If you really want to fall down the rabbit hole, NCommander did a thirteen-hour stream where he successfully (!!) installed OS/2 1.0 in a virtual machine (using PCem) and then upgraded, in-place, every single version after that, ending with OS/2 4.5. Sometimes the crazy custom color scheme migrated over, sometimes it didn't. Some early OS/2 apps worked after upgrading, but many of them didn't. The lengths he went through to make the upgrades work at all were beyond heroic and veered into the insane.
I was working as a contractor at the time, so I've got lots of memories of this.
Even before them, I actually used Microsoft OS/2 1.0 (yes, there was an edition packaged that way!). This was even before the "Presentation Manager" GUI was released. It was, from a user's perspective, just like an industrial-strength DOS.
Slightly later, running actual servers at IBM, OS/2 1.3 (iirc) was a godsend - it was the only OS we'd ever encountered that could reliable run for months at a time without reboot. I remember these tower cases loaded up with several 80MB hard drives for huge storage!
When OS/2 2 arrived, it really seemed to be a big step up over Windows, but IBM didn't know how to market it. There was a lot of innovation there, both in UX and in OS design. I recall the leaked internal "J'Accuse" email, where an employee pointed out how much the OS/2 team had done to make it such an excellent product, and that everyone in the company had done so much to support it.
IBM was really good at dropping the ball like this. Just as Windows has since come to be intertwined with BASIC (from early MS BASIC to Visual Basic to VBA), IBM had a thing for Rexx. Back in these days, few had yet thought about a VB-like tool to raise the level of abstraction for developers. Except for a small team in IBM. They built a tool referenced as, iirc, "Red October" that gave the rapid-prototyping capabilities of VB, but with Rexx, for OS/2. It didn't (yet) have the visual designer environment, but even at that early date it came baked-in with the ability to build remote client-server apps. I think that if IBM knew what to do with this, it could have pre-empted the success that Microsoft had with VB, and in that alternate universe, perhaps it could have led to IBM capturing the corporate desktop market rather than MS taking it.
I started my career in the OS/2 - OS/2 Lan Server world in the banking industry where we deployed OS/2 workstations running on Token Ring across the state of Louisiana.
The application that ran on these OS/2 boxes was a smalltalk GUI that basically sent commands back to a 3270 mainframe session. It was really a hilarious, basically non-productive application for the employees. Never underestimate how productive a bank teller who's been working for a few years can bang out keyboard combinations in a 3270 session vs now having to point and click to do basically the same thing.
Your post reminds me of the IBM ecosystem, from sales and tech support, Micro-channel token ring cards that were super expensive and had to "insert into the ring" to get network access, to watching the release of Win95, and even myself a hard core OS/2 zealot at the time could not deny that Win95 changed the world going forward.
I ended up going to work for IBM as a contractor doing level 2 support for the OS/2 TCP/IP stack, which was relatively new to the world in general, and so the small 3 person team that just did TCP/IP stack support were considered wizards and unique, given most of the OS/2 world ran on Netbios and even IPX for Netware integration.
It was a wild time of IBM software sales execs signing huge contracts, and deployments of overly complex environments that kept us on our toes.
I ended up pivoting to IBM's newly acquired Tivoli unit, and became a full time employee managing that beast of a enviromnent for "enterprise systems management" - then I got into all the CORBA and crazy frameworks there.
OS/2 was the bomb to run a multi-node BBS on a single machine. It could multitask DOS applications fantastically and reliably. Worked better for us than a multi-machine Novell-based network and more reliably than using desqview. A 486 with 12 MB ram could comfortably run 3 nodes plus an admin console when needed. We used Renegade and then Wildcat. Fun times.
It was also great for a single-node BBS. A friend only had one PC and couldn't do anything while his BBS was up so I recommended OS/2 to him. It worked great. I suppose he probably still had to take his BBS down to dial out to other BBSes.
I remember reading about running a BBS under OS/2. By the time I ran my own BBS, I was able to just run it on Windows 95/98, minimized.
It drove my Dad nuts to constantly have it in the taskbar, so so bought me an older computer to run mine. I think I ran it under Windows 3.1 so I could log in without needing to take it offline. I ran it that way until the summer of 1999 when I went to college. (And by that time very few people called dial-ups.)
This brings back some memories! The world was using Windows 95 and we were using OS/2 at home, with a sprinkle of DOS and Win NT 4.0.
Anyone remember the old Stardock games for OS/2? Entrepreneur, Galactic Civilizations, and of course multiplayer Trials of Battle on LAN.
Had my first foray into scripting with REXX, and Gopher was still a thing. First time I wrote some HTML was also on OS/2. Fun times as a kid in my dad’s lab.
I remember being a big OS/2 aficionado back in the 90s. It was always a bit painful being outside the mainstream so, of course, when I gave up on OS/2, my next stop was Windows NT. I suffered through that for a while before switching to the Mac which is still outside the mainstream, but is close enough to it that a lot of the pain no longer impacts me (if I had decided to go the Hackintosh route, life would have been far more painful, but my switch to the Mac also marked my deciding that I really didn’t want to be putting together computers from components anymore—part of what made OS/2 viable for me was that I made a point of buying only motherboards and peripherals that were explicitly supported by OS/2).
