Unreleased preview of Microsoft’s OS/2 2.0 is a glimpse down a road not taken

Leo@lemmy.linuxuserspace.show to Technology@lemmy.world – 134 points –
Unreleased preview of Microsoft’s OS/2 2.0 is a glimpse down a road not taken
arstechnica.com
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If it was OS/2 from IBM it was true multitasking and the OS in full control of memory allocation, something Microsoft only were able to offer after creating a new operating system from scratch (Windows NT).

If you thought OS/2 took forever to boot on a 386DX with only 8MB of ram, imagine how long it would take to boot Windows NT 3.5 on that same machine....

My dad ran IBM OS/2 Warp for a while on our PC. Rock stable. Shame it never really took off.

OS/2 3.0 "Warp" was a little too much ahead of its time and had the exact same problem that Windows Mobile had: no applications.

IBM tried to solve that with Windows emulation but it was a headache from the start and often have a buggy experience.

It didn't help that the real world hardest requirements were off the charts as compared to Windows 95 (still 16-bit MS-Dos based and not even close to what OS/2 was).

IBM did everything right from an engineering perspective but failed miserably on what the market wanted.

It never stood a chance. IBM had always been great at delivering solutions that was well engineered. What IBM has n-e-v-e-r been good at is marketing and understanding the volume market.

duideverything

English isn't my first language. Could you please tell, what that word means? Is it slang?

Windows NT came out of the failed collaboration with IBM and was originally meant to be OS/2 3.0. MS switched the APIs from OS/2 compatible to Windows compatible after Windows 3.0 took off, and it caused the collaboration to fall apart.