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Comment by jimt1234 | Hacker News Reader

I started my career in '95, too, and yeah, as difficult as it is to believe now, Microsoft's monopoly wasn't yet assured. The OS market was pretty much locked up (OS/2 Warp???), but as I recall, Wordperfect was the big obstacle in the office-suite space. It had a massive userbase, especially in markets that were not friendly to change (law offices).

IMHO, the big boost for Microsoft was when they adopted the Lotus 1-2-3 and Wordperfect file formats. Now there was a product that costs less (free, with a new PC), and was compatible with all the existing docs/data. Game over.

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Os/2 warp was miles ahead of windows 95 technically. The main issue was that it was also a bit too ambitious in terms of system requirements which meant that on most systems it was slow as molasses really.

Add that to the Microsoft first mover advantage and it was doomed to fail.

I ran OS/2 v 3 on a machine with 8 megabytes (sic) of RAM quite smoothly. But I had to choose: either I enable TCP/IP networking and disable the Win16 emulator, or the other way around. If I enabled both, the machine started to swap to disk too much.

Win95 worked well on such a machine, and even worked tolerably on machines with 4 MB RAM, which were still around. It lacked the nice true multitasking, because it was basically running on a DOS extender, like most large DOS games. But you could run win32 programs, win16 programs, DOS programs, and have TCP/IP and thus access the Internet all at the same time. It was a killer combination. Also, it had a really thought-out GUI, a big upgrade compared to Win 3.1. (Far from the coolness of OS/2 WPS, but...)

Yeah that's the thing, OS/2 really was way better (at least when Warp came around because the earlier versions were really mediocre). It was really IBM's last try to revert the mistake they had made with Microsoft back in the early days of the IBM PC. They failed to see its potential.

The desktop really reminded me of HP/Apollo's VUE (which later got turned into CDE when Sun and IBM joined the project). Especially due to the large "dock".

>Os/2 warp was miles ahead of windows 95 technically

Did it run DOOM and Quake? I think that's what decided what OS was gonna succeed.

It did, both in that OS/2 was backwards compatible with DOS, and that the games were ported.

https://doomwiki.org/wiki/OS/2

https://www.os2site.com/sw/games/action/quake/index.html

1995 was the tipping point. Windows 95 came out and WordPerfect was late coming up with a good Windows app.

In my memory (was young at the time), 95 coming out was such a huge event. Something about its emphasis on multimedia experience really changed the whole feel of the PC, at least for me. 3.1 was like this arcane puzzle, but 95 felt personable.

It was a very big deal. It was introduced with the help of Jay Leno.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Dv0PxINy2ds

People lined up for it.

Don’t forget the Rolling Stones Start Me Up was the marketing song. We ‘leet hackers all joked that it was entirely appropriate for “Windoze’s” theme song to include the lyrics “You make a grown man cry.” Those were the days!

Less than four months until Win95/Office95 turns 30.

It also has the line "You make a dead man cum." I always wondered how Microsoft's marketing department let that one pass.

I guess the decisive line was: You make a grown man cry. It is valid, even today, for all Microsoft products.

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