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At that point(1989), the future was less clear-cut than Windows vs OS2. Windows was more a graphical shell for DOS than a real OS, and there were other graphical shells for DOS. From the top of my head: I vaguely remember GEM, I have used one from Tandy. There was something else installed on our school computers, Dynamic Environment or something . Windows before 3.0 (1990) was inferior to a lot of these DOS shells.

If the choice was between 2 options, 'both' might be a viable response. But 3 or more, especially with a market expectancy that everything DOS-based would disappear?




You may be thinking of DesqView? It provided some level of virtualisation and multi-tasking, if you had a competent-enough CPU. Eventually, there was also DesqView/X which allowed you to export DOS and DesqView-aware applications over X11, which was actually kind of cool.


I completely forgot about DesqView. Never used it of saw it, but yes, that was another well-known one.


Right, and Microsoft was still putting so much development work into OS/2 in 1989 that there was still some sort of feeling that OS/2 was possibly the future of Windows. (OS/2 development kits were shipped from Microsoft with Microsoft branding prominently on them right up until the OS/2 3.0 [WARP] split and the origins of Windows NT.)

In hindsight it is much more obvious that Microsoft's involvement in OS/2 was something of a trojan horse to fund early NT development and a short-term hedge in case people did trust the IBM brand more than the Microsoft brand, but at the time it was much more confusing.


There was little doubt at the time that DOS based systems were rapidly becoming obsolete, and the future would be 32 bit Windows or OS/2.




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