[ale] a moment of silence please

[Jerald Sheets]

On Apr 28, 2010, at 4:17 AM, Pat Regan wrote:

> A friend of mine once bought OS/2 on cd.  I know we had 2.0 and Warp, 
> but I'm pretty certain this was Warp.  We were probably in the early 
> part of high school.  He didn't own a cd-rom drive, but I did. 


Here's a good one that underscores (at the time) the growing irrelevancy and "right hand not knowing what the left hand was doing" of IBM in the day.

I was running a pretty decent sized BBS off of OS/2 2.1 that came on CD.  The little shop I was working for at the time (Software Solutions on Florida Blvd. in Baton Rouge) got a package deal from one of our suppliers.  It was an IBM/Alaris SLC-2 66 motherboard, 4 MB of RAM, and a copy of OS/2 2.1 bundled with a Mitsumi CD-Rom and controller card all of $249. (yeah, you had to buy extra RAM at regular price, but it was a good deal nonetheless)

Here's the best part:

OS/2 didn't ship with the driver for the Mitsumi card, you had to get that from them via BBS and you couldn't generally get the whole download without being hung up on for timeout.  Once you finally got the driver and the CD was playing nice, you'd get the whole OS installed and on first boot the system would panic.  The reason?  The IBM motherboard was incompatible in the chipset with OS/2.

We got this straight from IBM.  

We had to refund everyone who bought the package by calling them up and asking them to come in and we gave them a similar package (someone else's chipset on the SLC2-66 mobo) for the same price, taking a hit on the product to keep our customers happy.

--j