Part of it is wanting to run more than one at a time. We take it for granted now, but back then slow modems meant you were stuck waiting/watching on downloads, just as browsing usenet was a full screen event until the advent of client side TCP/IP using slip/slirp/twinsock/ppp etc etc…
The move to OS/2. protected mode apps just didn’t happen, no doubt hobbled by the $300 per seat for OS/2, the $3,000 SDK, and of course the $7,000 286 that couldn’t even run OS/2 out of the box.
Meanwhile that $10,000 386 + Windows/386 for what? $99 ?199 could run more than one DOS task at a time.
It just took a while for people to end up moving their apps to Win16, but it could have been OS/2 but IBM priced it out of the market, and Microsoft ended up being more interested in a software stack they could wholely own, with the DOS Extender making the magic possible, by being able to utilize the existing MS-DOS install. It’s no surprise that Windows 3.0++ won, users don’t tend to upgrade OS’s, just look at how many freaked out with the automatic 7/8 to 10, just as we’ve gone through the 10 to 11 jump. – Although RAM being the new wildcard it’s hard to say what 2027 will bring us, as 2026 looks to be pretty bad.

Before Windows 3.x became a success, a lot of software ran fine on an original 8088 @ 4.77MHz with 640k RAM.

Thus it made sense for IBM to have the PS/2 25 and 30 both as 8086 and 80286 models. Or it made sense if the price difference between an 8086 and a 286 CPU were big enough, which I assume was the case.

I think they were absolutely terrified of the 386, and wanted to steer the market to their price ranges. The problem is though, Taiwan, which they could not contain.

Maybe if the PS/2 were dual bus, there would have been some hope for the models, but the Model 60 was an absolute stinker for the pricer/performance. That said, I’m really glad to have one now, even if I somehow got one of those fancey 286->486 upgrades for it, that certainly breathe some much needed life into the thing!

One day I’ll have to get some 1MB SIMMs to see if they can work on the motherboard, it’d be interesting to see if the stock 60 can go to 4MB, although I’m sure it cannot…. It really is like putting RAM in these things would have killed them, although OS/2 sure needed it!

Getting back to the Model 60, Chet Heath (the “Father of Microchannel”) demonstrated a second 286 processor board attached to the microchannel bus: https://www.ardent-tool.com/7552/Architecture.html#Test_Tool

One mistake made with OS/2 was the failure to save multiple DOS machines to disk. OS/2 1.x would do that for the single penalty box. Having a second inactive penalty box would allow one box to have the major DOS app that needs to be run while the second could have any TSRs or other lightweight utility DOS programs that need to be readily available. No background processing needed if the box is just waiting to be activated.

The Model 60 was the wrong computer for the time. The benefits compared to the AT were minimal and not worth the increased prices. The rest of the PS/2 line was not to the usual IBM quality with the Model 80 failing to accept Token Ring cards and the Model 50 have a broken second SIMM slot. IBM attempting to slow the growth hard drives was another mistake.

One minor problem for OS/2 was Word Perfect’s decision to drop the almost completed WP for PM. That encouraged a rush to Windows. Word Perfect should have released WP for PM to test out the UI concepts against weak competition and prevent the issues WP for Windows had.

Well, VINES is also an UNIX distro… Although completely focused as a Networking OS. But yeah, it would be one of the OSs which supported Compaq ASMP to do stuff which wasn’t Oracle related.

Banyan had a version of VINES for SMP that ran on the SystemPro. Some drivers could have issues, and Banyan deliberately removed several from the SMP implementation. We had a customer whose SMP servers would always panic after attempting to verify a backup – never got to the bottom of it.

I have a NCR MCA bus box, mentioning it on the off chance someone might be interested. I posted fairly full specs on the NNTP os2.hardware group on Usenet, but I’m in Los Angeles and the interested person is on the East coast.

But compared to the limited and crippled hardware discussed here, it should be dreamy even if pitiful by today’s standards.

386, with (proprietary) 486 upgrade socket. 8 Mb Ram, seems maxed?. Motherboard SCSI attached to the SCSI HD. Ethernet card. MCA slots. Modified video out port to fit standard modern VGA.

I marked “Notify me …” below so Neozeed should have my email for contact. I also read this site frequently and post comments occasionally.

Especially once I found out about pigskin/football the frustration is so clear that Microsoft had all the bits to make an incredible OS, but they were being held back by every possible way.

although it took years for hardware to catch up to NT, it was at least looking to the right direction, unlike developing for the 286. If IBM could they’d still be selling 286’s with a 20% mark up every five years.