I am cleaning up the closets here on our office and it is simply unbelievable the things I am finding here. Yesterday I found this beauty on the picture below that around 1995 came for free inside cereal boxes. The system was outstanding, it ran Windows 3.1 better than Windows itself, as OS/2 protected each Windows 3.1 application on its own protected area in the RAM memory, so if the application froze only that session was closed and not the whole operation system like happened on Windows 3.1. OS/2 had two major flaws. First IBM sold it, and selling to end-users was never IBM’s strongest area. And second it wasn’t compatible with Windows 95, i.e. you could install Windows 3.1 programs but couldn’t install Windows 95 ones (some people must have created ways to allow this, but this wasn’t standard). Then… it dropped dead.

This copy of mine, by the way, came for free bundled with a book called “How Internet Works”. Can you believe that I had once to buy a book with a title like that? Don’t laugh. In 1995 nobody knew what Internet really was or knew how to use it, everybody was talking about but only a few had seen it or really knew how to use it, also there were several features with weird names like Gopher and Veronica, used in Jurassic times before the web – which, like OS/2, died in 1996.

click to enlarge

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