The Death of OS/2
It’s been a long time coming but in an announcement this week IBM finally killed off OS/2.
I sheepishly remember in the glory days of OS/2 I was something of an OS/2 zealot going so far as to help start an OS/2 user group in Sydney and organize a volunteer group within IBM to promote OS/2. There was something righteous about having a technically superior product and taking up the crusade against the evil minions at Microsoft with their non functional windows. Of course IBM marketing for consumer products sucked back then and IBM never resorted to the dirty tricks that Microsoft used on PC OEM’s like Osborne to get Windows preloaded on all PC’s. That would have been bad enough but IBM’s user interface design back then was awful and OS/2 required more system resources than the average consumer PC came equipped with. It’s no wonder that no-one wrote software for OS/2 despite all the time we spent trying to get it to happen.
I bet there are still OS/2 die hards ast IBM that are absolutely livid at the company’s betrayal of OS/2. I had to come to the conclusion a long time ago that it just wasn’t working, I can still remember the day when I removed it from my PC at home. It was a sad day then but it was more than time and I had to move on.
