Nineteen years ago today (ok, by now, everyone sees where this one's going :))

Back in 1995, I was working over in the Northup building.  Valorie had joined me from school, and was working as a tester on Microsoft Word (she tested the Apricot version of Word and the AT&T 3b5 port, and the IBM OfficeWriter converter) and Microsoft Windows 1.0.

I was working on MS-DOS 4.0.  The entire team was ramping up for an October demo with IBM - we were going to pitch MS-DOS 4.0 to them as the next major release of DOS.

It turns out that they liked what they saw.  But not enough to actually buy into the project.  Instead they wanted something that would help them sell more of their newest PC, the PC/AT, which was a 286 based processor.  While the technologies in MS-DOS 4.0 were great, it wouldn't help sell more AT's.  So instead of taking our MS-DOS code, they eventually decided on a much more ambitious program.

They would start phasing out support for real-mode 8088 processors and concentrate on protected mode 286 applications.  Because they knew they couldn't do it all in a single release cycle, they staged it as two releases.  The first release was text-mode only, the second release was GUI based.

Of course, I'm talking about OS/2.

I never did get to work on OS/2, I ended up spending my time working on DOS variants until I moved to the Lan Manager group.