Re: The Future of IBM ..

I think you're off by a release. :-) Remember that Win 3.1 was really on top of DOS and was limited effectively to about 1MB (plus or minus your favorite memory manager, video memory space, rom blocks etc.) It was Windows 95 that required 4MB and OS/2 ran quite well in less. It certainly took a bit to install that much is true. Especially with OS/2 "Warp" it performed vastly better than Windows 95.


- Larry "DrFranken" Bolhuis

www.frankeni.com
www.iDevCloud.com
www.iInTheCloud.com

On 7/1/2013 11:39 AM, Nathan Andelin wrote:

It didn't help that IBM had billions of dollars in financial losses year after year between 1991 and 1993. OS/2 2.0 was released in 1992. Windows 3.1 was released the same year.

Windows 3.1 required only 4 meg of RAM which was inline with the PC market at the time. OS/2 required 16 meg of RAM. OS/2 came with a boatload of diskettes. Windows 3.1 required something like 4-6 diskettes if I recall correctly.

IBM's strategy was to limit device drivers mostly to IBM peripherals while Microsoft's strategy was to reach out to just about all peripherals. Microsoft was more in tune with the consumer market while IBM was arguably more in tune with the business market. Household consumers were a bigger market, however.

-Nathan





----- Original Message -----
From: Jon Paris <jon.paris@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion <midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Cc:
Sent: Monday, July 1, 2013 9:07 AM
Subject: Re: The Future of IBM ..

Not disputing the truth of many aspects of these comments - but there were a lot of ethically dubious practices on MS' behalf as well that went into the eventual demise of OS/2. DevKit issues could have been resolved - even marketing was beginning to show some progress.

Sad - it wasn't until more than 5 years later that I finally got a Windows PC with an operating system that even came close to the stability of OS/2.