OS/2

After it split with Microsoft, IBM decided to tackle OS/2 on its own. IBM had full access to the existing source code, which was actually bad news since it was written for an obsolete CPU architecture (the 286). Still, IBM soldiered on, revealing its frequent changes of direction in press releases that simply ignored previous announcements. One of the more interesting elements was IBM's frequent boasting. When they decided that OS/2 would support Windows applications, IBM's senior executives said that OS/2 would have "better windows than Windows." Never happened.

Surprisingly, in view of all this, OS/2 v2.0, released in 1992, was a pretty good piece of software that ran only on 32-bit Intel CPUs (386–486 at that time). It was buggy, ran ...

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