h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I remember going to it's launch - although all I can recall of that was we all got a free OS/2 tie. I never wore the tie nor used the OS.

I had a brief but lucrative career removing OS/2 from Escom machines which had been sold to people who wanted to play games, and didn't know any better...

I never had a problem palying games on it. I like the OS. I forget why I even switched back.

At the time, most mainstream games required at least a minimal set of DOS commands to launch properly. Escom had a bulk licencing deal which let them bundle OS/2 and an Office suite along with a cut-down version of DR-DOS 5 which only supported 3 or 4 commands. (things like "SET" and "KEYB" - just enough to boot the machine up)

Escom sold games in their shops which simply could not be played on the machines as they configured them, then had the cheek to offer to "upgrade" to a full version of DR-DOS for £25 or so when the customers complained.

All their advertising was tailored to attract first-time users who didn't know any better, and trap them in a spiral of continuing upgrades. The ads at the time featured "The Man from Escom" who would rush round to solve the customer's every problem. This was quite amusing to those who knew that there was only one engineering manager covering the whole of Scotland - truly "the Man from Escom".

Hold times on the support lines grew to two hours or more, and the advice they were giving out to any customer was usually of the form "Yes we know that game doesn't work. You should have asked us before buying it. The only option is to bring your machine in so we can wipe the hard drive and return it to its original installed state, for a fee. No, we can't save any of your data."

(I heard that the "Man from Escom" for Scotland sadly died in a helicopter crash about six months before the company went bust... )

You couldn't even format a floppy disk in the standard DOS supplied by Escom; instead you had to wait what seemed like days while the system restarted in OS/2 and fired up Presentation Manager...

I was really glad when they ceased trading, as their customer support was generally worse than no support at all, and at least they weren't duping anyone else into buying their inferior products.