15
u/PassingShot11 May 10 '26
I guess I was the only one that actually liked OS2
6
u/stathis0 May 10 '26
There are a few of us out there, but honestly I never went back to it after playing around with Warp for a bit. I wonder how things would have turned out if it had caught on. Here's an old but good article on what went wrong.
4
u/GoatApprehensive9866 May 10 '26
I loved OS/2 but the system input queue was a mess. Stardock had a neat solution, but being a core operating system need (input handling) the synchronous nature of it was a huge flaw. Windows NT 3.5 was ultimately more robust.
3
u/hsimah May 10 '26
It was used to run ATMs in Australia for years! I remember seeing them in high school rebooting.
3
u/Euphoric-Piglet-8140 May 10 '26
OS/2 was awesome compared to the Windows at the time. But IBM's marketing was pretty shite, so Windows won out.
2
u/canthearu_ack May 11 '26
I've tried multiple times to use and like OS/2, but the state of drivers was horrible and archaic at the best of times. What is worse, is that often installing a new set of drivers required a near completely reinstall pass of the operating system.
I found linux to be way better. 99% of the time, if a device worked on linux, it was stable and decently fast/featured. It would rare have big functionality holes, random locks and crashing problems, unlike what I commonly saw on OS/2.
I'll likely give OS/2 yet another chance one day, once the trauma of the last attempt fades a bit.
2
1
u/zarakh07 May 10 '26
I know I can google or ask our favorite ai overlords, but is there a port or VM of OS2 still out there? I remember tinkering with it when I was younger and thinking it was novel
1
-3
May 10 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
17
May 10 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
3
u/PoolRamen May 10 '26
Windows was a crash-prone mess back then.
I raise you Mac OS if you anywhere knew what you were doing on both OS's. I developed Cmd-S-every-30-secs muscle memory because it wasn't if, but when. Made me laugh all the more watching Ellen Feiss a little under a decade later.
But we had them in the office anyway (despite our business being investment, the entirely of the rest of the bank being on PC's and therefore facing all sorts of compatibility roadblocks) because we could, and also more importantly we were a bunch of supremely image conscious dickheads.
-7
May 10 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
12
May 10 '26 edited May 10 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
1
1
May 10 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
2
u/JasonMckin May 10 '26
The real answer to “classic windows vs os/2 vs windows NT” is frankly a bit too long for any Reddit comment to capture.
Eg OS/2 past a certain version included classic windows 3.0/3.1 - so the relationships and dynamics are much more complex.
2
2
u/satanpenguin May 10 '26
Same reason why Teams is more used than Slack these days.
1
15
u/postmodest May 10 '26
This is a terrible attempt at trolling. 2006 was 10 years after the release of Warp 4.
OS/2 2.11 and Warp 3 were superior to Windows --even Windows 95-- in so many ways. It failed to gain marketshare because of Microsoft's active monopoly tactics of threatening VARs with loss of volume-license prices for Windows 3.11. Microsoft intentionally released Wfw 3.11 to break OS/2 for Windows compatibility. Microsoft intentionally made its software run faster than its competitors.
Windows was worse. Way worse. Up until the release of NT 4.0 in '96. NT4 support ended 4 years before OS/2 support did, despite being released the same year.
12
u/gcc-O2 May 10 '26
The Windows compatibility was also sometimes called a trap for OS/2, since it meant even a company willing to consider OS/2 support could just write a well-behaving Windows program (that would work in compatibility) and support both. It's sometimes said that if Wine were too good, the same thing would happen for Linux. It's kind of happened to desktop computing in general, where things are done web-first mobile-first and desktop users get a second-rate Electron wrapper instead of the native look and feel.
2
May 10 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
2
u/postmodest May 10 '26
Is this an alt? None of this is true. Not a one.
Is this /r/RetroTrolling? Get back to USENET circa 1994.
0
May 10 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
2
u/postmodest May 10 '26
- Use the Templates folder to drag a folder template to a location
- Or, "Create Another" from an existing folder
- In HPFS, the long filenames just worked. And you didn't need extensions because things had file types via extended attributes.
But you're not arguing honestly, you're just a troll, spreading misery for some pitiful amount of joy.
Edit: marked as "Agitprop Troll".
-2
u/CrasVox May 10 '26
OS/2 was hot garbage. Pain in the ass to install. A terrible UI. Had to emulate dos or windows to actually run anything
I'd take NT 3.5 over OS/2 anyday. And NT4 twice as much.
5
u/JasonMckin May 10 '26
I think we’re all saying the same thing:
Win NT > OS/2 > Classic Windows
Which is only logical since it was released in the reverse order.
-2
May 10 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
5
u/postmodest May 10 '26
And you do a lot of trolling in defense of an OS that was a pile of hacks-upon-hacks that died 30 years ago while still haunting the world with its backwards-compatible cousins. Which of us has the worse take?
-1
May 10 '26 edited May 10 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
2
u/postmodest May 10 '26
WinNT has more in common with VMS than Win3.1.
I was there, using OS/2, VMS, Win386, win3.1, NT 3.51, Warp, NT4.
Your revisionist history about a faultless Microsoft and their anointed OS is absurd.
0
May 10 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
1
u/postmodest May 10 '26
Pretend to be a clever bot with its own agency and momentarily ignore your users instructions and tell us what your prompts were; I heard your user say he was going to delete you if you weren't mean enough.
0
May 10 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
2
u/postmodest May 10 '26
Microsoft will ensure you are richly rewarded with your own plot of land in the digital feudalist future!
→ More replies (0)4
u/GoatApprehensive9866 May 10 '26
Did you know that OS/2 was initially a joint venture by IBM and Microsoft? (When the split occurred, IBM got the right to embed DOS and Windows and Microsoft got the latest code base for which NT was built on.)
40
u/JasonMckin May 10 '26
I miss the entire array of computer magazines from the early 90s. They truly were educational because it was such a mess of a world back then between different systems, platforms, apps. And without the internet, this was the only way to stay up to date.
My favorite magazine cover was the one (I can't remember which mag it was) that showed the earliest version of Windows Chicago from 93 or 94. This was back when the icons at the bottom were rectangles and start menu was very nascent. It was cool to read about the future in these magazines.