I really can't blame IBM for being 'surly' about OS/2. They had and still have the best desktop operating system ever written for any computer and the market shunned and reviled it without even first having a look. Microsoft was really scared in 94/95'. They lied about availability and features of thier own products and Threated thier customers with financial ruin if they even spoke about OS/2. If you laid the golden egg and everyone continually crapped on you for it, you would be surly too. The market is so steeped in MS-generated ignorance and bigotry against OS/2 that most people in this group have little or no experience with it. In 1993 I recognized OS/2 for what it is and have run it ever since. IBM had the hydrogen bomb when MS and others were still setting off firecrackers. Still today, without the release of a new OS/2 client in four years, the operating system stomps any competition. There are a few warts on it now due to a lack of development but those are generally shared by Linux and the others. I can't speak for BeOS yet. OS/2's warts primarily are in the multimedia area. There are very few native clients for the newer MM formats such as Real Audio, ASF, etcetera. Some can be used by taking advantage of OS/2's ability to seamlessly integrate Win3x clients but it isn't enough. Now, after nine years of FUD, lies, and the ignorance that fostered, some client's now have a legitimate reason to run Windows. Yes, I'm pissed about it. I may be forced to run something incomplete and messy (Linux) or something half-assed (Windows) but I don't have to like it. Every time I show a warp system to a customer or friend they allways say something kin to 'how the hell did this stay a secret?!' and 'why is anyone running windows'!!. regards Bill Pechter wrote:

"Fred Cisin (XenoSoft)" wrote: I think you mean "who is AT MICROSOFT now". IIRC, he was not at Microsoft when he was originally working on OS/2.

On Fri, 26 May 2000, Marvin wrote: Gordon Letwin was at MICROS~1 when he wrote OS/2. Gordon Letwin was one of the first employees of MICROS~1. He is in the oft shown group photo ("MS-DOS Encyclopedia", etc.) of the Microsoft staff in Albuquerque, with Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Gordon Letwin, Bob Wallace, and I can't remembner who else. I don't know if he is at MICROS~1 NOW. and I can not IMAGINE him at IBM! -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin(a)xenosoft.com

On Fri, May 26, 2000 at 01:29:32PM -0400, Technoid Mutant wrote: I really don't get how that happened. I jumped on OS/2 when V2.0 came out (after reading a really positive review, in Comp Shopper I think), but then felt burned by the bugs in V2.1 beta (how on earth did they break my text mode "hello world" program?!?!) and bailed. Then, a while later, M$ released WNT and everyone acted as if it was the second coming -- "at last, a 32-bit GUI-based OS designed for PCs, with true pre-emptive multitasking". Hmm, where had I seen one of those before, that ran faster in less memory, came from a more competent vendor, and had a lot more miles on it? The weird thing is, M$'s absolute stranglehold on the marketplace has really only been for the last few years. Or at least it seems that way, because each new height of predatory behavior they get away with makes the previous rounds seem insignificant. So I don't get how they managed to lock out IBM. I can understand why early OS/2 didn't make much of a splash, it was a lot of weight for the relatively wussified 286 CPUs to support. Early Windows was too big for the PCs of the time too, and it was largely ignored as a result. But OS/2 V2.0 and the 386+ machines were a very good match for each other. It deserved to succeed, and at the time Windows was only just starting to snowball, so OS/2 should have been there in time to really get some market share. John Wilson D Bit

On Sat, May 27, 2000 at 12:47:40AM -0400, Steve Mastrianni wrote: But that's my point, OS/2 had that stuff back when Windows was still all strangled with 64 KB segments (even on CPUs that supported 4 GB segs) and the FAT file system and uncooperative single-tasking. And with applications too, M$'s absolute 100% dominance is a pretty recent development. There used to be piles of little application vendors before M$ killed them all, and plenty of them released OS/2 versions of their stuff (or, it worked so well in the compatibility boxes that there was no need). Customers don't care what percentage of applications run on an OS, they care whether the applications *they use* run on that OS. So an OS that runs less than 100% of the software in the world doesn't automatically deserve a 0% market share. I mean why the heck are Macs still around if so! I mean, just a couple of years ago, most games would not run under Windows. If you wanted games, you needed real live DOS. Yet M$ was somehow able to convince everyone to abandon it anyway and start writing their games for Windows, even though it had a bad rep among games users. How?! I'm just amazed at how M$ continues to tell the whole world to stand on its head and cluck like a chicken, and it actually works! John Wilson D Bit

Err... the early v2 OS/2 didn't have drivers for most of the hardware (IBM had to convince people to write 'em -- unlike MS who said write 'em or get locked out of the market since it's going to be preloaded on piles of PC's) OS/2 ran mostly on PS/2's back in the 2.x days. It took until 2.11 for the beast to stablize and take hold as a business platform (mostly at IBM using sites). It's the APPS and the moving Win32s target they tried to support. The killer was when MS made Office not run under OS/2. OS/2 was slow -- glacial on the early 386's without a LOT of memory 16meg was VERY rare then). IBM used it internally (v2.11) on PS/2 25's with 12-16mb. It was slow loading and glacial loading apps. Many secretaries booted it with all their windows apps loaded so they didn't have to wait for programs to load. They often ran Ami Pro v3.1 under win3.1 since the Lotus Smartsuite was BEHIND the windows version for features. Boot time took almost 5 minutes. It didn't crash, however. OS/2 really didn't show it's stuff until the 486's. IBM went to Pentium 100+ desktops with 32mb of memory and IP networking 3 1/2 years ago. They dropped the Lotus SmartSuite96 on it with the mix of Windows and it reallw worked well. I liked it so much I purchased it for home (along with Corel's WP Office 2000 (for Win9x and Linux) just to have the alternatives to MSOffice. Got to support someone other than MS. I'd bet they're switching to WinNT or Win9x (laptops) and going to Microsoft Word for customer compatibility in a lot of cases. We were one of the first bunches of IBM'ers to do it 3 years ago (due to IBMGS putting us out to support a major NJ manufacturer of Baby Shampoo and Band-Aids (tm) which was not to be named. 8-) Bill -- bpechter(a)monmouth.com | Microsoft: Where do you want to go today? | Linux: Where do you want to go tomorrow? | BSD: Are you guys coming, or what?