New Old Stock IBM OS/2 Warp 3.0

Unboxing and Installation

Today, I am unboxing and installing a new old stock red spine IBM OS/2 Warp version 3.0 just as was recently done for version 2. Warp 3 was first released in 1994, and for the time, it was quite good.

IBM OS/2 Warp 3 with original plastic shrink wrap on. That shrink wrap makes it hard to get a great picture…

The same, but no wrapping. The totally cool way to run your computer, according to IBM.

Now, for the installation.

Sadly, photos cannot provide you the sounds that occur upon startup, opening and closing windows, and shutdown.

The floppy icon on the bottom bar opens a floppy if one is inserted, the button next to that opens an OS/2 terminal just like the one seen earlier, and the question mark icon opens the help text that auto-loaded on first boot.

The small tab above the floppy and terminal buttons gives us further options. We can open up the hard disk, or we can start a DOS session instead of an OS/2 session.

While we’re here looking at drives, let’s in stall the BonusPak.

Well, we’re not using my floppies as you can see. One of them was corrupted, so we’re using a loose CD I have of the Warp 3 BonusPak instead.

So, this was a bit more capable than I realized. The multimedia part of the BonusPak offered the ability to record video streams if you have a video capture card installed, and then it installed an AVI file manipulation tool that allows things like merging, splitting, and interleaving video files.

Here, I am blown away by how much software was supplied to users of OS/2 out of the box. Of course, this was somewhat essential given how quickly Microsoft Windows 3 had taken the market. Software for anything other than Windows or MS-DOS was rather uncommon by the mid 1990s.

Going through the installation process, messing around with a bit of the software, and seeing just how much was on offer, OS/2 Warp 3 makes me play the what if game more than any other operating system has. Seeing OS/2 Warp 3, I cannot help but wonder how different things could have been had Microsoft and IBM not fallen out. It was an exceptional operating system, and IBM’s own first party applications offered in the box weren’t half bad.