OS2.0 was the single most important release of the system software (on 68K anyway) to date. Without it, no serious future compatible applications could have been developed.
True. Though for the 1.3 family, you could argue 1.1 was that same key release. Of course, you'll not find many people left who seriously want to use 1.1, nor do I think you'd find many people left who would seriously want to run 2.04.
Indeed, 2.04 WAS a key release from a historical standpoint. The A3000 and Workbench 2.04 were huge milestones to the early 90's Amiga. But, really... When Workbench 2.1 came out, why on earth WOULDN'T you upgrade to it, even back then?
Btw, what did you mean with "multiple (and alternative) serial.device handling"?
From Greg Donner's amazingly complete Workbench site, it's listed that Workbench 2.1 was the first release to have the new serial/parallel.device preferences support. I think I remember this was a major factor in my own upgrading to 2.1 as I wanted to use a custom turbo serial.device that crashed out 2.04.
(Of course, I might have missed the boat on this part, as my memory is a bit hazy when asking me questions about how I ran a BBS on an A500 back a good 12 years ago. It might have been my CNet BBS software I had to update to run the optimized serial.device. ;-) )
