Thanks to a very generous donor, the OS/2 section of the library at the OS/2 Museum has been recently expanded by 25 new arrivals (although a few of them are duplicates of books already in possession of the OS/2 Museum). The newly added books are approximately a 50-50 mix of titles written for software developers and titles written for more general audience. The books are in very good condition, nearly all of them like new, and survived a long journey from Australia quite well.
Looking at the publication dates, the books span approximately the 1988-1996 era. Most of them were published either around 1988 or around 1995. This is not a particularly wide sampling, nevertheless it is probably fairly representative. A number of OS/2 books was published in 1988, when OS/2 was the Next Big Thing. When OS/2 failed to take off, there was a corresponding lull in publishing activity. When OS/2 Warp became popular again, there was a spike in the number of OS/2 new books, followed by a sharp fall-off after 1996 when IBM essentially admitted that OS/2 would not be developed anymore. Continue reading