1/23/2008

A Blast From The Past

I saw the link in an online article from Information Week and I couldn't resist. I had to click on the link.

It was a trip to a fondly remembered past.

My first computer – a 486DX2/66 – came with MSDOS. The first thing I did when I got it was wipe the hard drive clean and installed IBM's OS/2 Warp.

Warp came out just before Windows95, if memory serves. It ran many of the Windows 3.x programs better than Windows did, had a great GUI, excellent memory management, and never crashed once in all the time I used it. Despite it being an excellent OS, it never really caught on. A lot of that was IBM's reluctance to promote it, using a series of TV ads that ran for a short time. I guess they thought that was all that was needed to succeed. Unfortunately they were wrong.

With a lot of reluctance I had to give up on OS/2, replacing it with Windows 2000. OS/2 didn't have the support or the software I needed, so I made the switch. It was a sad time for me.

OS/2 faded from the memories of a lot of people and I thought that it did too.

Then I find this article in Information Week and I find that OS/2 is still out there, still alive, with a rather large enthusiast community, including an online forum with links to OS/2 resources, news and other information.

It pleases me to no end that OS/2 still lives.

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