OS/2 stillborn, was Re: TRS-80 Model 1, etc

[Guy Sotomayor]

Dave McGuire wrote:
> On Feb 1, 2007, at 4:05 PM, Warren Wolfe wrote:
>>     IBM licensed MS-DOS from Microsoft, and CP/M-86 from Digital
>> Research, and did NOT develop their own Operating System until OS/2,
>> which was essentially stillborn.
>
>   Oh nonono.  I'm sorry to have to correct you here Warren, but 
> nothing could be further from the truth.  First, OS/2 was written by 
> Microsoft and sold to IBM.
Bzzzt.  Wrong!  OS/2 was a joint development between IBM and Microsoft 
(and the resulting JDA caused much wrangling and hand wringing at IBM).  
Neither company wrote the entire beast.  Some of the meetings on things 
like memory management and scheduling were pretty close to 
thermonuclear.  No, it was pretty close to 50-50 (maybe even skewed a 
bit more towards IBM).  After the famous Gates decision on Windows, IBM 
went it alone.  Even from the start, IBM had a considerable team (think 
100's) working on *code* for OS/2.

And no, I did not work on OS/2 (ok, just for a little while but it 
wasn't my fault).  I'm a Unix guy through and through, but I was in 
close proximity to both the project and people for ~10years.

-- 

TTFN - Guy