From: ch@sg1502.chemie.uni-marburg.de (Christoph H. Hochstaetter)
Subject: Re: Tidbits about NT and OS/2 from the trade rags.
Organization: Philipps-University Marburg
Date: Tue, 6 Oct 1992 18:37:02 GMT

In article <1992Oct2.191425.12244@njitgw.njit.edu>, dic5340@hertz.njit.edu
(David Charlap) writes:
|> In article <1992Oct2.165805.9074@solaris.rz.tu-clausthal.de>
|> ch@sg1502.chemie.uni-marburg.de (Christoph H. Hochstaetter) writes:
|> >
|> >This shows, that they admit, that /NT is superior to OS/2 and
|> >they are now trying to imitate /NT. All this will then be presented
|> >in xth Quarter of 199y, when the "state of the art" OS will offer
|> >much more than /NT today.
|> 
|> What?!?!?!??!?!?  In case you haven't noticed, Mach has been around
|> for at least a few years longer than NT has been.  And why does IBM
|> admit NT's superiority by choosing to have a feature that NT has?  You
|> might as well say that MS admitted IBM's superiority by supporting
|> OS/2 1.x apps in NT.  It just doesn't follow.
|>

Ok, we all know, that the mach microkernel is actually quite old. What
I meant is the fact, that IBM showed some demo of a microkernel *ON
THEIR MACHINES* in New York one or two weeks ago.

IBM is now (vaguely) announcing C2 security, a microkernel and
portability (to RS6000) for some future versions of OS/2. No one
could really believe, that they more or less randomly had these
ideas instead of just imitating (trying to imitate) /NT or its features.

It is really hardly understandable, what reasons there are to keep
OS/2 alive. The were very few applications for OS/2 1.x and there
are only few for OS/2 2.0. Most people decided to use OS/2 only for
server services (LAN-Manager, LOTUS-Notes-Sever) and the few End-User-
Applications (EXCEL, PMWORD, ACAD, DESIGNER) didn't sell very well.
OS/2 1.x was nothing but a big flop and the people who use OS/2 2.0
use it as a DOS-Multitasker.

MS did the right thing by stopping their envolvement in OS/2. People
decided, that they preferred Windows 3.x over OS/2 1.x. So MS was
right to create a new OS, which allows very easy porting of existing
Windows 3.x apps.

While OS/2 is far far away from being ported to other processors
than 80x86. /NT has the portability *NOW*. There are new generations
of processors at a price even affordable for hobby users. If OS/2
succeeds, we will be in a similar situation when OS/2 1.x came out.
We had to live with an OS for an 80286, which was already totally 
outdated, when OS/2 1.3 came out.

I've seen a beta of OS/2 2.0 in July '90 (not 1991), which already
had all features of the current release except the WPS. This shows
how "incedible fast" IBM's development work is. So when do you
expect an OS/2 for DEC-Alpha-Chips, P5, R4000, which will be
available soon or are already available.

What wants IBM to show? That they rule the PC OS market and
won't let anyone else in? Well, anyway I really don't wanna be
stuck to 80x86 processors, which will be low-tech hardware in two
years. DOS, Windows and OS/2 1.x suffered from being compatible
to low-tech hardware. Maybe /NT suffers from requiring extremely
high-tech hardware, whereas OS/2 2.0 is just right. But this is
only for a year or so.  

Christoph
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