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If there were "secret hooks" and other such shenanigans written secretly into Windows 95, then the competitors affected by such tricks would have gone to court and shown the judge and the jury their software (e.g. WordPerfect) running dog-slow under Windows 95 versus rabbit-fast under OS/2 in a side-by comparison that would have been difficult to defend against at trial.

Interesting theory. But the fact is that W95 apps wouldn't run on OS/2; it was fundamentally not the same system. If they had, there would have been scads of apps for OS/2, and Billy would not have been happy.

Win95 was still essentially a shell on top of DOS while OS/2 was totally different from the guts up. OS/2 would not format bootable diskettes; '95 did. Perhaps there were some similarities between '95 and OS/2 1.x or 2.1, particularly the networking layer, but that's about it. Remember, the Win-OS/2 compatibility stuff was for Win 3.1 apps!

I'll admit that my memory from 8 long years ago may be fuzzy.

Could you please help remind me which major commercial application wouldn't run on both systems, as I don't seem to remember any such apps offhand.