Subj : Re: The Downfall of OS/2
To   : Nightfox
From : tenser
Date : Wed May 17 2023 12:35 am

On 15 May 2023 at 01:08p, Nightfox pondered and said...
 
 Ni>   Re: Re: The Downfall of OS/2
 Ni>   By: Vorlon to paulie420 on Mon May 15 2023 02:48 pm
 Ni> 
 Ni>  Vo> Yeah, but it did cover so many things about why it failed and how IBM
 Ni>  Vo> themselfs in the foot so many times.
 Ni> 
 Ni> I always thought it was a shame that OS/2 failed.  I thought it was a
 Ni> nice OS overall, and the way it was able to run software for a few
 Ni> different environments really well (OS/2, DOS, Windows 3.1) was really
 Ni> nice.

Meh.  There's an old axiom in military circles: you are
always planning for the last war.

OS/2 is kind of like that: it was a classic second system.
DOS was the quick hack they needed to ship the IBM PC, but
I doubt that anyone _liked_ it.  Of course, IBM expected
to ship CP/M, but talks broke down with Digital Research
and that fell through; the "Quick and Dirty" QDOS was
available and ran on the 8086, Microsoft licensed it for
a song, turned it into PC DOS, and the rest of that part
of the story is history.

OS/2 emerged as a strategic direction to replace the anemic
and hacky DOS with a "real" operating system, but when it
first appeared at the end of 1987, MS-DOS was fairly entrenched,
and the Macintosh had taken the PC world by storm, and
clones of the IBM PC had deep market penetration.  OS/2,
therefore, needed to be backwards compatible _and_ offer
something superior to entice customers.

OS/2 was very similar to DOS, but better. But OEMs were leery
of any software operating environment intrinsically tied to
IBM hardware, and something that Bill Gates understood that
IBM did not was that backwards compatibility was a means to
an end, not an end to itself: he could leverage the near-monopoly
of DOS and the PC clone market to drive the industry towards
Windows, and then extend Windows far beyond anything that DOS
could have dreamed of doing.  Hence, Windows NT was multiuser
from the start (thanks to its VMS heritage) and supported
virtual memory and preemptive multitasking (again, thanks to
VMS).  While OS/2 made use of the MMU and supported multitasking,
it was basically a single-user OS, like DOS: this made it
rather unsuitable for the growing network environments that
became common throughout the 90s.

Put simply, OS/2 was not architecturally suited to the environment
it was launched in; it looked backwards, not forwards.  It was
essentially what IBM _would_ have built if they'd started with
the 80286 instead of the 8088.

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