OS/2® was IBM's response to Microsoft's Windows 3.1® and Windows 95®, in terms of multitasking abilities and overall performance. The latest versions of the OS/2 are called OS/2 Warp®. One interesting feature of the newer OS/2 Warp 4 is its ability to access Web sites by the mere sound of your voice. That is, it contains a Web browser that uses OS/2 speech recognition capabilities to locate a specific Web sight after you have verbally asked the computer to do so. OS/2 can run both DOS and Windows programs. However, any program that's written specifically for the OS/2 may not run on Windows or DOS operating systems. You can use the OS/2 Warp 4 on any computer with the Intel 486 or better processor. It can run both 16-bit and 32-bit OS/2 applications. The OS/2 Warp, as does the OS/2 Warp 4, uses preemptive multitasking, which means that the operating system deals out slices of the Central Processing Unit's time to various programs which need it, instead of single programs controlling the CPU for as long as they need it. OS/2 Warp is also a multithreading operating system, which means that it can operate multiple parts of a single program concurrently. The OS/2 Warp can also use all accessible RAM, as well as provide virtual memory, which is when the computer uses part of the hard disk as RAM, for programs that need it.
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