An article entitled Linux for the rest of
us describes the evolution of OS/2 and Windows over a number of years, and
the eventual death of OS/2 despite the hopes and wishes of many faithful fans.
Some amusing paragraphs, including:
Indeed, Windows 3.0 quickly became known for the initials “UAE.”
These stood for “Unrecoverable Application Error,” which is what the pop-up box
proclaimed when Windows was just about to crash. It meant the system had gone
haywire due to a lack of cooperation — even if only one program, typically
Word for Windows, was running — and that any work done since the last time it
was saved to disk was now about to be lost. Perhaps the most maddening thing
about it was the sheer audacity of the little “OK” box: The computer would sit
there and do nothing until the user clicked on this box, whereupon the computer
would go ahead and finish crashing, now with the user’s permission. There was a
cottage industry of hacking the code so that the box would have an icon of an
upraised middle finger, instead of the Windows alarm icon, and considerably
different wording than that supplied by Microsoft, now along the lines that the
user had just been screwed by Windows, which was now going to destroy some
data.
