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I didn't spell Microsoft with a dollar sign and I didn't portray OS/2 as a folk hero of computing.

So your responses don't seem to be addressing the issues I raised.






"What actually happened is that..."

Dismisses the entire article which, as far as I can tell, is pretty factual.

Admittedly I used your comment as a jumping off point for that observation about recent OS/2 commentary even beyond this particular topic on HN.


> Dismisses the entire article which, as far as I can tell, is pretty factual.

AFAICS it can be factual about IBM's incompetence, and Microsoft being a sleazy underhanded anti-competitor also be true.


The article is factual but IMHO profoundly misguided because it's profoundly biased.

I got a 2000 word editorial comment piece out of it. I'll share it when it's published next week.


I have read a lot about that time and it doesn't seem particularly biased. Microsoft hated working with IBM and their horrifically old-school way doing software development (e.g. counting lines of code, etc).

The bias, in my opinion, is the other way -- which is exactly what I said at the top.


I did try to explain the logic already, in this comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42338166

Letwin says what killed OS/2 was that it could run Windows apps.

This is not true.

That only applied to OS/2 2; OS/2 1 could not run Windows apps.

It didn't matter; there weren't any.

Windows apps followed Windows 3.0. Windows 3.0 followed the failure of OS/2 1.x.

This is his bias: he was one of the project leads and was passionate about OS/2, which blinds him to the fact that it was OS/2 1.x that flopped and there was nothing OS/2 2.x could do to usefully come back from that.

His assertion is that 32-bit OS/2 flopped, because it lacked native apps, because it could run Windows apps. This is not true.

It flopped because Windows 3 was out, and Windows 3 was a hit because it did what 16-bit OS/2 failed to do: it ran DOS apps _well_ and it could do that because it took advantage of the 386 chip.

His bias means he fails to identify the true cause although he named it.

Secondarily, I think we can point to a 2nd, non-technical, personal reason: Letwin was not involved in Windows 3, which was essentially a 1-man skunkworks project.

It was done by David Weise:

https://news.microsoft.com/2000/09/10/i-found-a-cool-little-...

Helped by Murray Sargent:

https://www.landley.net/history/mirror/ms/davidweise.html




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