOS couldn't really do anything much more on a 286 than it could on an 8086, so 286s were just used as faster XT-class boxes.
There were 3 OSes that could use the 286: Digital Research's Concurrent DOS, SCO Xenix, and IBM/MS OS/2 1.x.
Xenix was a hit.
The others not so much.
Then came the 386DX.
Via UMBs and improved DOS memory management, 386s could do way more in plain old DOS. There were memory managers like QEMM386 and 386Max.
(Now FOSS: https://github.com/sudleyplace/386MAX )
For power users they could multitask. There was a brief flowering of multitasking DOS extensions and replacements: Concurrent DOS 386, DESQview, DESQview/X, PC-MOS 386, TSX-32, and others. Most aimed at multiuser stuff because 386DX kit was expensive.
(PC-MOS is FOSS now. https://github.com/roelandjansen/pcmos386v501 )
This drove the market towards the 386. It could do more, even just for DOS and DOS users.
I made a good living optimising the memory management of DOS PCs.
Once it was established, the much cheaper 386SX came along and made 386 PCs cheap. The tech and the software and the skills were already there.
But OS/2 1.x couldn't do any of it. It could barely run DOS at all. If you were a DOS user OS/2 gave you nothing worth having.
NT was a hit by aiming at the PCs of the near future. That's what OS/2 should have been targeted at as well.
Then gradually, incrementally, Windows 3 took over because it worked on XTs and ATs but on 386s it gave you DOS multitasking and copy-and-paste between DOS apps. It gave you the good stuff you got from DESQview. AND you got new apps.
OS/2 1.x was gradual developing. It got a GUI after 1 version. It got a decent GUI next. Then it got smaller and faster.
NT was incremental too.
3.1 worked but was huge. 3.5 got VFAT and was smaller and faster with better networking. 3.51 got smaller and faster and stabler and started ditching the OS/2 legacy stuff.
The point being, OS/2 1.0 should have gone up against DESQview and Concurrent DOS as a DOS multitasker for rich power users, then OS/2 1.1 against Windows 2, then OS/2 1.3 would have taken the place of Windows 3.
I started my first job in 1988, at an IBM (and Apple and Compaq) dealer.
We sold lots of PS/2s, and yes, they were mostly 286s -- and they mostly ran plain DOS, no Windows and definitely no OS/2. 386s were servers.
But even then there were a few executives or managers with 386s on their desktops.
By just a couple of years later, 386SX boxes were everywhere, including on laptops. I got 2 free Librex machines from my 3rd job, because Nippon Steel pulled out of laptops. I ran OS/2 2.0 on mine and while it wasn't _quick_ it was pretty good.
OS/2 1.x was comparable in price to DOS + DESQview386.
It didn't sell at all to any of my DOS-using customers in any of my jobs, because they needed their apps. It was expensive and it didn't deliver any benefit.
But DESQview did. Not a lot but it was there. QEMM386 was everywhere, and DR-DOS/Novell DOS was quite a hit. MS-DOS 5 and 6 sold great.
DOS users would pay a bit extra for stuff that enhanced their use of DOS apps. If OS/2 1 had been a 386 OS, which it nearly was, I think it could have sold to DOS power users.
The offer would be: you get multitasking -- and a CD drive and networking without faffing around with memory management. Then on top of that you get a GUI, and you get it with half a dozen DOS apps at once, in 4MB of RAM, and every one of them gets 620kB of available memory.
I do reckon we could have sold that, yes.
It was close. MS had demo versions that have leaked. MS had a nearly complete 32-bit OS/2 2.0 with Program Manager and File Manager, almost ready to roll in 1990, earlier the same year Windows 3 came out... and that was after wasting ~5 years on 286 OS/2.
For a whole new OS to succeed, aim at the hardware available to rich power users the year it launches and available to everyone 2-3 years later.
NT 3 needed a nearly £10K PC when it launched but just a few years later it could run well on a bog-standard office PC, like a Pentium 66, so long as you exercised a little care over the choice of components. I know this because I ran it myself in such an office, when everyone else was on WfWg 3.11.
Nope. OS/2 was a single user, protected mode OS.
Those of us who wanted a desktop unix wanted in part because it was a unix, but in part because it was also a multi-user system. So the folks who created BSD unix for 386 would still have done it.
IMHO what drove a lot of the development of FOSS xNix, especially Linux -- which has thereby created a lot of the tools and apps and things that make the BSDs useful today -- was the desire to have a proper memory-managed protect-mode OS for personal desktop use.
That's why Xfce, GNOME, KDE, X.org and XFree86 before it, and a tonne of other FOSS projects exist.
The fact that occasionally some of this is also useful on servers is, I reckon, because so many people wanted their own personal UNIX workstation, using COTS kit.
But the design language was less uniform in OS/2 despite that it was based on Presentation Manager standard like Win3.1. The generous use of colors in OS/2 made it look like a kindergarten scrapbook, rather than a serious desktop OS. Maybe, they thought people would find it friendlier that way, and it might have even looked friendlier.
Yet, Win95 looked way more professional than OS/2 because the design language (fonts, conservative color use in UI elements and more incorporation of gray 3D style in the UI) was simply more elegant. That was mostly because of the influence of NeXTSTEP in the design of Win95 though, so thanks, Steve Jobs, I guess? :)
Not to mention completely innovative paradigms in Win95 like "Start" menu and taskbar which made it to 2024 and became the de-facto standard of desktop UX.
This said, I believe that what made a big difference in look and feel when Windows 95 was released was the introduction of TrueType fonts that had much better rendering. OS/2 was using PostScript fonts, and introduced support for TrueType much later... If I remember correctly thanks to the open source efforts of the FreeType project.
Are we still talking about OS/2 2.x? I somehow remember it to be more "somber", and a very quick search seems to confirm that, though it's not conclusive.
https://www.classic-computers.org.nz/blog/images/2009-10-3-o...
You can pick from any number of business, technical or marketing decisions - and there are many to choose from - that contributed to its failure, but fundamentally, nothing was going to save OS/2 from its original sin.
The system was very good, stable, snappy. The main issue was the lack of software. Microsoft made deals with all hardware vendors and whenever people bought a personal computer they would find Windows pre-installed. At that time most of the people did not know what an operating system was, they just thought of a PC as an appliance, and most believed that Windows was the only option, that PC=Windows. Plus, computer and software were quite expensive, so why buy another operating system when your new PC comes with Windows for free. There are articles over the internet that claim that Microsoft, to kill OS/2, made deals with PC makers (HP, Compaq etc.) giving them OEM Windows licenses for free as long as they did not offer OS/2 as an alternative purchase choice to the end users, which basically meant 99% of people did not even know OS/2 existed. You would then find OS/2 in airports, banks, public transport etc. (all big organizations who were IBM customers) but it was not known by regular users.
This said the main weakness of OS/2 was the SIQ [1], single-input-queue. The user interface had a single queue for dispatching UI events, and due to a poor design, a single badly written UI program that got stuck while processing a call from the event loop, would freeze the whole OS/2 user interface. This was improved in later releases but never completely solved, even though admittedly in the last years of OS/2 this type of issues became quite rare.
[1] https://www.os2world.com/wiki/index.php/Databook_for_OS/2_%E...
Especially GeoWorks ... makes you wonder why Microsoft won. If you ever tried installing and using OS/2 on a normal (for the time) PC, you don't wonder why it lost.