Alioth's Journal: The day the OS died

So, quite unlike BSD (which has been healthily dying for years) or the Mac (which has been dying for over a decade, in fact dying so well that Apple is more profitable than ever), OS/2 is really dying (or at least getting killed off).

It's funny, OS/2 was what woke me up to how trashy computer magazines were. I used to subscribe to 'Personal Computer World', which if all truth be known, wasn't a bad PC mag when I was subscribed. I was a teenager when I started the sub, so it was a fairly big investment for me then. But it had (amongst the usual hardware and software reviews) columns on programming, various bits of interesting news, a Unix column and a BBS listing. (My dialup BBS was listed in here at one point, Fidonet node 2:252/204 if anyone's interested).

Anyhoo, what I really wanted was Unix for my newly acquired 80386 PC. I used DOS and DesqView/386 to run the BBS (and it was painful with only 512K RAM - so I upgraded to a whopping 2.5MB RAM). But lacking any UNIX that'd run on that set-up, I was hoping for OS/2 2.0. I saw it at the PCW show in London (IIRC), and saw that It Was Good. It was quite frankly the best PC operating system out there - pre-emptive multitasking (which Win 3.1 didn't have), proper 32-bit OS, multi threading, a decent GUI. Anyway, later in the year, up came Personal Computer World's annual punditry and 'awards'.

Guess what - they gave OS/2 the "Golden turkey of the year" award, saying it was essentially crap.

Another year passes, and Windows NT 3.51 (IIRC) comes out. It has the Windows 3.1 GUI, and doesn't do anything that OS/2 didn't do at least a year before. Indeed, it's a great deal more resource hungry (I got to use it).

Guess what - Personal Computer World gives it the "Most Innovative Product of the Year award". When OS/2 had all those innovations and had them for at least a year. PCW did gush over the latest Redmondware.

I noticed that there was a correlation between the quantity of Microsoft advertising in PCW and their gushing praise for anything MS, and the lack of advertising of IBM stuff, and the disdain for IBM kit and software.

So I let my subscription lapse. I also let my PC Plus subscription lapse. I've never bought a computer mag since. So, OS/2, I thank you for saving me a vast quantity of money over the years.

Of course, the way history worked out, I did get my Unix PC - Linux 0.14 was out in early 1992, and the rest was history (incidentally, I learned C on that 386 running very early versions of Linux).

OS/3?

[admbws]

I never subscribe to computer magazines anymore, they tend to be pricey and there are loads of excellent internet-based resources availiable for free.

I did of course see the OS/2 death story on the front page. I've never seen or used OS/2 (maybe I could obtain and fiddle with on vmware at some point in the future), but judging from screenshots googled for earlier it looks like a quality OS, though obviously looking somewhat dated these days.

But it got me thinking - an IBM-supported desktop/workstation-ori

Re:OS/3?

[Alioth]

Not only have I used OS/2, I've written bespoke software for OS/2 Warp for the USPS.

Re:OS/3?

[NuclearDog]

Now, the question is where could someone obtain a copy?

I've wanted to try out OS/2 for quite a while but I cannot find it anywhere.

ND