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mattbg's avatar

This is a great history so far, and the comment threads really enrich the content.

I was a teenager when all of this was going down, so some of it is a blur. But I remember Windows 3.0 being mentioned here and there by a few people that liked it, and then all of a sudden Windows 3.1 was out and it was ubiquitous. I had been using DOS for 3-4 years by that point and don't remember anyone talking about Windows before Windows 3.0.

A few other things I remember from that time:

1. As a Windows 3.1 user with a teenager's budget, I remember aspiring to run OS/2 2.0. It just seemed so much more advanced. I even bought 16MB of RAM to run it, which at the time was extremely expensive because of the chronic "memory factory fire" in far-off places that always seemed to explain why memory was so expensive. However, I think the technical sophistication sustained my interest more than what it could actually do. I remember so much of OS/2 feeling unpolished and underwhelming from an end user perspective, even if I felt assured that it was technically capable of doing more than Windows. I always got the sense that disk caching never worked properly on any of my systems, and what's the point of being able to use long filenames if those files then become invisible to your DOS and Windows applications?

2. I was at a consumer trade show in Canada where IBM was trying to sell OS/2 2.x to consumers. They did this by showing Space Quest 4 playing simultaneously with Flight Simulator while also searching for files in Windows File Manager - hey look, the Windows clock is still moving even though Windows only has co-operative multitasking! It was cool if you understood why it was cool, but in retrospect I find it funny that you'd use such a ridiculous use case to sell a product to home users / consumers who just want to get work done.

3. Windows 95 came along and OS/2 just disappeared from the map for me. It solved all of the issues I had with OS/2 and gave all of the benefits and more.

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Jean Philippe Bagel's avatar

On the first Billion $ in revenue, I was not an employee at the time, but an intern in MSFT France, but I got to see Frank Gaudette's company meeting skit, as a Blues Brothers, singing "Coming to you on a dusty road, big numbers I got truck loads". This was MOST excellent.

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