Re: What problem will it solve ?
You're jesting I hope, from what I remember OS/2 was just as buggy as Windows and in such a case why didn't they simply use Linux.
A lot of OS crashes were caused by people running it on clones that didn't completely follow the PC standard. I seem to recall a conversation on the CompuServe support forums which ended with a comment something like: "If we ask a motherboard for 72ns RAM refresh and it tells us it's using 72ns RAM refresh we assume that's what it's doing because that's how we build our PCs. 74ns is not the same as 72ns!".
There also use to be an issue with printers because OS/2 insisted on using the polling facility and a lot of cheap parallel cables were cheap because that pin wasn't wired up.
Maybe also (stretching my memory a bit) a similar issue with joysticks because OS/2 expected to be able to talk to them before it started listening.
To my mind that was part of why OS/2 failed (and also the relationship between MS and IBM). IBM seemed to be old-school, 'do the job properly' whereas MS (and clone PC industry) was 'knock something up and if it sort of works sell it'.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
