25 Years of IBM's OS/2: The Strange Days and Surprising Afterlife of a Legendary Operating System
Big Blue's next-generation operating system was supposed to change everything. It didn't. But it's also never quite gone away. — The July 1987 issue of PC World magazine featured a centerfold (!) of Microsoft CEO Bill Gates.
Context & Ripple Effects
Techland's 25th-anniversary retrospective arrives during a run of PC-era milestone pieces — The Register marked MS-DOS turning 30 less than a year earlier, and Ars Technica had just framed AT&T's 20th-century dominance as corporate history worth retelling. OS/2 sits at the hinge of that era: confirmed by the piece's own account, IBM launched it in 1987 as the next-generation operating system meant to change everything, back when IBM and Microsoft still shared a PC software roadmap — the same period that put a Bill Gates centerfold inside PC World.
The relationship record is blunt about the outcome: OS/2 failed to remake the PC landscape, yet never fully disappeared and retains a niche afterlife. The unusually broad same-day syndication — Network World (twice), The Verge, Errata Security, ShortFormBlog, Open Source Blog, TechPinions — suggests the anniversary touched a nerve beyond pure nostalgia, tapping ongoing curiosity about how the desktop OS market got decided.
First-order effects
- IBM and Microsoft are pulled back into joint framing: the OS/2 launch years are the last stretch in which both companies were committed to the same flagship PC operating system, so any OS/2 retrospective necessarily retells their partnership and parting.
- The 'never quite gone away' finding gives whatever users still depend on OS/2 a rare moment of visible existence in mainstream coverage.
Second-order effects
- Microsoft's founding mythology gets recycled alongside IBM's: the 1987 Gates centerfold detail resurfaces precisely when the Windows-versus-OS/2 story is being retold, reinforcing the narrative that Microsoft won the desktop by out-executing its former partner.
- Outlets gain a reusable template — milestone-plus-afterlife pieces — as shown by the wide syndication, lowering the cost of the next DOS-era anniversary feature.
Third-order effects
- If legacy platforms keep persisting in niches long after vendor abandonment, the industry carries a growing tail of orphaned-but-live operating systems whose maintenance knowledge survives through enthusiast and enterprise pockets rather than official support.
- Anniversary retrospectives consolidate into a standing genre of tech journalism that keeps defunct-platform expertise in circulation, shaping how new generations understand which battles actually decided the PC era.
The trend: Defunct PC-era platforms keep finding afterlives in niches and nostalgia, and their round-number anniversaries have become a reliable recurring beat in technology coverage.