The support center at IBM Boca Raton will always be my favorite job ever. I loved that place with all my heart and the people that worked there. OS/2 was the reason I got that job when I called to report an issue with OS/2 running Renegade BBS and the Ray Gwinn FOSSIL driver. God I loved that operating system and still do. It really sucks that it didn't make it. If there is one thing I miss most of all about it was the community around it. People generally connected to help each other unlike what I have seen today in all of the tech communities. The hardest parts about getting older is seeing the "golden ages" of things past.
I remember getting that for Christmas when I was like 11 or 12. Don’t think I understood much but I was impressed by the two monitors on the cover. I’ve kept it for nostalgia…
My Dad's work computer had OS/2 Warp on it, and I honestly just thought it was some kind of weird 'business' version of Windows. They only used it to run Windows programs as well, very strange lol
My work laptop came with DOS and Windows 3.1. I bought OS/2 Warp for the pre-emptive multi-tasking I was used to on my Amiga. I was building a dBase IV app using two DOS windows. One day while I was compiling my app in one of the DOS windows, the WorkPlace Shell crashed. After a minute the DOS windows went away and a few minutes later they came back along with the WorkPlace Shell. My app was still compiling. I was impressed.
OS/2 Warp was a great way to get preemptive multitasking for 16-bit apps. If my memory is correct, 16-bit apps still only had cooperative multitasking even on Windows 95/98. I might be wrong, though, because it's been a long, long time since I used Windows 95. :)
I think there was something like that in "fortune" cookies on linux as well, circa 98. It poked fun at OS/2, as you said, and at the PS/2, for being half a computer, perfect for running OS/2.
IBM had a weird obsession with the /2, apparently.
Never used OS/2 but I do remember some ATMs running it well into the '10s: when they crashed or were in maintenance mode they sometimes got stuck in either the os/2 boot screen or the desktop.
Nokia Data was the leading provider of workstations in Finland in 1989 with almost 20% share. Besides OS/2 they also had at least MS-DOS distributions to their name.
I ran a network of OS/2 machines circa 1995 or 96, for a library system where the book tracking app would only run on OS/2. Client/server was the new hotness, and OS/2's TCP/IP networking and stability was streets ahead of Windows at that time.
Unfortunately it was too little, too late. By the time NT 3.51 came along, the game was over.
Is that right? I don’t remember 3.51 as being the thing that made OS/2 go away. (I don’t recall ever seeing it and NT 4.0 was also not super-common.) Sure, NT was the right technology to do so, but my recollection is that Windows 95 is what made OS/2 irrelevant due to its widespread and quick growth. Warp 4 came around the same time but didn’t get sufficient traction.
I didn’t have any visibility into the industry at that time so I could be very mistaken.
OS/2 Lan Server was the direct competition to Windows NT. When NT 4.0 hit (with the hardware discovery and Win95 interface) that was it for Lan Server.
OS/2 Lan Server was a dream server OS for IBM environments. Those things could crank out File/Print and 3270 Gateway etc services for months without a reboot. They were great during the time, and could collect dust in the back of a branch back office for years, kind of like the AS/400s.
Win95 certainly put several nails in the coffin. My experience was a bit different because of the app I was running, where the vendor was convinced that Win95 was not robust enough to handle it. In consumer space, Win 95 was undeniably the death knell for normie use of OS/2.
IIRC, OS/2's IP stack was a straight port of BSD UNIX, so it was pretty solid. I think NT's was as well, which killed off the last reason to stay on OS/2 for the org I was with at the time.
I bought OS/2 2.0, after scrimping and saving to bump my 386sx to 8 Mb RAM. It was pretty painful, but it could format a disk, download a file, and play solitaire without missing a beat once the disk swapping died down.
Anything else would slow to a crawl with the disk format.
(Also migrated to Warp, was pretty happy with that, too.)
I worked on version 1.0 when I started working for Novell in the late 80 and was assigned to test out the NetWare client software (called the OS/2 Requester). I remember they had to order memory expansion cards (I think it was 5MB) for every computer that used it and it cost about $2K per card.
Thx for the memories... I worked with OS/2 1.2 & 1.3 when I worked at IBM as a young engineer. It was never my favourite system, but I remember it fondly.
I vaguely remember an extraordinarily configurable (or even programmable?) editor under OS/2 Warp that I found quite impressive at the time. I think it was EPM. Surprisingly, I can hardly find any information about it except on wikipedia and edm2.com.
The only relationship between OS/2 and NT is OS/2 subsystem for running OS/2 userland code and some ideas from Installable File System, plus not exactly supported HPFS driver (NTFS is actually very different beast from HPFS).
Part 1 is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeaRlhz96mI Part 2 is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uwGTHZzzF4