Too many people have speculated why OS/2 faded into the sunset while Windows reigned supreme. I want to explore some of the bigger theories and then offer up one of my own. The fact remains that OS/2 was the operating system that should and could but never would. I wanted OS/2 to work. I remember the Visual Basic class I took all the way back in the summer of 1994. I remember the instructor going around the class having us introduce ourselves. I remember saying how much I hate Windows (it was 3.1 at the time) because it was such a hacked and slashed together operating system, and that I really wished we would’ve gone the “OS/2 route”. In my mind, Windows 3.x was nothing more than a glorified version of DOS Shell, although I later learned that Windows was a real operating system; an operating system you add to pay twice for because you couldn’t run it by itself. All kidding aside, even in my late teenage years I stayed loyal to the OS/2 brand. I even ran it on my PC at home, albeit in dual boot mode because there was a lot of stuff that Windows 95 could run that OS/2 could not. I owned two versions of OS/2, “OS/2 for Windows” which was OS/2 version 2.1 without a standalone copy of Windows where you used your own copy. I also purchased OS/2 Warp 4 in 1996 when I was sick and tired of Windows 95 and the constant reboots.
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