I spent a little bit of time trying to become an OS/2 fanboy. Remember that this was before Windows NT (and Linux was a gleam in Linus's eye) so a PC that could walk and chew gum at the same time seemed like a miraculous feat for anyone used to DOS. It was a pretty sweet development platform for the time, since you could run multiple DOS and Windows 3.x sessions -- I even set up two Windows sessions to communicate over null modem to test a game.
However, there were defects both large and small that didn't seem to get resolved -- from missing files on the custom Windows installation to filesystem corruption when the swap file filled up (this last one was the final straw for me).
Still it's interesting to think how its shared DNA is in Windows today, just as NeXTStep is in Apple's products. In fact many APIs between Win32 and OS/2 are similar (I once made some OS/2 API bindings for Borland Pascal).
I remember buying multiple copies of OS/2, but never installing it, at one point it was so discounted that it was the cheapest way to buy good quality floppies. IIRC warp came on about 40
Yes indeed. I remember thinking I had gone to heaven when I got my hands on a Warp 3.0 CDROM. Installing any OS that has 40 floppies is painful. Kind of reminds of of the slackware days as well...
I think I gave up before Warp so only OS/2 2.x -- the API bindings were for BP7 I think. There was a German computer magazine that released a patch for the compiler to output OS/2 executables.
However, there were defects both large and small that didn't seem to get resolved -- from missing files on the custom Windows installation to filesystem corruption when the swap file filled up (this last one was the final straw for me).
Still it's interesting to think how its shared DNA is in Windows today, just as NeXTStep is in Apple's products. In fact many APIs between Win32 and OS/2 are similar (I once made some OS/2 API bindings for Borland Pascal).