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Why I have used OS/2 !

I had the first contact with OS/2 in 1988. At that time is was a crude clumsy Operating System in its first version. The company where I worked at that time embarked on a journey with IBM to develop a new Software package powered by OS/2. Even though we had all the manuals (also the internal IBM stuff) it was rather cumbersome to program the OS. However, it was still easier than the APIs from Micro$ofts Windoze and a hell of a lot more stable !

To begin with, OS/2 was the baby of Micro$oft and IBM. I still remember the words of Bill Gates "This will be the Operating System of the future", but after a few years MS pulled out of the contract with IBM and did their own thing. And only some month after this pullout Windows NT saw the light of the world (pretty amazing, huhh) it took the MS programmers only something like 6 month to develop a 'completely new' operating system ! What most of the MS followers didn't know was the fact that NT had OS/2 under the hood ! The MS guys just gave it a new shell, and that's something fairly easy with OS/2. In fact, the first versions of NT still threw OS/2 exceptions.

I decided to stay with IBM's OS/2 I haven't done much development work for OS/2 but I have used it as my desktop operating system. It was just so convenient to have DOS windows open, being able to kill them and hardly having to reboot during weeks ! MS claimed that windows could do this, but I know better ! The guys in our office who used 95 or NT had to reboot at least once a day because an application has once again caused a GPF. On the other hand we had a multi purpose workstation running on OS/2 WARP4 which did daily scheduled backups and served as our intranet server, running several copies of IBM's GoServe (web server). And that on a 486/133 with 16MB.

Of cause, meanwhile NT, 2003 and XP can do the same thing, just OS/2 did it long before and I trusted the IBM programmers more. They know their stuff and know what backwards compatibility really means ! And I am talking source code here ! The API calls introduced in version 2.0 of OS/2 were still valid in Version 4.

Unfortunatelly OS/2 died and IBM did not support it from 2003 onwards.