Submitted by IBM had unknowingly created a juggernaut when they allowed Bill Gates and Microsoft to control the PC operating system standard, first with DOS and then with Windows. Having lost control of the PC hardware standard, IBM was determined to regain control of the operating system standard.
Their weapon?
The OS/2 operating system, a powerful and feature packed operating system that best case should have had little trouble overcoming Windows, and worst case should have at least been able to carve out a profitable and sustainable market share. This is the story of how IBM’s last attempt to keep a measure of control in the PC space…Failed.
I don’t always link to videos, but when I do.. This is a great video – a long, detailed story about the downfall of what was, arguably, the best operating system of the 1990s, one that lost out due to illegal behaviour by Microsoft and IBM’s own incredible incompetence. They had a gem on their hands, but just didn’t know what to do with it.
The part where they disband their own teams who develop software for OS/2 @ IBM is my favourite part.
Corporations are where good stuff goes to die.
Bleh, videos are painful.
This poster’s thesis is OS/2 Warp 4 was a serious contender, and I’d disagree. It launched more than a year after Windows 95, with no (real) Win32 compatibility. By that point, it was already over. The serious time was OS/2 Warp 3, where it could run essentially all Windows software, so using it was an option. Analyzing all the mistakes of that release would be a totally different discussion.
The link goes to the last ten minutes. Scroll back through the video and it talks about all the other versions of OS/2.
I was a home PC user in the early 90s, I bought lots of the computer magazines available in the UK at the time (Personal Computer World, What Personal Computer?, PC Plus and so on) and OS/2 was always the next big thing; once IBM ironed out all the glitches and provided Windows or DOS compatibility, we were all going to be running it, just as long as we had the right hardware (32-bit PCs were expensive in the early 90s and lots of people had older hardware that they’d paid thousands for in the late 80s). Everyone knew of it as a great OS that ran on expensive hardware and had hardly any software written for it. The term OS/2 was used as a synonym for multi-tasking, particularly reliable native multi-tasking, very much unlike Windows 3.1. I also recall the great hype over OS 2 v2 and the disappointing reviews it got; IBM always said it would be a better Windows than Windows and it really wasn’t.
It was a better Windows than Windows 3.1… unfortunately by the time people had computers that could run it well, Windows 95 was around. ArcaOS is cool, but still difficult to run even win32 programs on.