Preview Version of Microsoft OS/2 Was Sold for $650 on EBay
Gaaark writes:
OS/2 was a joint operating system project by IBM and Microsoft, which was intended for IBM's own Personal System/2 (PS/2) PCs. (If you've ever seen the old circular ports used by keyboards and mice on old PCs, those are also called PS/2 ports- because they're inherited from this.)
While OS/2 comes after the original IBM PC DOS and MS-DOS, we know today that the partnership between IBM and Microsoft would not last in that form. Microsoft eventually stopped working with IBM in 1992 when it dropped Windows 3.1, a direct competitor of the OS/2 software IBM paid it to make.
OS/2 was intended as a protected-mode successor of PC DOS targeting the Intel 80286 processor. Notably, basic system calls were modeled after MS-DOS calls; their names even started with "Dos" and it was possible to create "Family Mode" applications - text mode applications that could work on both systems. Because of this heritage, OS/2 shares similarities with Unix, Xenix, and Windows NT.
Up to $990 million per year was spent developing OS/2 and its replacement. OS/2 sales were largely concentrated in networked computing used by corporate professionals; however, by the early 1990s, it was overtaken by Microsoft Windows NT. While OS/2 was arguably technically superior to Microsoft Windows 95, OS/2 failed to develop much penetration in the mass market consumer and stand-alone desktop PC segments.
IBM discontinued its support for OS/2 on December 31, 2006. Since then, OS/2 has been developed, supported and sold by two different third-party vendors under license from IBM - first by Serenity Systems as eComStation since 2001, and later by Arca Noae LLC as ArcaOS since 2017.
If you're reading this before April 15, 2024, and wish to dig into OS/2 computing history, you're also advised to check out the Hobbes OS/2 Archive while it still exists. The Hobbes OS/2 Archive is the longest-lived host of OS/2 software, but the decades have finally caught up to it, and it's set to close in April.
https://hobbes.nmsu.edu/
Submitter remembers buying OS/2 Warp ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS/2 ) (although, not really sure which version) : The box I bought (if memory serves... which it doesn't Batman...) came with a CD and like 10 diskettes. I didn't have a CD drive at the time, so had to install from the many diskettes, which didn't always install failure free. Finally got it installed and tried it out some, but, again if memory serves, had so little hard-drive space that i couldn't install much else to fool with to test compatibility.
Then Windows Whatever came along (remember "Start me up" from the Rolling Stones?) and then finally found Linux and never looked back.
If only IBM had had better marketers....
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