Actually OS/2 was very good at running DOS apps even graphical ones -- I
have used to use it to develop my DOS stuff on it as it was the ONLY
operating system that could reliably run multiple tasks on a PC by that time
(...and Xenix and SCO but they were not compatible with DOS at all). It was
years before Win95 or the NT4 and IBM made the biggest mistake on marketing
to not to populate it with full power. They had only the "if you really want
to buy it we can sell it for you" strategy.

BTW, Win3x (16bit) applications were very stable on OS/2 as well (each Win
app could run in a separated environment which was very unique that time).
Also you could run OS/2 1.3 applications (16bit) on Windows. That was the
last version Microsoft worked on OS/2 together with IBM so the Windows was a
real one from Microsoft and the PC-DOS box also was a real MS-DOS with only
some minor changes.

Tamas


On 27/10/06, Gerhard Fiedler <lists@connectionbrazil.com> wrote:
>
> Howard Winter wrote:
>
> > No, it's the way Microsoft goes!  Backward compatibility used to be a
> big
> > thing in computing, but M$ discovered that it means that people can just
> > stay with what they have, rather than upgrading every couple of years,
> > which reduces M$'s profits.
>
> Are you sure that a compiled binary from ten years ago for any OS that is
> not stuck in time would run on a current version? Of course, if you take
> OS/2, the programs still run, but then, if you take Win98, they also still
> run.
>
> I'm not sure, but there are probably more MS-DOS programs that run on
> WinXP
> than there are MS-DOS programs that run on OS/2, no? :)
>
> Gerhard
>
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