When OS/2 V3 aka Warp landed in the early 90s I actually bought a copy and used it… 4

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When OS/2 V3 aka Warp landed in the early 90s I actually bought a copy and used it as my daily driver on my work laptop for a couple of years. It was so far ahead of Windows 3.1 in terms of multi-tasking support and stability that it was a pleasure to use. Best of all with its virtualization capabilities and Win3.1 built in, it could actually run any Windows apps I needed in a better protected mode than stock windows.

Unfortunately when Windows 95 arrived with Win32 APIs, IBM' relationship with Microsoft had deteriorated to the point that they were no longer really supporting the new APIs very well and I couldn't use many of the apps I needed. Thus I had to revert back to using raw Windows for more than a decade. I dabbled with various Linux distros but since I needed to actually do stuff rather than being a developer, it just didn't work for me.

Only after Mac OS X arrived and I moved into writing and content creation did I finally transition off Windows for the most part although my recent forays back into the corporate world have forced me to use Win7 at least part of the time.

OS/2 did serve as a great transition from the DOS world (with some Win3 experimentation) to a full time multi-tasking GUI world.

Reshared post from +Harry McCracken

OS/2 turns 25 today. It's legendary for having failed, but it's never really gone away. Here's my tribute.

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25 Years of IBM’s OS/2: The Strange Days and Surprising Afterlife of a Legendary Operating System | Techland | TIME.com
How the next-generation operating system that was supposed to change everything didn't — and then refused to die.

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4 thoughts on “When OS/2 V3 aka Warp landed in the early 90s I actually bought a copy and used it…”

  • Kevin Jones

    I never used OS/2 Warp, but I remember the commercials about it on TV. They made it look so fantastic! I may have been in 5-6th grade, but I desperately wanted to know what this awesome thing was.

  • John Berger

    OS/2 Warp really was a slick OS. I was really excited for it when it first came out. True multitasking was unheard of back in the days of Windows 3.1. Hell, I remember being ecstatic just at the ability to format a floppy disk without the whole damned operating system coming to a complete halt! And having one Windows program crash without affecting others was fantastic.

  • Sam Abuelsamid

    +John Berger Considering how often windows apps crashed in those days, the ability to just kill a window and restart the app was a godsend. All things considered, given the hardware we had in those days, (gigabytes of ram and terrabyte hard drives were just a dream at the time) it's amazing that OS/2 worked at all. I think I started running it on a 25 MHz 386 Compaq before moving to a 33 MHz 486 Thinkpad.