‘SteveB went on the road to see the top weeklies, industry analysts and business press this week to give our systems strategy. The meetings included demos of Windows 3.1 (pen and multimedia included), Windows NT, OS/2 2.0 including a performance comparison to Windows and a “bad app” that corrupted other applications and crashed the system. It was a very valuable trip and needs to be repeated by other MS executives throughout the next month so we hit all the publications and analysts.’
‘The demos of OS/2 were excellent. Crashing the system had the intended effect – to FUD OS/2 2.0. People paid attention to this demo and were often surprised to our favor. Steve positioned it as -- OS/2 is not "bad" but that from a performance and "robustness" standpoint, it is NOT better than Windows’
"I have written a PM app that hangs the system (sometimes quite graphically)."
http://iowa.gotthefacts.org/011107/PX_0860.pdf http://iowa.gotthefacts.org/011107/PX_0797.pdf
Great links!
I don’t see how SteveB’s “bad app” was out of bounds. IBM was telling these analysts a bad app couldn’t bring down OS/2. As someone who used (and liked!) OS/2 at the time, this was indeed false: IIRC OS/2 in this era had a single-threaded UI loop, and a misbehaving app could (and occasionally did) block input for all apps and corrupt the UI.
You could argue about the difference between this and a Windows “UAE”, but to the user the experience was a broken, unusable OS/2.
DOS ain’t done ‘till Lotus won’t run.