OS/2 2.0 Commitments

Last week the OS/2 Museum received a rather interesting donation: a thick spiral bound document titled Third party commitment to IBM’s OS/2 Version 2.0, and labeled IBM COMDEX/SPRING ’92.

The binder is a collection of about 250 press releases that coincided with the release of OS/2 2.0 and also with the COMDEX trade show in early April 1992 (the press releases are dated April 6, 1992). The interesting thing is that each press release is printed on the respective company’s letterhead paper, using a wide range of paper weights and types; it is apparent that each company printed their own press release, mailed it to IBM, and then someone at IBM bound them into an official looking document. It is unclear how many copies of this document were made. There could conceivably be the only one copy in existence.

The document is a veritable who’s who of early 1990s PC world, predominantly software (Adobe, Attachmate, Borland, Citrix, Corel, Ingres, Lotus, Novell, SAP, Symantec, Watcom, WordPerfect, ZSoft) but also hardware (Accton, ATi, Cirrus Logic, Digital, Fujitsu, Intel, Logitech, Matrox, NCR, Racal-Datacom, Tseng). The companies range from one person operations (Hamilton Laboratories) to huge corporations. Only Microsoft was mysteriously missing.

For details, please refer to the scanned OS/2 2.0 third party commitment document.

Scanning the document was a bit of a challenge. The press releases were printed on paper that was not just several different shades of white, but also yellow-ish to yellow, gray, and blue. The scanning software by default treats the light yellow paper as yellowed with age, and tries to turn it to white. I had to turn down the scanner settings to let the images come through more or less unmodified.

The document feeder in my scanner did an excellent job dealing with perforated paper of various thickness. I feared that I would have to feed the sheets into the scanner one by one, but fortunately that was not the case. Very useful given that there were over 270 sheets total.

While checking the scanned document for completeness, I came across a minor mystery. Several of the companies listed in the table of contents were nowhere to be found–for example Snow Software which should be right between Simple Systems Corp. and SofNet. Since the pages are not numbered, it’s impossible to tell if someone tore out the missing press releases, or if they never made it to the binder in the first place.

The document is an interesting piece of history, a snapshot of the PC computing scene in the early 1990s, and IBM’s plans for OS/2 when version 2.0 was released.