[09:25] I remember being hopeful that OS/2 would win out over Windows. It was vastly superior in every way. [15:56] BrianHechinger[m: IBM did not market it to the masses in a way that worked. They were used to dealing with large companies who thought nothing of paying $500 for the driver for $50 network card. [15:56] in the end it was cost that got me looking at Linux. [16:00] Even the $200 for OS/2 3.0 (2.1 was free) was a stretch for me. To then not be able to connect it to anything except by serial was what took it out of my system. At the time 10Mbit network was really fast ;) [16:06] BrianHechinger[m: MS manged to put dos and then win into so many new computers and that was it for OS/2. MS took the technology like hpfs->ntfs and made NT but somehow made NT so much worse than OS/2...??? [16:08] They had people from DEC working on NT and those guys built amazing stuff at DEC. I can only assume it was management that got in the way of an actually good product with NT. [16:10] DEC made great real time SW/HW, we used a microvax at work... slower than NT but able to be on time all the time for belts running at 3M/sec [16:11] When they got bought out, that was the end of that though. [16:11] RT-11 could do amazing real-time stuff on some really minimal hardware. [16:11] Yeah, that was a sad day [16:12] When people buy out another compny they always say it is to bring the inovation into their company but it almost always really means getting rid of a competitor [16:16] I think more in the case of Compaq it a buying something to help them compete against the likes of HP, Sun, IBM, etc. They were the one big player without a non-x86 platform. [16:18] So now we livr in a world where Apple makes the smallest tweak to a known product and it is call inovation :P [16:18] Removing the headphone jack is not innovation. 😜 [19:33] no, but it saves money in manufacture