Goodbye To An Old Friend
December 11, 2002
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Posted by Aubrey Turner
It was with a bit of nostalgia and sadness that I greeted this article about the final demise of OS/2. I worked with it from 1993 until sometime in 2000. My first job was doing NetWare technical support and I was the OS/2 client guru for the team (we also had a version of NetWare that would run with OS/2, but it never caught on). My next job involved doing OS/2 Presentation Manager programming, and that’s what allowed me to get into the position that allowed me to grow into my current position. We moved all of our client code to Win32 in 2000, and I finally migrated off OS/2 on my work desktop shortly after that.
I was never a fanatic about it (I didn’t go around preaching the gospel of OS/2, like some people do with Macs or Linux today), but I thought that OS/2 had a lot of potential and I liked working with it. The WPS was a true technical innovation, and the underlying kernel was pretty solid. A well configured OS/2 LAN server could match or outperform both NetWare and MS servers. I was disappointed at how it was handled and I was ultimately chased away from it because of technical problems (as OS/2 got less and less attention from IBM and vendors, it became increasingly difficult to interact with web sites and to find programs to read documents).
Oh well, all things must eventually come to an end.
Categories: Computing
Heck, I remember OS/2 as well, back from the “WARP” days. What I also remember is that it would consistently outperform Windoze, hardly ever crash and, in general, was just a joy to use.
Unfortunately it didn’t support a lot of games (yeah, I know, but whereas the number-crunching etc. is all very well, if I WANTED a $3,000 pocket calculator, I’d gold plate my HP15C), nor could it keep up with Micro$loth.
In my opinion, OS/2 was the only serious potential alternative to the incompetently coded muck that Micro$oft was and are still foisting upon us and, for a while back then, I harbored tender hopes that one day it would catch up with Gates’ Gunk.
Unfortunately, it was not to be.
Rest In Peace, old friend.
I started out with OS/2 2.0 and used both Warp 3.0 and Warp 4.0. Warp 4.0 had a better installation program and better performance. Unfortunately, IBM couldn’t keep up with Win32 because of architectural issues (Microsoft specifically added code to the original Win32 layer to prevent it from working on OS/2 after IBM bragged about “a better Windows than Windows”).
I eventually gave up and gave in and started using Windows, but only for the games. At home I have two computers—one that runs Linux that I use almost everything, and one that runs WinXP for games.