Warp Background

By Harvard Computer Society

Once upon a time, there was DOS. And it was good. It ran all the applications people wanted (Lotus 1-2-3). There was no need to run more than one application, because if you wanted to write a letter, you could just turn to your typewriter and rattle one off.

Computers became more powerful, more popular, and used their computers for more tasks. The idea came about that maybe people would like to run more than one a program at a time. So the two giants of the industry, Microsoft and IBM, came up with the notion of rewriting DOS so that it could run more than one application and do away with the limitations of the original DOS design (specifically the 640K barrier). The result was OS/2 (or DOS 5.0, as it was originally going to be called). The initial version of OS/2 was really bad, and it scared a lot of people off. Then Microsoft discovered unexpected success with the third version of their DOS shell, Windows, and they broke away from the OS/2 alliance with IBM, and followed the Windows path.

So OS/2 floundered for a while. IBM released a version (1.3) that fixed a few of the problems with the system, but it was still not a stable environment for most people (except those "true-blue" companies that always bought what their IBM account representative told them. In 1992, IBM announced OS/2 2.0, a completely redesigned, rewritten system. It had a fancy new object-oriented graphical interface, stable DOS program compatibility, and, something completely unexpected: strong Windows program compatibility. The new operating system was finally one worthy of the name.

Over the next two years, IBM programmers and designers improved on the system, adding several tiny but significant features and fixing the mountain of bugs that appeared in the initial releases. In this time, OS/2 sales have been steadily increasing - recent estimates place them at six million and climbing. While this is insignificant compared to the 50 to 80 million unit sales figures of Windows 3.x, it is worth noting that due to the lack of OS/2 preloaded computers, just about every OS/2 sale has been to someone who actually wants it and is going to use it. Just about every PC sold today has Windows preloaded on it, whether or not they actually use it, and these count as Windows sales. For instance, probably every PC running OS/2 today originally had Windows installed on it, which was then removed to install the new operating system.

Copyright (c) 1994 Harvard Computer Society. All rights reserved. This article may be distributed freely electronically provided this copyright notice is included. This article may not be reprinted without prior permission from the Harvard Computer Society.