OS/2

OS/2 stands for Operating System 2. This is another operating systems for powerful microcomputers and networking. OS/2 was designed to avoid some of the most serious limitations of DOS. OS/2 runs in 4MB of memory, although it runs well in an 8MB system. It requires about 30MB of hard disk space. OS/2 WARP, the window version of OS/2, performs reasonably well in 4MB system and requires less disk space.
Users do not need to abandon DOS and Windows to try out OS/2. OS/2 provides a dual boot feature that allows users to boot up in either DOS or OS/2. OS/2 uses folders much like those on the Macintosh and on some UNIX GUIs.

Advantages and Disadvantages

• Advantages: It is not affected by requirements of DOS and Windows that certain device drivers live in the first 640KB of memory. Instead, OS/2 can load network adapter drivers, multimedia interfaces, CD-ROM software or video drivers into memory as required. While OS/2 works very nicely with the same FAT file system used by DOS, its HPFS has a number of benefits. It is significantly faster, it allows a long file name, and it supports disk drivers as large as 256 gigabytes.
  This operating system allows multitasking and dynamic data interchange. It also provides common graphical user interface with mainframes, minicomputers, and microcomputers by OS/2 WARP. OS/2 was developed to assist in the sharing of data and programs among several microcomputers. OS/2 solidly supports Novell Netware and TCP/IP. Most network interface cards are supported.

• Disadvantages: OS/2 Shell or WARP is similar to Windows, but is not identical. It may take users a while to adjust to some of the differences. The application programs developed specifically for OS/2 are not as many as those for Windows, although more and more application developers are going to converting and developing programs for OS/2 thesedays.

HPFS

This refers a High Performance File System introduced with OS/2. The system handles larger disks, long file names, and can launch the program by referencing the data. It coexist with the existing FAT system.

FAT

FAT is an abbreviation of File Allocation Table that is the part of DOS and OS/2 file system. It keeps tracks of where the data is stored on a disk. It is a table with an entry for each cluster. The directory contains file ID that points to the FAT entries where the files start.