https://www.npr.org/2025/04/15...

Kibo Kibo Kibo.

... except when used in the Java4k game contest. Shameless plug? You betcha. But it's still a great place to find interesting submissions, such as those by _Notch.

The 486DX2 used a 33MHz front side bus and a "doubled" processor speed, while the 50MHz 486DX used both a 50MHz chip and bus. However, the 50MHz also had significant heat problems (I heard rumors that it could melt the solder).

I know several people who worked on OS/2, one of which was a graphical designer (the one who created the swirly blue logo). He said that IBM had a hard requirement that all graphics had to be limited to 16 colors, for legacy video support. That explains a bit of the ugliness. The other part was that they experimented with alternate UI designs which ended up being horrible - specifically, the "tabs on a spiral notebook" layout, where the tabs would be on the left, right, and bottom in the particularly egregious cases.

It was also back in the day where integrating sound with desktop actions was considered a neat idea, and it would deafen you whenever you minimized or maximized a window.

All that being said, I still have fond memories of OS/2 - I ran from 2.0 beta up to 4.0, and it was the best development environment for DOS programs at the time.

My stint on the ISS testing team years and years ago (back when the Interim Control Module looked like it was needed) showed that, though everyone wanted the thing to work, there were more pressures to make papertrails than make quality work. That being said, oh man, that Ku-Band data stream got seriously hosed.

I can't even find a good Gopher server anymore.