[rescue] OS/2 Warp - was Re: NeXTSTEP or OPENSTEP?

[Liam Proven]

On 6 August 2014 14:51, Nemo <cym224 at gmail.com> wrote:
> I have fond memories of OS/2 Warp.  When 3.0 was out, I was working
> for a company developing a PC-card (as in PCMCIA) with DOS device
> drivers.  Of the three of us working on the project, two used Warp and
> the third was forced to use Windoze by our manager.  When the driver
> crashed in a DOS-box, we simply closed it and opened another, usually
> carrying on;  when the driver crashed in Windoze, it took the whole
> "OS" with it and sometimes toasted it, too.  (With the MKS toolkit
> along with emx and friends, one came close to the real thing.)

[Nod]

OS/2 was the real thing -- a proper 32-bit OS (well, mostly) that kept
stuff safely contained. But installation was horrible, config was
horrible, drivers were a problem, the UI wasn't great (for all the
fanboys praising it, it was way too complex).

MICROS~1 took a long time to get there, but TBH, they did deliver.

The UI was pioneered in Win95, and it was a very good UI. Just look at
all the imitators, from GNOME 2 to KDE to Xfce to LXDE to Cinnamon.

And the underlying OS was pioneered in Win NT 3.x, with the crappy old
Win3 UI but a good, solid OS underneath.

Win32 looked like MS being anticompetitive at the time, but it wasn't
-- it was a clever migration path from the limited Win16 to the brave
new world of NT. And Win16 may not have been much, but Windows 3.0 was
a triumph in its day, putting the usable OS/2 1.1 UI on 16-bit Windows
and supporting everything from an 8086 with 640kB of RAM to a 386 with
16MB (if you were insanely wealthy).

Then the marketing lizards go to it and the rot set in with XP...

--
Liam Proven b" Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk b" GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven
MSN: lproven at hotmail.com b" Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven
Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) b" +420 702 829 053 (DR)