Retro-anniversaries for OS/2 and Windows 3.1
During the first days of April, anniversaries for two genuine pieces of the operating systems’ history took place, two different evolutionary lines of what should have been a single product born from the partnership between two giants of the PC industry. IBM OS/2 and Microsoft Windows 3.1 were initially destined to be merged in the graphical interface-based operating system by Big Blue, afterward history went in a different way and OS/2 sunk while the competing OS turned into the dominant platform on the market.
May 2010, a month of retro-anniversaries
Some technologies are really die hard, but they can be celebrated in due time when they finally become history. It happened by chance that the twenty-second day of May 2010 fell the anniversary of two fundamental tech products, considered as milestones within their field so much that there is a “before” and an “after” their appearance on the market. And both products have no need for introduction, being no less than the first “star” of the video games history and the first Windows version to be successful among the vast user base of “IBM and compatible” PCs.
OS/2 and floppy disks, aged but not extinct technologies
Technology old fogeys can rejoice: even though they have lost the chance to obtain new Windows for Workgroups 3.11 licences by now, the almost-defunct operating systems and storage devices that persist in not wanting to fade away surely aren’t lacking. A recently surfaced couple of news actually highlights as even in information technology, probably the most rapidly evolving technology field, there are users niches that really don’t want (or can’t) abandon an outdated standard to adopt a more modern one.
My last purchase on eBay
It was since a long, long time that I didn’t join in the eBay virtual marketplace, and though I don’t frankly know how during the end-of-year holidays I’ve felt a vague desire to return back and make some purchases. Such desire has coupled with the evocation of memories on one of the first PCs I’ve ever seen in action in my life, maybe not the first and surely not the first I’ve got, nevertheless the Olivetti Prodest PC1 has been the system that transferred me this strange disease that makes you love machines made of metal and bits that is personal computing.
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