OS/2

I had gone to Dallas to see the launch of OS/2 3.0 and was blown away by the demo. The object-oriented shell was to die for. They showed opening the address book, then dragging a few entries out and onto a document on the desktop causing the document icon to grow a tiny head in its corner to indicate there were some contacts now attached to it. This document was a form letter. Without opening the document, its icon was dragged to the fax printer icon. The system then went into action. It then began to print the document to the fax printer, which caused the word processing program to instantiate the form with data. It recognized that there were address book entries associated, and pulled the fields required (name, address, etc.) from the address book to fill in each version of the letter. Then, the pages could be rendered and sent to the fax printer to be converted for faxing. However, to fax them, you need fax numbers, and the fax printer was able to see the attached address info and pull the fax numbers from it! The fax printer then informed the user that it would have to que up the faxes for sending later as there was no fax modem in the machine. The presenter simply plugged in a PCMCIA fax modem card, the system recognized it, and the fax software began to send out the faxes. Then we got to see how easy it was to use it to connect to the Internet. This was October 1994. Windows95 was a sad beta called "Chicago", and this system could run rings around it. For the next few years, I was in OS hog heaven. I could run DOS programs, I could run Windows programs, and I could even boot real DOS into a virtual machine window. However, you couldn't run some of the newer DOS programs that were using protected mode on their own. The most popular of these was DOOM. It would run, but you couldn't get sound. The stability of OS/2 came at a price. No biggie for me, OS/2 let you boot back into real DOS. However, it was a biggie for many others, and besides, the new Windows Chicago beta was running it with no problems.

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