Author Topic: Do not forget: Spock (Leonard Nimoy) introduced OS/2 Warp  (Read 30008 times)

Fahrvenugen

  • Jr. Member
  • **
  • Posts: 90
  • Karma: +4/-0
    • View Profile
Re: Do not forget: Spock (Leonard Nimoy) introduced OS/2 Warp
« Reply #30 on: August 30, 2019, 04:35:05 pm »
Why didn't IBM ship OS/2 with its own computer models? 

As has been pointed out by a few people here, IBM most definitely did ship its own computer models with OS/2.  I can recall press releases from when Warp 3 came out talking about how there was a policy at IBM to offer OS/2 pre-loaded on any of its PC's that it sold.  There was also the selection system where OS/2 along with DOS - Windows was on IBM systems and you could pick the one you wanted upon boot/setup (and if you'd picked one you could later switch, but that option was not always clear in the documentation - many people thought that once they'd picked Dos-Windows they could not then go to OS/2).

For those who bought a desktop or laptop directly from IBM the sales representative would ask if you wanted OS/2 or Dos-Windows.

I think it is also worth pointing out that IBM did initially have some success marketing Warp 3 - even after Windows 95 had been released.  There was the TV campaign (the commercial with the Nuns is the one most people remember), but even more successful then that and often overlooked was the Just Add Warp campaign.  It came out just shortly after the release of Windows 95 and was promoted heavily.  If you called IBM they'd mail you the disks, or for those who were online you could download it (via FTP if on the internet or it was also available through the various services such as Compuserve and all the BBSes that were around in those days).

Just Add Warp was actually a decent campaign and won several awards.  It contained a Windows 3.1 app (which also ran under Win95) which would check your system's hardware and tell you if your system could run Warp.  Checking hard drive space, memory, CPU, graphics, sound, etc.  It had a OS/2 Warp demo showing the benefits of Warp.  It also had a number of help files which walked you through some of the benefits of OS/2 over running Windows, how to install OS/2 on the system containing Windows 95, how to remove Win95 from your system if you chose to do so, OS/2 tips and tricks, and more.

It also had a dual-boot app that - if you had Windows 95 and OS/2 installed on the same FAT partition it would put on each desktop the dual-boot app to allow you to boot to the other.  For those running OS/2 along side Windows 95 it also had a "long file name conversion utility" which would map Win95's long file names to OS/2 EA's - so that when you looked at a file's object in WPS you'd see the long file name.

For a brief time IBM claimed that the Just Add OS/2 Warp kit was its most requested and most downloaded software from IBM.  In January of 1996 IBM claimed that for the month of December OS/2 Warp 3 was the best selling software on the market - outselling boxed Windows 95 (not counting OEM installs) according to one of the organizations that monitored software sales.

Unfortunately it was not to last.  Microsoft had a huge foothold through the OEM installs.  At IBM with the failure of the PPC and PPC version of OS/2 IBM made significant cuts to their PSP division.  Upper management at IBM decided to focus OS/2 more on the business market and mostly abandoned the consumer market. 
« Last Edit: August 30, 2019, 04:39:22 pm by Fahrvenugen »

Tuure Linden

  • Jr. Member
  • **
  • Posts: 88
  • Karma: +0/-0
    • View Profile
Re: Do not forget: Spock (Leonard Nimoy) introduced OS/2 Warp
« Reply #31 on: August 30, 2019, 05:02:13 pm »
Mathias, actually I used Gentoo for a couple of years in the early 2000s. It broke easily and took forever to install larger applications because they were compiled from source. There were some binary packages available but at some point I abandonet Gentoo completely.