About This Project

In an age of endless crashes, forced updates, and invasive bloatware, it’s easy to feel that modern computing has taken a wrong turn. We find ourselves in a digital landscape dominated by systems that prioritize profit over stability, ensnaring users in a web of mediocrity.

But it wasn't always destined to be this way.

This website is a testament to the paths not taken. It's a "warp back" to the mid-1990s and a love letter to an operating system that was engineered for excellence: IBM's OS/2 Warp 3.0.

OS/2 represented a different philosophy. It was built on a foundation of robust architecture, offering true pre-emptive multitasking, superior memory management, and crash protection that users of other systems could only dream of. Its object-oriented Workplace Shell was intuitive, powerful, and treated the user with respect. It was, as author Jason Page describes it, "a rose in the marketplace."

Yet, despite its technical superiority, OS/2 was sidelined—not by merit, but by monopolistic pressures and masterful marketing that championed "good enough" over "genuinely good."

The design of this site is a direct homage to that lost era. The OS/2 Warp 3.0 theme, the typography, and the file-browser interface are all intended to evoke the feeling of a more stable, principled, and empowering digital world.

This project serves as a collaborative book and a historical archive, built in indignation of what could have been and as a continuous light on what was—and still is—a superior commercial operating system. It's for all of us who remember, and for those who wish to explore what we lost.

Welcome to the roads not taken.