From: Egan Orion 

Not really. IBM mishandled OS/2 horribly all throughout its life. First
they associated it with the PS/2 (limit PCs to 286 chips, yeah right!) with
MicroChannel. Thus they had their clock promptly cleaned by Compaq, and
updated OS/2 2.0 for the 386, but by then the association had stuck.

By OS/2 3.0 that system was fairly capable, but the installation was a real
pain (earlier this year I finally threw out that box of floppies), plus
networking wasn't well integrated, thinking of it makes me shiver.

OS/2 4.0 was the first competent version, IMHO. But IBM didn't know how to
market it, the IBM PC company was actively hostile to it, there were still
some issues with Presentation Manager and its single input queue problems
(never fixed). So OS/2 was finally and irretrievably doomed by Microsoft's
backstabbing, proprietary DLL software, an upgrade treadmill that IBM
wouldn't invest enough to match, and that lock on OEM preloads (determined
to be illegal, but too late to save OS/2). With OS/2 one can say that
everything that could go wrong, did go wrong, all of its life.

So it's arguable that OS/2, although a better fundamental design, wasn't
well enough executed, delivered or supported to make it better software,
and it was badly handicapped by its vendor plus Microsoft's shenanigans.

I don't regard OS/2 as a valid counter-example for all of these reasons.
One can imagine that IBM's OS/2 debacle is one reason for it deciding to
support Linux at arms-length -- without trying to build some IBM distro.
The other reason is probably its overhead and limited success with AIX.

Egan

PS -- I still have an OS/2 partition, but I hardly ever boot it anymore.


Robert Comer wrote:
>>I offer Windows 3.x...95 vs. OS/2 as a counterexample.
>
>
> Well, that kind of squashes Egan's law.
>
> - Bob Comer
>
>
> "Jeff Shultz"  wrote in message
> news:3e615353{at}w3.nls.net...
>
>>Egan Orion wrote:
>>
>>
>>>An update of Gresham's Law... for software:
>>>
>>>http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=8059
>>
>>I offer Windows 3.x...95 vs. OS/2 as a counterexample.
>>
>>--
>>Jeff Shultz
>>I don't speak for anyone, and only One speaks for me.
>
>
>

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