LOL I have a working "original" Commodore 64 sitting here in the garage I'll letum have for $700, hell ill even throw in the boxes of 5 1/4 floppy's and the drives.

Brad, since your post I've been thinking about OS/2 a lot.  So much so that I installed OS/2 4.5 on an old Athlon 1333 system I had in storage.  It is really too bad Stardock wasn't the ones the were allowed to continue the OS/2 development.  Ecomstation just doesn't have the drive you guys could give it.

I miss it too.

I specially miss the time I didn't have with it, the beginning. I wished I had been old enough (I was born in 1977) to see OS/2 grow from 16 bit to 32 bit.

I have a book "Inside OS/2" from Microsoft Press that explains how OS/2 1.0 worked, how it switched between Protected Mode and Real Mode to run the DOS Box (then called "3x Box").

I myself only started using OS/2 in 1994 with OS/2 Warp. Many new OS/2 users came via Warp. I even bought Warp 4. And I still have an eComStation 2.0 VM on VirtualBox.

For what it's worth...

No, they don't. Or rather, the Windows NT project had its roots in the OS/2 project, but Windows NT (including later versions like Windows 2000 and finally Windows 7) did not have their roots in OS/2.

Windows NT (then NT OS/2 or OS/2 3.0) was started by Microsoft to replace OS/2. The original plan involved keeping the "OS/2" name and API (what programs see and use) but the NT OS is very different from OS/2 and was written from scratch.

OS/2 was based on the 80286 CPU and used the 286 memory model. Later versions used the 386 model as well, for 32 bit programs. Windows NT doesn't have any 286 compatibility or legacy.

I can think of only five things that Windows NT got from OS/2:

1. The file system model and the ability to read from and write to OS/2 HPFS file systems (removed in Windows NT 4.0).

2. The OS/2 subsystem that could run 80286 OS/2 code (removed in Windows XP).

3. The command interpreter cmd.exe (extended in Windows XP and above but not in OS/2).

4. The drive letters (which OS/2 got from PC DOS).

5. Some ancient authentication mechanisms that sometimes pop up in database applications.

That's it. Linux has more OS/2 code in it (JFS file system) than Windows NT. (And Mac OS X is based on the same kernel as OS/2 for PowerPC was.)

(The original Windows NT's version number 3.1 can be said to have derived from NT being "OS/2 3.0" at a time. But it most likely came from Windows 3.1 which it resembled and was supposed to replace as well.)

I knew about JFS being in Linux, I'm a fan of Linux as well.  But I didn't know that they removed the 286 subsystem in XP.  Thanks for all that info.

What do you think about Linux?

I liked Warp 4 for its stability in the days of NT4.  But that was the last OS2 I used, and of course progress has sent it to the museum.  XP was the best, and 7 may be.  The GUI is a lot better than OS2, and the stability about as good.

A long time ago the best NOS was Banyan/Vines.  But it is no longer for the same reason that OS2 is no longer.  They did not change with the times.  Both marketed to the Fortune 500 CIOs, instead of the Department heads who had to get things done. Microsoft went for the little guy (as did Novel - still around, but not by much) and won the big guys due to attrition.

Well, for the big guy, windows is not the main OS used... go to http://www.top500.org/list/2010/11/100 , and click the "computer/Year Vendor" field for each one... mainly all are using Linux, maybe there is a few using Windows but i was tired of clicking for seeking one...

If pro use Linux, it is not because of money ( a linux server version is about similar price that a windows one, several thousand $$$ ) but more about being able to modify the OS for their own need ( open source ) and having a good support system ( everybody know the quality of windows helpdesk )... infact, for linux server version, you don't pay for the software, but you pay for the support...

On desktop, windows have 90% of the share because it is already installed when you buy a new desktop computer... this was a great marketing strategy, nothing more... Win7 was released 2 year ago but as today, around 50% of the desktop continue to use XP... more will move to Win7 only when they buy a new computer...

rather odd that we had a os/2 warp + win 3.11 combo pre-installed in one of our old machines back when

only thing is... i don't think we ever used the os/2 part...