I know it’s fashionable to hate on BillG these days, but the guy was an excellent software engineer and a shrewd (if at times unethical) business man. The two greatest achievements of his, imho, were mentioned and they made me smile: 8080/Altair BASIC and the Model 100 software system. Just outstanding.

I get what is being said, but some like Perifractic owning Commodore gives me more hope. I just hope he exercises good judgement on who and what can use the trademark.

Well… that would be umm… amazing.

I absolutely love OS/2, and I have since I was a kid playing with my brother’s laptop. OS/2’s voice recognition was great for the time, the tooling and object oriented abilities were mind-blowing at the time, and I loved the look and feel of versions 3 and 4. Just great. Using it now makes me sad. It should have won, and IBM just kept making the wrong moves.

I truly enjoyed webOS. I was a Palm fan, both of the Pilot and the Treo. When webOS was released, I found a slick interface, a Linux shell, and gorgeous hardware. It was wonderful. Sadly, both Android and iPhone stole the market. Still, Apple’s MagSafe has continued the charging system of those devices and the cards interface has been replicated to some extent. Many parts continue, many more do not.

Love the site style, love the content.

This makes me happier than it probably should.

This is great, though I really wish there were a converter/viewer for 8088 or V20.

I think about this quite often. OS/2 was amazing. It deserved to win. Honestly, the biggest problem at the time was that Microsoft was much more a bunch of cowboys, while IBM insisted on near perfection. The two sides simply couldn’t agree on anything. Microsoft’s “quality” was focused on being “hardcore” where they wanted things to be lean and quick, quality be damned. IBM was more focused on having very few bugs. If that meant it required more hardware, that simply served their bottom line.

Many people feel that way, but it had multitasking, its own APIs, its own memory management, and so on. Disk access was still handled by MS-DOS, but that was it. I’d say that it’s an OS as it is far more than a shell, but we can also use Microsoft’s terminology from the time, “operating environment.”