A couple things to add:<p>1. Microsoft got paid about $400 million for their work on OS/2, supposedly, through to v1.3 .<p>Development of Windows through to v3.0 was much much less. It is safe to say that Microsoft made money from the partnership with IBM.<p>2. OS/2 installation had a fatal flaw: if your PC had cache memory you had to disable it while the installer copied the files from floppy. It didn't hurt install speed since floppies were the bottleneck but it was very confusing to the newbies to OS/2 that IBM was trying to attract.<p>3. The Ziff-Davis magazines were pay-to-play in editorial content and they plugged Microsoft as being the better choice all the time. And pre-Internet they were a big source of information.
"<i>So a rogue group in Boca Raton, Florida—far away from IBM headquarters—was allowed to use a radical strategy to design and produce a machine using largely off-the-shelf parts and a third-party CPU, operating system, and programming languages.</i>"<p>At IBM around this time, Boca Raton was known as the place where people who weren't competent but couldn't be convinced to leave were transferred.
I liked OS/2 and used it simply because it meant I could develop 16 bit code using a protected mode operating system, which made development much faster.<p>Only as the last step was it ported to real mode DOS.
> IBM rules about confidentiality meant that some Microsoft employees were unable to talk to other Microsoft employees without a legal translator between them.<p>Haha, this is so ironic. I've worked on projects for MS that were just the same. We had to have code names for their code names and a code name for MS itself. Even our own code names had to be uttered with caution. Maybe they learned from IBM? Edit: Thinking about it some more, maybe they really did. None of the other big tech companies we did work for were <i>that</i> secretive.
There is Arca Noae[1], but I don't know how successful their business is.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.arcanoae.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.arcanoae.com/</a>
SOM was much more advanced than COM and nowadays it is almost impossible to find any documentation online.<p>WinRT is closer to it, but still lacks the metaclasses capabilities that SOM had.
Discussed at the time: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6792010" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6792010</a><p>One comment from 2017: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14070102" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14070102</a>
I almost got to use OS/2 for a commercial project.. we had fetch information from a PC desktop and feed it to an IBM mainframe while servicing up to two simultaneous users.<p>OS/2 1.1 EE had EHLLAPI support but was still a few months from release and I couldn't wait for it. I was really disappointed I didn't get to explore it fully because first look was really impressive.<p>I ended up using DOS + DESQview, and it worked out fine.
OS/2 was the most impressive "prosumer" OS of the time.<p>Wasn't as impressed by anything else that was not from Apple or Microsoft except NeXTStep and BeOS.
Little-known fact: Windows of today is an entirely different OS than early DOS-based Windows because Microsoft took ownership of the 386-based “OS/2 3.0” codebase it jointly developed with IBM, forming the foundation for Windows NT 3 which all modern Windows is based on. This gave them the huge head start in having a modern enterprise-grade operating system that allowed them to dominate the market.
This thread brings back the memories - I was an editor at a Ziff-Davis computer magazine back in the day.<p>Looking back on all this, the only lasting legacy I can identify is the linux windows emulation layer (wine), which exists only because Microsoft was required to make the Windows API public so it could be used by OS/2.<p>Given the difficulty of getting an ancient version of Windows running on currently available hardware, linux/wine is now the only practical way to run a lot of old Microsoft Windows application software. If it weren't for wine (which was made possible by OS/2), that application software would be unusable.
>Long before operating systems got exciting names based on giant cats and towns in California named after dogs<p>What operating systems were named after towns in California named after dogs?