[jrclark]

Many of you probably dont remember OS/2, but I was right in the middle of the whole Windows vs OS/2 debacle.

Those of you banging the "business friendly" and "technically superior" drums of the PB would be well served to review some history. I wont bore you with the myraid of parallels betwen the two product rivalries, but the similarities are donwright spooky.

My guess is that RIM has forgotten the OS/2 history lesson, and is repeating it. But hey! Maybe they can get a college bowl game to help advertise. The RIM Playbook Fiesta Bowl?

Oh, and just in case your wondering, I was a huge OS/2 fan and proponent until the very end.

[meltbox360]

Yes but the playbook doesn't run iPad apps and therefore doesn't benefit the iPad...

[soney1]

maybe IBM will buy them and put "microchannel architecture" in the playbook...LOL

[egranlund]

I can see your parallel between the playbook and os/s but the iPad is no windows. Closed closed closed. The iPad would be the macintosh in that whole debacle.

The android = windows parallel in this whole thing would make more sense anyway as one of the huge things advertised about os/s was windows compatibility and we're gonna have android compatibility with the playbook :P

[meltbox360]

Well that would make the playbook linux? D: the horror of the low adoption rate

[1812dave]

ah, I remember all the way back to learning how to "program" punch card machines. (collators and sorters) Punched card - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Punched Card II

BTW, I put "program" in quotes because it was awfully easy. I never once cracked open the textbook.

[i7guy]

Many of you probably dont remember OS/2, but I was right in the middle of the whole Windows vs OS/2 debacle.

Those of you banging the "business friendly" and "technically superior" drums of the PB would be well served to review some history. I wont bore you with the myraid of parallels betwen the two product rivalries, but the similarities are donwright spooky.

My guess is that RIM has forgotten the OS/2 history lesson, and is repeating it. But hey! Maybe they can get a college bowl game to help advertise. The RIM Playbook Fiesta Bowl?

Oh, and just in case your wondering, I was a huge OS/2 fan and proponent until the very end.

Actually OS/2 was a great o/s and better and more stable than Windows at the time. IBM mucked it up by not making the lowest level chip the 80386.

[jrclark]

Actually OS/2 was a great o/s and better and more stable than Windows at the time. IBM mucked it up by not making the lowest level chip the 80386.

Exactly my point! OS/2, and the hardware it ran on, was technologically superior to Windows at the time. Anyone still running OS/2?

[jrclark]

I can see your parallel between the playbook and os/s but the iPad is no windows. Closed closed closed. The iPad would be the macintosh in that whole debacle.

The android = windows parallel in this whole thing would make more sense anyway as one of the huge things advertised about os/s was windows compatibility and we're gonna have android compatibility with the playbook :P

Windows is an absolutely closed system, just like Apple OS and Blackberry QNX. It is not open source.

The promises of Adroid app compatabily remind me of the big promises that OS/2 would run Windows apps through a "campatability" layer.

It was Warp speed to nowhere...

[iN8ter]

Apart from being good as a platform, one of the biggest selling points of OS/2 was its compatibility with DOS and Windows 3.x applications.

In that respect, I personally think Android is more like Windows in this analogy.

And that type of marketing has always failed becasue consumers almost always come to the conclusion that if they're gonna run Windows applications anyways, why not just get a Windows PC (i.e. Android Tablet) that will be cheaper (i.e. ASUS Transformer with comparable hardware will be $100 cheaper than a Playbook) and has a much better ecosystem with better services integration on that platform (either in-built, or through the developer ecosystem).

Also, OS/2 didn't run Windows Apps through a compatibility layer. It was beyond that. It was almost as good as having a complete installation of Windows 3.0/3.1 embedded in OS/2. It was more akin to Windows 7's XP Mode virtualization than something like WINE/CrossOver on Linux - even beyond XP Mode, you got a full Windows 3.x Desktop with Program Manager and everything as well... You could even install Win32s in it to run some 32-bit Windows applications!

OS/2 got beat on pricing and OEM support, in addition to the fact that Microsoft introduced Windows NT which was 95% backward compatible to Windows 9x and had many of the advantages of OS/2 in addition to better hardware support (they supported many different platforms with NT over the years).

Microsoft's developers tools were also clearly superior, as was their documentation and pricing thereof. Once developers started supporting Windows to such an extent, it was over for OS/2. Windows 95 sealed the deal. IBM didn't have joint ownership of Windows 95 the way they did with earlier versions of Windows (when MS and IBM were working together), so once developers moved to 32-bit Windows and stopped supporting OS/2 development it made the platform a dead end outside of niche/business deployments.

OS/2's stability and architecture were a huge win over Win16, especially when it could run basically every Win16 application, but Microsoft made sure to delete that advantage...

OS/2 was also prohibitively expensive for consumers back then. It was disgustingly expensive compared to Windows.

[TheScionicMan]

Well that would make the playbook linux? D: the horror of the low adoption rate

Technically, it's POSIX, but I know your were just making an analogy...