OS/2 had an evolving marketing claim of "better DOS than DOS" and "better Windows than Windows" and they both were believable for a time. The Windows one collapsed quickly with Win95 and sprawling APIs (DirectX, IE, etc).

It exists in that interesting but obsolete interstitial space alongside BeOS of very well done single user OS.

Circa 1987, DOS boot disk had a "Backpack" hard disk driver on it, so I could plug it in the parallel printer port and boot up with 300 Megabytes of my stuff instantly available as D: on on any customer machine. It made service calls a lot easier to manage, no more stacks of floppy disks.

300 Megabytes!!!

I had all my source code on it, archives, utilities, compilers, the whole shebang!

You could write your own GUI rather than using a text screen. I had to do that as I was working under OS/2 1.0, which didn't have the Presentation Manager. it did mean providing your own character set (ripped from VGA on DOS in my case) and mouse handing.

Btw, I'd love to know where this idea about no assembler programs on OS/2 came from. There was no problem at all with using MASM, with CodeView to debug on a second screen.

Ahem the minute I got my 286 ( free ) home, I added Mode con lines=50 to my Dos 3.3/Tp 3.02+8087 disk, everything worked perfectly until you actually tried to do some text addressing, but I was able to pass physics 1 and 2 and Pascal and the program design and styles class with As the machine served me well. Now if I had the $400 for the extra 4mb of ram, it would have run os/2 2.1 in text mode... Or not.

Oh the screen would go to snow often, and sidekick would bring it right back.

How well did OS/2 handle the text modes for VGA?