The resurfacing of a 1995 Usenet post earlier this month prompted The Reg FOSS desk to re-examine a pivotal operating system flop … and its long-term consequences.

A 1995 Usenet post from Gordon Letwin, Microsoft’s lead architect on the OS/2 project, has been rediscovered. To modern eyes, it looks like an email, but it wasn’t. Usenet was the original social network and this was a public post. In case you don’t recognize Letwin’s name, he was one of the founding staff members of Microsoft – he’s in the famous 1978 Albuquerque photo. He literally wrote the book on OS/2, that book being Inside OS/2.

…

When OS/2 finally went 32-bit, as a platform it had already lost the battle. The lack of native apps was not the reason it lost; the lack of native apps was proof that Windows 3 had already won.

…