On 12/15/2005 at 9:26 PM Liam Proven wrote:
I'd love to know how the computing world would have
turned out if DV/X
had been a big hit. It would have bought the worlds of DOS and Unix
much closer together. It might have been a fertile combination.
Imagine if all the GNU stuff had got ported to DV/X, for example.
When it comes to Microsoft, there are a lot of "What ifs".
Note that even back in 1990, Gates thought that OS/2 should be marketed in
separate 32- and 16-bit versions. From the "OS/2 Notebook" (Microsoft
Press). It's a book worth owning, simply for the belly laughs in Section
VI:
"Developer: How will the 16-bit and 32-bit OS/2s be packaged?
Gates: They will be sold as separate packages. But remember that 16-bit
binaries wil run on OS/2 2.0 and see the benefits of paging and the larger
address space."
"Gates: I believe OS/2 is destined to be the most important operating
system, and possibly program, of all time. As the successor to DOS, which
has over 10,000,000 systems in use, it creates incredible opportunities for
everyone involved with PCs."
An application engineer friend over at Intel was furious that 386 mode
systems and apps were so long in coming. He said something to the effect
of "Look what we break our backs doing--giving you software guys a
high-performance 32-bit architecture and you p*ss it all away by running
16-bit code on it".
A bunch of folks (myself included) ponied up some serious cash to Microsoft
to be included in the beta test program for the new OS/2. Lawsuits were
threatened when MS decided to preview NT instead.
Cheers,
Chuck