Micro$oft Biz'droid Lusers (was: OT email response format) - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

24 Apr 2002

...
  On Tue, 23 Apr 2002, Fred Cisin (XenoSoft) wrote:
  On Tue, 23 Apr 2002, Richard Erlacher wrote:

  such as when Bill Gates said, "The 80286 is
brain-dead." ?  
 Did he really say that? I can't imagine what he'd have meant. Perhaps he was
 mad at the Intel folks.  
 Yes, he did.
 Also, Gordon Letwin (author of OS/2 at Microsoft) compared mode
 switching of the 286 to having to shut off your engine to change gears
 on the freeway.  
 Interesting you bring up Gordon Letwin...I picked up a copy of his book
 _Inside OS/2_ last Friday at the annual library book sale. I haven't
 started to read it yet, so I hope it was worth the $1 it cost me. 
OS/2 is/was a nice OS, but it embraced some architectural flaws
that persist in Windows and are part of of makes Windows a sucky
operating system. Gordon is obviously very proud of his many
pronoucements in the book, such as his belief that GPF indicates
a program bug and your program must therefore be terminated.

GPF is just a fault condition, and can be programmically used
to implement OS features. What OS/2 and Windows call dynamic 
linking isn't dynamic linking at all, for example.

The interesting thing is that so much of Letwin's book contradicts
a magazine article by IBM's Ed Iaccabucci, where Ed described 
a dynamic linking mechanism that worked exactly like the one in
Multics. So at one point, *early* on, there were divergent path
of development for OS/2, that ended up coalescing into one, the
wrong one...

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