Comment Re:WPS (Score 1) 432
I would be delighted to switch my window manager back to the Workplace Shell (well, provided that there were keyboard shortcuts). I would not be so delighted to again deal with the SIQ lockups (but I imagine a port of WPS to X11 wouldn't have that problem, except to the extent that its own components might themselves use their own queue). I also would worry about EA corruption, which was always a concern with OS/2 as the collection of cruft in EAs kept growing and often a little mistake led one to need to repair them (or reinstall the system).
SIQ was not even a crippling problem in the end as there was one programmer on IBM team that made an heroic effort and implemented kind of watchdog functionality into the kernel. So if one program hogs the input queue, it gets booted to the corner. Kids today probably can't imagine a situation where you have no access to keyboard because a trivial 3rd party app is misbehaving. I do not remember when we got the fix, but probably either out of box with 3.0 or with a service pack.
The real killer was complete inability of the kernel to kill a process which was unable to terminate gracefully. There simply was no "kill -9" equivalent. Don't try telling me your favourite app z fixed that because they never worked properly and I tried them all back in the day. Maybe one time in 5 you got lucky and the offending app got zapped but in the end you had to reboot because you had half-dozen zombi apps cluttering the desktop..
Personally I actually gave up home computing for a couple of years between giving up OS/2 and before Win2k came out. I skipped the dos extender garbage completely.
Real reasons for OS/2 failure are pretty simple to enumerate:
1) you really honestly needed at least 16MB of memory and that was the time when the RAM cartel was in full swing and almost everyone was squeaking along with 8MB that was completely insufficient as memory was more expensive than ever.
2) Microsoft promptly and thoroughly sabotaged OS/2 ability to run windows programs by "updating" Win32s API to allocate processes beyond 2GB, which OS/2 couldn't handle. This was the real death knell, ability to gain Win32 apps was regained only far too late by very very nifty executable converters that could actually take MS Office and convert the binaries to OS/2 binaries (OS/2 implemented natively about 80% of Win32 api anyways)
3) It was totally different from what people were used to. See how much problem MS has dragging XP users to Vista/7 and they have near-absolute monopoly to back them up.
There are/were solid technical limitations (Back at the day only thing MS shills wanted to talk about was symmetric multiprocessing that only became reality with dual cores more than a decade later..) but they were largely irrelevant to the real success and/or failure.