I remember in 1994 a friend had purchased OS2 for his 386dx with 8 (!!!) mind blowing megabytes of extended memory. OS2 took nearly 18 minutes to get to an interface you could use - not to install, to boot. went back to DOS lol.
If it was OS/2 from IBM it was true multitasking and the OS in full control of memory allocation, something Microsoft only were able to offer after creating a new operating system from scratch (Windows NT).
If you thought OS/2 took forever to boot on a 386DX with only 8MB of ram, imagine how long it would take to boot Windows NT 3.5 on that same machine…
My dad ran IBM OS/2 Warp for a while on our PC. Rock stable. Shame it never really took off.
OS/2 3.0 “Warp” was a little too much ahead of its time and had the exact same problem that Windows Mobile had: no applications.
IBM tried to solve that with Windows emulation but it was a headache from the start and often have a buggy experience.
It didn’t help that the real world hardest requirements were off the charts as compared to Windows 95 (still 16-bit MS-Dos based and not even close to what OS/2 was).
IBM did everything right from an engineering perspective but failed miserably on what the market wanted.
It never stood a chance. IBM had always been great at delivering solutions that was well engineered. What IBM has n-e-v-e-r been good at is marketing and understanding the volume market.
