Oooh I remember having one of these (with OS/2, no less) back when I had a side-job as the Microsoft support rep for Texas A&M. I was tasked with getting it up and working so I could demo it to the department heads who were looking to upgrade lots of old IBM XT's.
While DOS with Windows 286 worked okay, OS/2 for Mach20 never would get past installation.
I finally told my boss that I was getting nowhere with OS/2. She contacted her boss and later relayed to me that OS/2 for Mach20 had been marked as a "non functional product" and would be going away.
The happy ending was that I kept the Mach20 board in my ancient PC and used it for my remaining programming classes. It ran Turbo Pascal and QuickC for DOS quite well.
So this makes you a candidate for the ultimate retro-computing challenge :
"¹ If you’re one of those retro-computing archivists, I guess this poses an extraordinary challenge even greater than possessing a Tandy Video Information System: Can you track down one of the three remaining copies of OS/2 for Mach 20?"
Coincidentally, I got a job at Tandy right out of college and I got to see the demise of the VIS firsthand.
There was a big warehouse in Fort Worth where un-sellable products ended up, so I definitely could've won that challenge. They had pallet-loads of brand-new VIS machines bundled with all 20-odd games for around $49.
More accounting fun! This time around revenue recognition. It used to be that you had to ship a physical item to a customer in order to recognize the revenue from the sale. So the place I worked at back then would send out first-draft manuals to customers who had ordered the not-quite-done software. When we finished it and it passed testing, we'd send them the actual diskettes and an updated manual.
I never heard of any complaints being lodged, so it must have been a standard industry practice of the time. Or the salespeople had already smoothed the waves with the customers.
I miss those days. I worked in the Compute department for the DOT and we were always getting proof of concept hardware and some of it ended up under my desk.
Boss has a Dec laptop that was _thin_ (Digital Hi Note?)
We had a Dec Alpha running an early version of Windows NT
While DOS with Windows 286 worked okay, OS/2 for Mach20 never would get past installation.
I finally told my boss that I was getting nowhere with OS/2. She contacted her boss and later relayed to me that OS/2 for Mach20 had been marked as a "non functional product" and would be going away.
The happy ending was that I kept the Mach20 board in my ancient PC and used it for my remaining programming classes. It ran Turbo Pascal and QuickC for DOS quite well.