What ever happened to OS2?

Way back in the 20th century, there was an os that was competing with windows 3.1, and win95...It was called OS2 warp, and while windows 95 was running on a 16 bit dos extention, OS2 was fully 32 bit capable.
I never tried it, but I'd heard that it was better than win95, only windows was advertised more, and OS2 dissapeared.
Does anybody have any experience with this alternative, and how did it perform?

Does anybody have an original copy? Another question is...would it be hard to write drivers for OS2?
I always wanted to try it.

I had a copy once...I got it at the Friends of the Library bookstore. It's alright, but I'd look at using Linux instead on modern hardware: IIRC, Warp 3 and 4 don't recognize IDE CD-ROMs.

So yeah. I know absolutely nothing about the OS/2 device driver infrastructure, so I won't speak to it.

My first computer (IBM Aptiva 75MHz pentium 8MB RAM) came with both OS/2 warp and win 3.1 running on IBM's PC DOS. It was kinda cool but I really did not know enough about what I was doing at the time to appreciate it. I know IBM a few years ago finally discontinued support for it (after years of it running on their mainframes) in favour of IBM's spin on Linux. It's current form is called eComstation, I'm not too sure what it's about but I think it's developed independently of IBM but with their approval.

Wiki is always good.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS/2

Yeah, progress happened to it. I didn't find it all t hat inovative. I mean look at Windows XP 64 bit. Sure it has more bits but... it sucked.

I used to work as a PC technician at a computer retailer circa 1994-1996. The vast majority of machines I encountered then were Dos/Win 3.1 and later Win 95. But I did see some OS/2. My fellow techs and I had a nickname for OS/2 Warp - we called it "oh s*** squared". It was more stable overall than Win95 and probably more advanced for it's time, but the support for it was so horrible that when something went wrong or wouldn't work it was a major undertaking to resolve.

IBM had this strategy of only supporting their hardware which would push people who liked OS/2 (which they assumed would be most everyone) to buy their stuff. Instead it created a tech nightmare, and a bunch of people who bought OS/2 for clone hardware (or purchased 3rd party hardware add-ons for their IBM machine) became upset when things didn't work. By the time IBM realized their mistake and tried to correct it with OS/2 Warp - trying to go after Microsoft by opening up their hardware support, it was already too late. By then MS had become the dominant OS and was entrenched, and the limited hardware and software support for OS/2 never got better.

Fun fact: What OS/2 did to run most windows software was actually use a installation of windows on the machine. It didn't emulate, it hooked right in and used it. In light of that OS/2 never really had a point anyway, you still needed a dos & windows to run just about anything.