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DOS was becoming outdated and insufficient in the 90’s. No multitasking, no crash-protection, no unified UI, unreliable file system. Yet it ran on millions of computers.

OS/2 was one of the spiritual successors to DOS. It was DOS and Windows compatible, could run DOS apps in parallel and apps wouldn’t crash the whole system. It came with a reliable file system called HPFS as well.

Its direct competitor was Windows 95. It bet on better compatibility and better hardware support so eventually persevered. After switching to Windows NT kernel with Windows 2000, Windows had no technical shortcomings left compared to OS/2.



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