Liam on Linux

The VGA standard, along with PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports, 1.4MB 3.5" floppies, and even 72-pin SIMMs, was introduced with IBM's PS/2 range of computers in 1987.

The original PS/2 range included:

• Model 50 -- desktop 286.

• Model 60 -- tower 286.

• Model 70 -- desktop 386DX.

• Model 80 -- tower 386DX. (I still have one. One of the best-built PCs ever made.)

All had the Microchannel (MCA) expansion bus, and VGA as standard.

Note, I am not including the Model 30, as it wasn't a true PS/2: no MCA, and no VGA, just MCGA.

IBM promised buyers that they would be able to run the new OS/2 operating system it was working on with Microsoft at the time.

This is the reason why IBM insisted OS/2 must run on the 286: to provide it to the many tens of thousands of customers it had sold 286 PS/2 machines to.

Microsoft wanted to make OS/2 specific to the newer 32-bit 386 chip. This had hardware-assisted multitasking of 8086 VMs, meaning the new OS would be able to multitask DOS apps with excellent compatibility.

But IBM had promised customers OS/2 and IBM is the sort of company that takes such promises seriously.

So, OS/2 1.x was a 286 OS, not a 386 OS. That meant it could only run a single DOS session and compatibility wasn't great.

This is why OS/2 flopped. That in turn is why MS developed Windows 3, which could multitask DOS apps, and was a big hit. That is why MS had the money to headhunt the MICA team from DEC, headed by Dave Cutler, and give them Portable OS/2 to finish. That became OS/2 NT (because it was developed on Intel's i860 RISC chip, codenamed N-Ten.) That became Windows NT.

That is why Windows ended up dominating the PC industry, not OS/2 (or DESQview/X or any of the other would-be DOS enhancements or replacements).

Arguably, although I admit this is reaching a bit, that's what led to the 386SX, and later to VESA local bus computers, and Win95 and a market of VGA-equipped PCI machines: the fertile ground in which Linux took root and flourished.

PCs got multitasking combined with a GUI because of Windows 3 and its successors. (It's important to note that there were lots of text-only multitasking OSes for PCs: DR's Concurrent DOS, SCO Xenix, QNX, Coherent, TSX-32, PC-MOS, etc.) The killer feature was combining DOS, a GUI, and multitasking of DOS apps. That needed a 386SX or DX.

These things only happened because OS/2 failed, and OS/2 failed because there were lots of 286-based PS/2 machines and IBM promised OS/2 on them.

The 286 and VGA went closely together, and indeed, IBM later made the ISA-bus "PS/2" Model 30-286 in response to the relatively failure of MCA.

It was a pivotal range of computers and it sealed the future of the PC industry long after PS/2s themselves largely disappeared. They were a hugely important range of computers, and they introduced the standards that dominated the PC world throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s: PS/2 ports, VGA sockets, 72-pin RAM, 1.4MB floppies etc. Only the expansion bus and the planned native OS failed. All the external ports, connectors, media and so on became the new industry standards.