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This one made me smile a little. I was one of the early users of OS/2 2.0 though I moderately despised the gui. Under the hood OS/2 did shine but the interface developers just couldn't seem to get a grasp of a consistent and simple user experience. Even Warp 4 though better was still lacking in usability, it was simply too "busy". By that time Microsoft was getting Windows whipped into shape so I was left with little choice but to abandon what I felt was a technically superior OS.

I am saddened that IBM left the carcass with eComstation, they have squandered their opportunity to make something more modern and useful of the old OS. I cannot justify throwing away money to buy what amounts to a legacy OS that will nor even recognize all my hardware, especially printers and wireless cards.

OS/2 should have been placed in the public domain where legions of developers could tinker with the thing in their spare time.

The current state of O/S 2 is not 'perfect' but the people (esp Mensys) are doing a very nice work there.
I *really* hope that the hardware compatibility will improve at the future (like adding support for wireless, printers, ACPI, etc), as for the s/ware I would like to see a better NTFS driver (mainly for external USB drives) and an Odin32 that is comparable to Wine.
I believe, also, that the price of the eCS for personal use should be way LESS than the current price.

They actually didn't want to replace dos, they wanted a better Windows OS. OS/2 was designed to fix many of the original limits of dos, hence windows. Microsoft's only interest in the venture was to gain access to thousands of IBM patents that they later put into windows products. IBM messed up by trying to sell it only to commercial companies. MS was way less expensive (since they stole it) at something like $30 per Windows 3 versus $200 per OS/2

Edited 2012-04-02 15:50 UTC

IBM got GUI tech from Commodore Amiga. Maybe it was the desktop(?). In exchange, Commodore got the programming language REXX, which was dubbed AREXX.

The irony was that OS/2 largely lost in the marketplace to Windows because of the press. The press were very anti-IBM because it was the big evil monopolist. Of course, where are we today with Windows?

I would encourage everyone posting to actually read the article, if you have not already done so. From reading the existing comments, it seems more like people are just adding their reflections based on their memories rather than actually reading the article.

I for one, was a bit floored by how much it contradicted my memory. I had a demo of OS2 Warp that we ran on our 386 dx. It was amazing! We really wanted to use it based off of that demo. We never did because of the cost. Why buy a computer and pay more for an additional OS, when it came with one already?

But the point is, the article reviled that the OS 2 warp I loved so much, would never have worked on that PC we demoed it on due to the limited amount of ram it had. How awesome is that the demo worked, but the actual paid for software would not have. Man, we would have been ticked off if we had actually bought it. That was low IBM.

For people (still) interested to O/S 2, check the "OS4 Phoenix Project" ;-}

I actually remember OS/2 in a different way. When I was in high school, the company that printed our yearbooks subsidized our journalism department's technology. They gave us these old 486 AST machines running OS/2 2.1. We had to run Aldus PageMaker in Win-OS/2 mode, but OS/2 had better networking support. It also worked much better with NetWare than Windows. I actually have one of the machines at home.

My dad also used OS/2 at work. They ran some AutoCAD-like program for designing landscapes and decks/porches. As far as I remember, it was a native OS/2 app. When Windows NT 4.0 finally became ironed out, they moved to NT. I kept his workstation from home to play with OS/2 on.

I actually have boxed copies of OS/2 2.1, Warp 3.0, and Warp 4.0. I loved the game Cat & Mouse that shipped with it.

I always thought it was a shame that IBM exited the operating system business. I thought they should revive OS/2 by building their own Linux distribution and putting an OS/2 VM on top of it for legacy support. They could have their own GUI instead of Gnome or KDE. They could call it "Blue"

Somewhat revisionist in it's views; trying to claim that consumers embraced Windows 3.0, that multi-user was a big deal in 1995, and ignores a lot of the revelations in the Microsoft antitrust trial (pressure on the whole PC industry from hardware to software vendors and magazines).

As far as the user study, well things were pretty routinely "gamed" in Microsoft's favor. e.g., the Windows PC would have a better processor, graphics card, and more RAM, or users would be chosen from a pool that were used to Windows (throw a new interface at anyone, and they'll declare it's hard to use.). This might not be the case, but considering PC World's bias back then ...

While IBM does shoulder a big portion of the blame, OS/2 lost the PC OS wars due to Microsoft's monopoly. At best, IBM could have kept it a niche player on par with the Mac, which probably didn't look like enough of a business case. Even Judge jackson's remedies would have been too little and too late for the alternative PC market. i.e., OS/2, Linux, BeOS, Mac, Amiga, etc.

Although I never got around to using OS/2, I remember very well its "compound document architecture" OpenDoc. That sounded very promising and very "whizzy". Sadly, like the rest of OS/2, it had trouble getting off the ground.

IBM never offered any discounts on OS/2 where MS did. At one place we purchased a site wide for windows 3 and 1. We purchased a site wide windows 95 for almost nothing per system. I can't say how little we paid but it was close to nothing.

In the 90's I was involved in IBM systems and tested them on a daily basis. I had a small engineers portable that had 2M or ram and ran OS/2 on it. I also had access to the cost of MS for very large companies that installed their OS on new systems. Again it was stunningly low.

Yes, MS did have a working GUI as basis for windows when they thought about working with IBM. They needed the agreements from IBM to make it work. Then they dropped out saying IBM isn't going our direction. Fact it they never wanted to make a stable OS. IBM kept working on OS/2 and it was in no way an attempt to replace dos or any other command line OS that IBM sold. IBM continued to sell it's DOS for many years after they offered OS/2.

Some anecdotes, first.

I had the chance to have OS/2 installed in some machines, at my University, as a "new technology", sort of a contract between IBM & my university.

They didn't allow the students, to work with them. Later, the academic people, change its mind, and invite students to work with them. But, with any support or teaching, just, take the machine, take the manuals & see what can you do with that.

Win95 just been released, and students, where getting used to. OS/2 machines work, but, where slow. Used a lot of resources.

A teacher used to work with Mac, said, that IBM wasn't wrong about requiring more resources (32 MB of H.D. was expensive at that time), the same path, have been with Apple, but, they could it done better.

The Dean, had a OS/2 system folder icon on its desktop. He commited the common mistake, of thowing it to the trash icon, because he tought it was a game or old document.

Microsoft already have several anti Monopoly court suits. I also, remember mentioned in magazines and the early internet, that IBM tried to tie / restrict developers with agreements, (similar to Apple, these days), something that Microsoft wasn't doing.

Later, I work in a large, manufacturing company, that had a lot of IBM servers, plus, some Windows 98 PCs, as clients.

Several times the programmers require technical info, not just OS/2, but other technologies as well, and had problem getting them. IBM already had its developer network site, but, a lot of stuff, couldn't be available.

It wasn't like a patent, or copyrights, like Microsoft did years ago, secretive about technical info. It was more like burocreatic stuff, plus like not having technical people available full time, or doing other stuff because they where contracted.

Even, Microsoft have people, or some of the technical info available at that time.

Summary

So, knowing Microsoft way of doing business (getting rid of competitors), and IBM bureocracy, OS/2 didn't go as far as expected...

Note:
I forgot to mention, that I live a country where, there is a kind of "conspiracy theory" about IBM, that many competitors outside IBM & Microsoft where discouraged, in favor of IBM or Microsoft.

I don't have probe for this, wish I had, but...

For many years, there where a lot of manufacturing companies that only use IBM servers, I haven't see a lot of old Digital, HP, Sun servers, whatever, like the U.S. and other countries did.

And you know, when a company works like a monopoly, its get used to not giving good quality or support, to customers, and users...