this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2024
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My first not embedded OS! Actually not... It wasn't the hipster "warp"... Boy i am old 😅
Never seen an OS/2 computer in the wild unfortunately. How similar was it to Windows?
If you interacted with an ATM in the 90's - 2000's it was likely running OS/2. It was superior to windows, but lost in the end. Many of the concepts of the workplace shell were ahead of other DEs even today. KDE initiallly borrowed a lot from the wps.
Ars wrote a decent article about it a while back. I dug it up - https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/11/half-an-operating-system-the-triumph-and-tragedy-of-os2/
It's a fun read. The tl;dr: OS/2 had lots of features Windows didn't, but IBM is notoriously bad at marketing, and failed to beat Microsoft in the public perception arena.
1.3 wasn't really great, although it was used by a number of embedded systems such as ATMs and the like. Version 2.0 was actually quite good. It could typically run DOS and Windows software in addition to native stuff. I got one of the Wing Commander games to run on it.
Sadly, there were basically no native applications, so there was no point in switching from Windows. So it never took off.