by dfe | 2025-10-08 19:24:04+00:00
I was an avid OS/2 user from 2.1 (1993) through Warp 4 (1996). This is sort of accurate and sort of not. It depends on what point in time you are referring to.

I did happen to have a machine with a monster CPU (for the time), but I knew many people with lesser CPUs. It really wasn't the CPU but the RAM. You had to have 4 MB, better to have 8 MB.

In those days, RAM was the most expensive thing on any computer. Also in those days a lot of the inexpensive clone machines like the Gateway and Dell were still using 30-pin (8-bit wide) RAM, so you had to use 4 sticks to get 32-bit width, and there were only 8 total slots (two banks). 1 MB SIMMs were at least obtainable, which means your practical limit was an 8 MB machine. 4 MB SIMMs were incredibly expensive, almost unobtainable, if your system board even supported them.

OS/2 would run very comfortably on an 8 MB machine, meaning all you really had to do was come up with the scratch for some 1 MB DIMMs and have a machine with the full 8 sockets. It was slightly upmarket for 1992 and 1993, but very far from high end. A ton of people in the BBS scene used OS/2 because it allowed you to run your own BBS in the background, or to connect to a BBS and be downloading files while still being able to use the computer, like say a word processor to write a paper.

By the time Windows 95 came out in late (September) 1995, 4 MB was considered the minimum and 8 MB was considered better. By then the Pentium had been released, but 486SX systems were pervasive and cheap. If you slapped more RAM in them, they would indeed run either OS/2 or Windows 95 just fine. Software rarely needed an FPU. System requirements between the two were basically the same.

The failure of OS/2 came down to software compatibility. The killer feature of OS/2 is that it could run all your DOS programs and all your Windows programs and unlike real DOS or Windows you could have multiple programs open at the same time without bogging-down or crashing the system. Heck, you could even run full-screen VGA games like Doom and task-switch out of them and return. You could be gaming while downloading.

But Windows 95 came out with an even better feature: the ability to run Win32 software that was formerly limited to Windows NT. And that turns out to be a way more important feature than being able to run lots of older software simultaneously. And as far as stability goes, if you only ran Win32 software on Windows 95 it was actually incredibly stable. As long as all the applications themselves are reasonably well-behaved, the inherently unsafe Windows 95 architecture of a large amount of globally shared unprotected memory hosting critical system data structures isn't a big problem.

So what did I do in 1996? Well, I got a true monster machine, a Pentium Pro 200 with I think 64 MB of RAM, and I ordered it with Windows NT 4. By then, Windows NT needed 32 MB minimum, but RAM was getting cheaper so it wasn't as much of a barrier.

So the irony of saying that you needed notably higher-end hardware for OS/2 is that notably higher-end hardware becoming the norm is what really killed OS/2 even among die hard fans.

Cheap RAM, cheap enough to run the even more stable Windows NT, was the last straw. OS/2 was mortally wounded when IBM failed to deliver Windows 95-on-OS/2. I thought at the time they should have done that, and I know now they could have done it. If they had done it, I think OS/2 could have competed with Windows 95. Instead it only limped along among die-hard fans like me. But once hardware caught up and I was able to run Windows NT, there really wan't much point in OS/2 anymore.