OK, hands up, who, like me, was a one time IBM OS/2 user? What? You don’t know OS/2? It was IBM, and briefly, Microsoft’s 32-bit server and desktop operating system that was going to change the world. Then, Bill Gates decided that he’d do better by going it on his own with some operating system called Windows. We all know what the result of that decision was even if you’ve never heard of OS/2.

If you did miss it, that’s something of a pity since it was a fun, remarkably stable and secure operating system that was a real challenger to Windows. Now, after years of soldering on as an obscure spin-off operating system, EcomStation there are rumors that IBM might bring OS/2 back from the dead. Could they? Should they!?

In its day, OS/2 was great. Back in 1993, for example, when I was a contributing editor at Computer Shopper, we decided that OS/2 2.1 was the best operating system over such competition as the newly minted UnixWare, Windows NT, Solaris, and NeXTStep. So what happened?

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