One of my biggest computing interests is operating systems. At least it used to be. Of course, as anyone with some experience in the IT industry, I have tried several, including – for the record – Windows (2.1, 3.1,95, 98, Me, NT 3.5, NT 4.0, 2000, XP, Vista, CE, PocketPC), Dos 2-Dos 7, OS/2 (2.1, 3.0, 4.0), Linux since kernel version 0.96 (1992), Solaris, HP-UX and other Unix variants, Symbian and BeOS,real-time operating systems like pSOS, VxWorks, Windows CE, Integrity, Nucleus, QNX, OSE, LynxOS, Symbian and others.
The greatest of them all I used to think was OS/2. I even went to WarpStock in 99. Well, I still think so. However, IBM killed it by not updating it and not releasing new drivers. And they did not make it open source. The greatest thing about OS/2 was of course its object oriented build and interface, and all those nifty applications one were able to build by replacing or extending a single component of the OS.
Anyway, the reason I mention this is that I have just tried Microsoft Virtual PC 2007, and I really smiled when discovering it has OS/2 support! It did not take me long to get the old OS/2 Warp CD and install it as a virtual machine on my pc running Vista. Of course I could have used VMWare as I did a couple of years ago. But Virtual PC seems to do the job as well.
Whether OS/2 still looks that great I am unsure of. After all, things has improved in the world of personal computing since 1994. XP and the Vista user interfaces are better (but not object oriented). Some of the Linux windows desktops also look good. Still it was fun to have another run at OS/2!
Jon's Techbits 