Comdex 1991 / 1992: OS/2 Version 2.0 vs. Windows NT 3.1

[ThinkDan]

Found this when looking through boxes for an old ThinkPad. It's a copy of the vendor support letters that IBM gathered for Comdex in 1992 to support the launch of OS/2 2.0. I've seen it mentioned in a number of histories of OS/2 and the OS/2 / Microsoft split, but I'm not sure how many copies were produced. All the letters are dated April 6th 1992, presumably the date Comdex opened.

It's about two inches thick, really just a bound stack of letters from vendors arranged in alphabetical order. All appear to be originals, some have gold foil etc. on vendor logos so not photocopies. Interesting to leaf through, so many companies and products are long-since gone or just memories - anyone else remember the reverence for DeScribe word processor back in the day?



It reminds me of this other curio that I picked up a couple of decades ago, when it was just an old CD:



Yes, it's an early release of the win32 SDK, but more importantly it contains the first public pre-release of Windows NT 3.1. Distributed at Comdex Fall in Oct 1991, it was part of the same rivalry between IBM and Microsoft as the document above, as both companies jostled to position their competing 32-bit "next version of OS/2" as the future of desktop & server PC computing. Of course, Microsoft's New Technology OS/2 won that battle



Apparently they made 200-300 copies (Showstopper quotes "a couple of hundred CDs"), yet a shrinkwrapped copy is in my farmhouse attic in the UK. Funny the junk that we hoard, isn't it?

[ThinkDan]

Just noticed in that Info World snippet that there was a story on page 3 about IBM announcing some new portables at Comdex Fall 1991... anyone want to guess what they were?

The company demonstrated a 6-pound pen-based system, running Go Corp.'s PenPoint operating system with OS/2 extensions. The system uses a variant of the 386 processor, and its monochrome VGA display allows users to manipulate data with either a pen or their fingers.

That'll be the 2521, known then as just "ThinkPad" - only later renamed to ThinkPad 700T when the 700 and 700C were launched.

IBM also showed off a notebook system with a color VGA display. The system, which is expected to be generally available in the United States by the end of next year [1992], has a 10.4-inch diagonal color display that was jointly developed by IBM and Toshiba. ... the 11-pound system's configuration had a 20-MHz 386SX chip, an 80 megabyte hard disk drive, 2 megabytes of main memory, a 3.5-inch disk drive, and a full-size keyboard.

That'll be the PS/2 CL57sx.