Kahenraz wrote on 2022-08-20, 19:28:
Well done. I don't think that I'll ever use OS/2, but I respect it from a distance. It looks like a lot of work to get set up properly.
Yeah, I've never really used OS/2 for anything besides playing solitaire. My main motivation, aside from the challenge, is that the Windows and OS/2 versions are built from the same codebase and I'm making quite a lot of changes for Windows, so I wanted to make sure I wasn't accidentally breaking OS/2 code (which, it turns out, I did in a few places). Stuff like the update and install experience, and all the weirdly formal IBMisms everywhere like the "Problem Determination Tools" makes it pretty clear why Windows 95 won.
Plus in many respects NT 3.1 from 1993 feels like a more modern operating system than OS/2 Warp 4 from 1996. Like the install process - NT 3.1 you just feed it the three? boot floppies, it partitions your disk, it copies its files, done . OS/2 Warp 4 - you feed it the three boot floppies (starting with the "install" disk, not "disk 1") , it *reboots* because its relying on the BIOS still (which also means it has big difficulties with big disks), then you have to feed it the three boot floppies again before it will go and start copying files from the CD. I'm pretty sure NT4, released around the same time, has a bootable CD.
That said, in other ways its surprisingly modern. The first time I installed OS/2 2.0 last year was actually a little shocked. Its the same age as Windows 3.1 but has all this stuff that later appeared in Windows 95 making it fairly obvious where Microsoft got some of their ideas from. Like this is pretty much Network Neighbourhood: