OS/2 for Not Yet Techies

OS/2 is an operating system developed by IBM for personal computers to compete with Microsoft and Apple. However, IBM OS/2 never caught on and today the name is used for IBM servers for business.

They had the brilliant idea that people might actually want to run two programs at the same time on their PCs. Pretty weird, but the prevailing operating system of the early 80s, DOS, ran just one program at a time.

So Microsoft and IBM worked on the joint project, expanding DOS, until Microsoft decided that their new operating systems Windows was a better idea and pulled out of the deal.

IBM kept on trucking and threw away the great weakness of DOS, the 640k maximum memory for RAM (to be fair, when DOS was created, 640k was a HUGE amount of memory -- which was much more expensive then than now -- and even Bill Gates did not foresee a time when more would be needed - what kind of monster program would need more than 640k RAM?). In 1987 they finally came out with the first version of OS/2 -- which stank.

After more work, they introduced OS/2 2.0 in 1992 and it was popular with the growing number of geeks and other techies who were deciding they hated Microsoft, whether for the technical weaknesses of Windows or its perceived greedy business tactics. The final version was Warp 4. Today, these kinds of people have abandoned OS/2 and flocked to Linux.

Next: IBM OS/390