So Long OS/2, I Will Miss You

Sarah and I spent the morning going through some of the boxes in garage, cleaning and looking for Christmas decorations. We came across some boxes with some of my old books and software, including my old copy of OS/2 Warp and couple of very large OS/2 books. I had a rush of memories about running it on my desktop in the mid 1990s.

I still have many great memories of OS/2, despite the sometimes minimal hardware support (especially for video cards). The Workplace Shell (WPS) was a GUI well ahead of it’s time and it many ways it still is. Most things in WPS were treated as objects, so customizing them usually involved tweaking attributes for that specific object in the shell. Imagine being able to sent a different color or background image for every folder you were viewing in your GUI. This was simple in WPS because those were just attributes of each folder object.

Running OS/2 during a semester of Assembly was a life saver. You could fire up as many instances of DOS as you needed and kill them off just as easily. That was a much better option than having to reboot your PC because your Assembly program poked and prodded some where it shouldn’t have.

After looking at my OS/2 box and books after few minutes they went into the trash and recycling piles.

So long OS/2, I’ll miss you.