The demise of the terminally ill OS
Tuesday
Jul 19, 2005
Flashback alert!
Among other breaking tech stories this week, IBM has officially announced that it is killing OS/2 (links: The Inquirer, PC World). Back in the early 1990’s, OS/2 was supposed to have been the operating system of choice because of its cutting-edge features (many of which are now found in the modern Windows incarnations), stability and compatibility with both Windows and DOS
applications. It was touted as “a better DOS than DOS and a better Windows than Windows.” (You remember DOS, do you? It used to be something other than “denial of service”.)
As the story goes, things could have gone well for IBM, had Microsoft not pulled out of the partnership in developing OS/2 to instead focus on Windows (MS actually brought over some of the code it developed into building its Windows NT). IBM could have hit it big with such a great OS, but bad marketing seems to have a bad habit of popping up right where you least expect it.
My take is that IBM is not actually killing off OS/2. It’s merely announcing that it’s pulling the plug on something that’s been terminally ill and on life support for a decade.
I wonder what Michael Balcos is thinking at the moment. He used to be such an OS/2 enthusiast (Balky, if you’re reading this, drop me a line! Or better yet, I’ll get in touch with you!). I almost was, save for some resource constraints on my end during my BBSing days (resources of time and computing power!). I ended up running my BBS under desQview on my old 386SX laptop. I got true preemptive multitasking, which at that time Windows (which was at version 3.1) did not have.
Here are a couple of articles by OS/2 enthusiasts, to jumpstart that sense of nostalgia:
Ah, the good old days.
J. Angelo Racoma is a technology journalist and blogger. See more of his blog posts here at racoma.com.ph, commentaries at racoma.net, and Twitter feed at @jangelo.
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