New Old Stock OS/2 version 2

Unboxing and Installation

IBM’s OS/2 shaped the history of the PC in extremely important ways. For a product that was only mildly commercially successful (it succeeded in very specific market niches), it’s impact is felt by anyone using an IBM compatible PC to this very day. I happened upon a sealed copy of OS/2 2.0 and I simply couldn’t pass it up. After well over a year, it’s time to open it. Unlike previous unboxings, this one will be more thorough as I imagine that not many people will have ever seen OS/2 in box.

I will now show the entire contents of the “Migrating to the OS/2 Workplace Shell” manual… for some this may be really boring, and I know that other readers will be zooming in on each and every page. For those who hate this sort of thing, sorry, please skip ahead.

Now, I will give the “Getting Started” guide the same exhaustive treatment.

I created disk images from the floppies, and I then used VirtualBox to perform an install. I usually use KVM and Qemu for modern virtualization, and I usually use 86Box to emulate old PCs. VirtualBox, however, has a preset specifically for OS/2.

I am always amazed by OS/2. Just as with Digital Research’s DR DOS and GEM, I wonder what might have been had the OS wars played out differently. OS/2 is speedy, well thought ought, and I personally like the look of it. Version 2 here has some visual similarity to Windows 2 and 3, but it is, of course, far more sophisticated. From what I could find when covering both Windows and OS/2, Microsoft and IBM couldn’t work together for cultural reasons. As IBM’s fortunes in the PC spaces began to fade, Microsoft had little reason not to simply continue with Windows and ultimately create NT. Yet, what if IBM and Microsoft could have made it all work?