alt Hacker NewsYeah IBM really fumbled OS/2 badly, it was rock solid compared to Windows but the only places I really saw it used were at the old "true blue" companies that bought absolutely everything from mainframes to desktops to printers from IBM.
Even their "totally cool way to run your computer" campaign for OS/2 Warp pretty much fell flat. That was the last gasp, never heard about OS/2 after that.
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spogbiper • yesterday at 6:33 PM
I remember that campaign, me and a couple of college buddies convinced an IBM rep that we were an OS/2 User's Group and they sent us a crate full of Warp T-shirts, posters and buttons.
They really stuffed it up pretty good.
They had it all: Lines of dependable PC hardware, an excellent operating system that was much more advanced than what people were used to, and they were even selling a cost-competitive CPU (the 6x86) with their branding soon-enough.
But even with a properly-big marketing budget they just couldn't fit it together.
It would have made sense that a person could go to Sears or something, and buy an IBM-branded computer with IBM's CPU and with IBM's flagship operating system running out-of-the-box.
As far as I know, that was never a thing that happened.
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I ran OS/2 Warp 3 for awhile -- in text mode at first, because I couldn't afford enough RAM to run the GUI. It worked; I had multiple computers online concurrently with the InJoy software from F/X Communications. I was playing videos, chatting on IRC, browsing the web, and reading Usenet with FreeAgent all at the same time, with multiple hard drives combined into a single namespace with LVM. It was running GNU utilities and other Unix-ey things and had a local rootless X server in the form of Humingbird's eXceed.
It was a fun time to do interesting things with computers. Software was still tight enough to get these things done with perhaps whole dozens of megabytes of RAM.
A good friend of mine transitioned his shop full of PCs and terminals (which had been based around IGC's VM/386, running MS-DOS programs from a shared box) to OS/2 Warp around the time it came out.
OS/2 worked well-enough for him that he kept using it until 2018 when he sold the business and retired, though it had been marginalized to VMs running in Linux by then.
But that worked well and provided great continuity: All the little programs and features and bits of custom software (with customer data) that flowed well when they were implemented in the early 1990s continued to flow well until the end.