GUI

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Thu, Nov 27, 2003 at 02:12:55PM -0500, Henry Spencer wrote:
> And don't forget IBM's OS/2.  Either MacOS or OS/2 could have owned the
> desktop market in the same way Windows owns it now, had their parent
> companies displayed a modicum of intelligence.  It took Microsoft a long
> time to respond adequately to the Mac, and the pent-up demand for a
> graphical environment was enormous by the time the first usable Windows
> (3.0 or thereabouts) appeared.  The first graphical environment with a
> solid set of basic applications running on cheap hardware was going to
> take over the market and make somebody a whole lot of money, and either
> Apple or IBM could have delivered it well before Microslop.  But Apple was
> (and still is) bent on using MacOS to sell overpriced hardware, and IBM
> marketing was far gone into senility and couldn't grasp how vital it was
> to have a proper applications lineup for OS/2.

Lack of backwards compatibility with DOS applications was probably the
biggest issue with OS/2, which meant there was lots of reason not to
switch for people, and hence no reason for anyone to develop
applications for OS/2 since no one was switching.  By the time 386
protected mode came around and was supported in OS/2 and could actually
run a decent number of DOS programs, win 3.0 had already taken off.

Lennart Sorensen
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