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« on: August 28, 2019, 08:55:19 am »
I wasn't aware of Martin's channel but now I'm a subscriber. Other OS/2 related channels are WarpEvents, os2memories, OS2memories, Warpstock Europe and Sigurd Fastenrath. Are there still more channels I should be aware of?
When watching the Warp launch event from 1994 I just keep on wondering what went wrong. Here in Finland I remember when I saw a pc running Warp 3.0 next to another one running Windows 95 beta back in 1994 in a local computer store. If my memory serves me right, I got my own copy in 1996 when a friend of mine won one in a lottery and sold it to me. And after Warp 4.0 was introduced a lot of copies of Warp 3.0 sold on a large discount and later they were even given away for free. The situation might have been that there were a large amount of copies in Finland but the demand for them was quite modest. There were lots of things Warp 3.0 did better than Windows 95 and backwards compatibility with DOS and Windwos 3,1 shouldn't have been a problem either: some Windows 3,1 software that ran under OS/2 didn't run under Windows 95. Windows 95 was also more unstable. But OS/2 wasn't perfect either, it wasn't "as solid as a rock" and it was possible to hang up the system. Things got better with Warp 4.0... But still when using ArcaOS nowadays reboots are some times required when, for example, WinOS/2 session hangs completely and CAD popup doesn't always work.
Did IBM fail because of bad marketing? David Barnes did all that he could and was a good speaker in a front of audience but why wasn't it enough? But when I think back Microsoft was a market leader and usually won all its rivals. At my school we used WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS and later 6.0 for Windows but they ware replaced by Microsoft Word 6.0 for some reason unknown to me. Maybe Word had already become a market leader by then. It was also in around 1996. Linux was also far superior operating system compared to Windows 9X when it comes to stability but still Windows dominated the market. And the only reason for Linux to be a bit successful is it's being free and open-source. Might the open-source route have gained more popularity to OS/2 also? But like it has been said, making the os source available will never happen because of the licensing issues and IBM has no interest in spending more money and time to it.
It's quite amazing that loyal users have kept OS/2 alive and you can run it on "bare metal" even now in 2019. Many other old operating systems have disappeared completely into obsolescence. Many of them, however, have been released as open-source later like CP/M and others.