Today I read of the retirement from IBM of David Bradley, a founding
father of the microcomputer industry and the inventor of
CTL+ALT+DELETE which got me wondering.

Question:
Is OS/2 Warp as secure as Windows XP in terms of virus and worm susceptibility?
Back around 1987 IBM and Microsoft were joined at the hip to architect
and develop the follow-on to PC-DOS / MS-DOS.  They split with
Microsoft creating Windows 3.1 and IBM creating OS/2.  Later,
Microsoft created the Windows NT (new Technology) for business
computing. Eventually the NT line morphed into XP.
So, if OS/2 was connected to the web today with a browser and an email
program how would it stack up against XP in terms of exposure to the
following threats:

virus
worms
drive-by downloads

By exposure I mean both would it be affected and what would be the
scope of the damage.
e.g.  one product might let an email virus delete your mailbox but
nothing more (sigh) while another might let the email virus delete all your
documents.

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Clarification of Question by grthumongous-ga on 30 Jan 2004 21:37 PST

Are there architectural differences in terms of virtual memory,
virtual machines, protected storage or restricted instructions that
are germaine to this somewhat hypothetical inquiry?

I'm not sure that OS/2 Warp can even run most of the viruses or worms
that are circulating today.  Certainly most worm writers looking to
get the most bang for the buck would be focusing on the millions of
active Windows users instead of the hundreds of active OS/2 users.

OS/2 Warp hava a Win16 emulation and a little of Win32 captable
emulation, so only 16 bits virus can infect it.