offer - OS/2 for the PDP-11

On Tue, 1 Jan 2008, madodel wrote: Isn't it amazing how several people who were, in theory, working together, can come up with mutually incompatible versions of events that they all witnessed? David Both's writeup is very interesting. I need to buy a copy of Both's book, "Inside OS/2" to shelve alongside Gordon Letwin's "Inside OS/2". I'm reminded of the old "Computer Memory" threads where the military people said that industry and education did not play a significant part in developing the internet; education says that industry and military were unimportant; industry claimed that education and military were incidental. I agree with MOST of his gratuitous MICROS~1 bashing. I'm fascinated at how somebody so incredibly ignorant about the competition could do such significant OS development. "For you trivia buffs, the other OS delivered with the original PC was the UCSB P-System (University of Southern California at Berkely Pseudo code System). I will permit those who make a living from documenting the history of computers to describe that operating system elsewhere." For the record, the p-system OS was UCSD University of California San Diego. University of Southern California was never involved. Berkeley is spelled Berkeley, NOT Berkely. There is no Berkeley, nor even a Berkely in Southern California. To those in Berkeley (my license plate frames attest that I am an aluminum (sic)), the whole world is Unix. Heard of BSD? Unconfirmed anecdote: UCB bought exactly ONE copy of UCSD p-system, and Tom Callaway asked for his money back. Many will disagree with me, but I feel that a floppy based OS that can't handle non-contiguous files is the worst product ever marked as being an OS. "Shortly after this split, Microsoft renamed OS/2 V3 to Windows NT." MOST people do NOT consider NT to be a "renaming of OS/2". MICROS~1 does acknowledge a very substantial amount of OS/2 code used in creating NT. But many people say that much of the remainder is code stolen from DEC! Unconfirmed anecdote: When Cutler went to MICROS~1 and headed up the NT project, he wanted to move away from OS/2, and towards VMS code. DEC desperately wanted an Alpha port of NT, so they signed a release on any incidental pieces of their code that might end up in NT. Only later did they find out how much of it came from them. "The owner of DR snubbed the IBM lawyers and went flying or golfing (depending upon whose story you hear) instead." In spite of DRI's attempts to deny it, that story is very well confirmed. It was Oakland that he was flying to, and Gary was never much of a golfer. "90+% portable C code" A citation of Wikipedia [even when correct] adds little credence to any argument. It WAS once named "Windows for OS/2" That was slightly before the time of "OS/2 for Windows". MICROS~1 doesn't seem to have EVER cared about confusion over their product names. Unconfirmed rumor: there are rumors that MS put together a 68000 port of NT to run on Macintosh, but cut a deal with Apple to not release it. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com