OS/2

Err... the early v2 OS/2 didn't have drivers for most of the hardware (IBM had to convince people to write 'em -- unlike MS who said write 'em or get locked out of the market since it's going to be preloaded on piles of PC's) OS/2 ran mostly on PS/2's back in the 2.x days. It took until 2.11 for the beast to stablize and take hold as a business platform (mostly at IBM using sites). It's the APPS and the moving Win32s target they tried to support. The killer was when MS made Office not run under OS/2. OS/2 was slow -- glacial on the early 386's without a LOT of memory 16meg was VERY rare then). IBM used it internally (v2.11) on PS/2 25's with 12-16mb. It was slow loading and glacial loading apps. Many secretaries booted it with all their windows apps loaded so they didn't have to wait for programs to load. They often ran Ami Pro v3.1 under win3.1 since the Lotus Smartsuite was BEHIND the windows version for features. Boot time took almost 5 minutes. It didn't crash, however. OS/2 really didn't show it's stuff until the 486's. IBM went to Pentium 100+ desktops with 32mb of memory and IP networking 3 1/2 years ago. They dropped the Lotus SmartSuite96 on it with the mix of Windows and it reallw worked well. I liked it so much I purchased it for home (along with Corel's WP Office 2000 (for Win9x and Linux) just to have the alternatives to MSOffice. Got to support someone other than MS. I'd bet they're switching to WinNT or Win9x (laptops) and going to Microsoft Word for customer compatibility in a lot of cases. We were one of the first bunches of IBM'ers to do it 3 years ago (due to IBMGS putting us out to support a major NJ manufacturer of Baby Shampoo and Band-Aids (tm) which was not to be named. 8-) Bill -- bpechter(a)monmouth.com | Microsoft: Where do you want to go today? | Linux: Where do you want to go tomorrow? | BSD: Are you guys coming, or what?