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After playing a bit with the OS, a question sparked my interest:
Could it entirely replace DOS and Windows ?
Let's restrict the scope of this question a bit since it's fairly broad,
Was it compatible with:
In other terms, how was the compatibility with DOS and Windows programs from the second half of the nineties ?
The short answer is yes, starting with version 2.0 and even more so with Warp, OS/2 was a viable alternative for daily DOS and Windows tasks, up to and including Windows 3.x.
Starting with OS/2 2.0, the first 32-bit version, OS/2 included very, very good support for DOS programs, including protected-mode and some measure of direct hardware access. This allowed it to run Windows 3 itself (with some modifications), and most real-mode and DPMI protected-mode DOS software.
It was thus compatible with most protected-mode DOS programs (an early demo involved running Doom in a window), most Windows 3 programs, and even Win32s-compatible 32-bit Windows programs (at least on OS/2 Warp 4). Odin, released in 1999 and continually in development since then, is supposed to provide more general Win32 binary translation, but I haven’t used it much. I don’t think Windows 95/98/NT compatibility was ever all that good in practice, and it certainly wasn’t when OS/2 was still relevant — the industry’s switch to Win32 was the nail in the coffin for OS/2.
Note that OS/2 does require more resources for basic use than DOS and Windows, so when it first came out, many potential users would have been frustrated if they’d tried it — it really needs at least 8MiB of RAM (which was still unusual in early 1992) and a decent amount of disk space. However on a system with enough resources to run it well, it really is very fast, and perhaps more efficient than DOS and Windows.
Some consider that this excellent compatibility contributed to OS/2’s demise: since it was so good at running DOS and Windows programs, there wasn’t much incentive for developers to provide OS/2-specific applications. There were a few, but no big killer app sufficient to carry the platform and allow it to compete with Windows. The requirement for Windows compatibility, which was always based on running a dynamically-modified version of Windows inside OS/2, meant that users needed either a Windows license, or a version of OS/2 with its own Windows license, which meant Microsoft made money off of OS/2 sales anyway (above and beyond any remaining licensing agreement from the joint IBM/Microsoft days)...
This episode of LGR Tech Tales gives a decent summary of the life and non-death of OS/2 (which lives on as ArcaOS).
I recently installed OS/2 Warp on a vintage (late-90s) IBM PC 350 with a 200 MHz Pentium MMX CPU and 96MB of RAM. I found that OS/2 Warp works very well for running virtually any DOS or Windows 3.x productivity application, and provides excellent stability, performance, and access to all that glorious RAM and CPU "power" in my vintage PC.
However, DOS gaming is another matter. Many of the games from the period will run, but it is difficult to get them to work with the peripherals, like sound cards and input devices, when running under OS/2 Warp's DOS mode. My most frequent problem was simply no sound output, but that kills it for gaming. My first attempt was with a ProAudio Spectrum 16 sound card, and it was only able to work with a few of my games. I switched to a more compatible (at least on plain DOS) SoundBlaster 16, but still had plenty of problems getting the OS/2 driver system to work with many games.
Since my main usage for the vintage PC is gaming, I ended up replacing OS/2 Warp with DOS 6.22. This OS with the SoundBlaster 16 provides the best gaming compatibility for late 90s games that don't require Windows 9x. Even so, there is still too much tweaking (IMHO) to get DOS games of this period working correctly; between memory manager settings, driver settings, in-game peripheral and controller settings, etc. Really, the whole reliving of the experience was a strong reminder as to why I chose a Playstation for most of my gaming (not to mention the family's gaming) from 1995 onward.
