Eric Theriault wrote in a message to Darin McBride:

 DM> Sounds familiar.  I use Warp Connect at home - and the company I
 DM> work for writes for Windows (3.x, 95, and NT).  They all think I'm
 DM> crazy.  (Hell, I get the job done - who cares, right?)

 ET> Exactly.  I have no idea why people hate OS/2 so much.  I
 ET> was reading in an OS/2 book that Microsoft and OS/2 were
 ET> writting OS/2, when Microsoft got out to push Windows.

No one could defend some of the decisions IBM made with regard to OS/2, and
which they then shoved down Microsoft's throat.  By far the worst mistake
in OS/2 1.x was designing it for the 286 architecture instead of the 386,
mainly because IBM was still making a lot of 286 machines and did not want
to advance the market too quickly.  IBM had played that game for years with
mainframes, but they discovered that it didn't work with PCs.  In the
process, IBM sabotaged both OS/2 1.x and their own market share for
hardware in one shot.

Microsoft and IBM actually made a joint announcement in 1990 about a new
project to develop "OS/2 3.0," and this is the very same project
which eventually became NT.  Microsoft shifted the focus of the project to
the Windows API instead of the OS/2 API after Windows 3.0 because a merket
success, and then kept IBM from finding out for as long as they could get
away with it.  Once IBM realized what was going on, the split was
inevitable.

Only with the introduction of a 386-specific OS/2 2.0 -- five years after
it should have been done -- did OS/2 become a reasonable contender.   While
OS/2 1.x had technological brilliance, it was obviously also a dead-end.
 
-- Mike


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