It looks more like reorganizing, and fleshing things out. Obviously football is lacking graphic support, and things like DPMI. But for the world of 1988 it would have been enough.

IBM was clearly out of their element once MS withdrew support further delaying 2.0 and leaving OS/2 in shambles that it never could recover from, between the bonehead moves in not including networking in a sane manner, holding onto the unwieldy config.sys/startup.cmd/autoexec.bat. The finally nail was SMP and TCPIP, both of which worked great out of the box with NT.

I think the actual OS/2 2.0 kernel was already much different from “Football”. For example all real mode code was removed from the OS/2 kernel itself, with the DOS code that runs in VDMs being separate.

This is why I call it the OS/2 fiasco. the CLI version of cruiser was ready in 1987. It should have been out there in 1987. IBM should have shut up, and let MS port Windows over OS/2 like they wanted to in 1987 and it would have been a 1988 product on the outside. Instead IBM had to be IBM, and force the delay.

The only ‘poor’ choice from Microsoft was to stick with Windows on DOS. The other OS they were writing at the time, NT was nowhere near ready in the 80’s, although work did start in 1988, and wasn’t near even alpha quality until 1991 with release in 1993. Meanwhile IBM had kneecapped OS/2, drove MS out of OS/2 development all together and sat around and did nothing with it. I mean look @ Warp 3/4 with it’s 16bit device drivers. It’s still just a slightly updated 1987 OS/2 football kernel.

Could Microsoft had made a more vendor friendly OS/2, something not as highly incompatible? Could they have marketed it on it’s own? Maybe. But Windows 3.0 was ‘good enough’ being able to run MS-DOS and Windows apps in protected mode. It could have been better, but IBM made sure it didn’t happen, but they didn’t control Windows, and the industry as always doesn’t mind installing a program, but an OS? Users don’t do that kind of thing.

Yes, but that is why I call it the OS/2 2.0 fiasco, because I am not talking about 1.x. I tend to assume that with MS’s support, MS and IBM would have released OS/2 2.0 in late 1991, not long after AMD released their 386. As for the Workplace Shell, I think it might have been a good idea to save it for a future release, though 8MB of RAM was not that expensive in 1992.

After seeing a 386 capable version of OS/2 that dates in 1987, I blame the whole OS/2 fiasco on IBM. No doubt it was their meddling that forced its insane SAA back assword UI, and 16 bit only for those first and important years on OS/2. A OS/2-386 version in 1987 would have been a ‘big deal’, instead the honor of multitasking MS-DOS fell to Windows and DESQview.

OS/2 could have been so much more, and football proves it.

One of the things I liked to point out when I was discussing the OS/2 2.0 fiasco was that the Win9x dependence on DOS allowed Caldera’s lawsuit to continue.

Sadly I do not. I gave that 286 away many many years ago in a cleaning up effort. And due to some misfortune for me in the US I wound up losing everything I couldn’t carry with me.. Breakups always suck.

And when I moved out to Hong Kong I basically only had a suitcase of clothes, and a macbook air I had bought before that trip that now nolonger boots.. I thought that older stuff would be easy to find ut here, but rather it is the opposite. Old gear here is impossible to find.

That image of the Baby-AT triggered a memory for me too. So down to the basement I went to uncover a mint example a client threw in my direction a few years ago. Not sure it I dare turn it on though as Electrolytics can be capricious fellows if disturbed.

I was considering dropping it at our next Makerspace, Junk Independance Day (hacklab.to) but I sort of want it to go to a good home for retired computers rather than be a stealth case for a PI-Behemoth.

Any suggestions?

I just installed Windows 3.0 and 3.1 on a PCem 286, and it works fine… although 386 mode on 3.1 no go. 🙁

I was looking at the original CGA game to show how.. aweful it was. The VGA updates were nice, but if you didn’t have a VGA card, like me it was back to the crappy CGA.