The real reason OS/2 flopped shaped modern software
Summary
Opinion The resurfacing of a 1995 Usenet post earlier this month prompted The Reg FOSS desk to re-examine a pivotal operating system flop … and its long-term consequences. This set the stage for the developments of the 1990s that put us where we are today, in a world of multicore 64-bit machines running just two families of operating systems – Windows NT and Unix – which take tens of gigabytes and are still growing. The Deskpro 386 launched in September 1986, but it was crippled by a 16-bit ISA expansion bus – only its proprietary memory card slot was 32-bit, and $6,499 ($18,718 today) is a lot of money for a very limited machine. On the back of that hypothetical success, IBM could have individually couriered a replacement 80386 "planar" ("motherboard" to lesser vendors) to every customer who bought an 80286 PS/2 and wanted OS/2. It ended up eventually dominating the industry because it aimed at future hardware: it was designed to run on the i860, specifically the Dazzle motherboard, then the MIPS R3000, as well as x86 machines.