From: yeates@rtsg.mot.com (Tony J Yeates)
Subject: OS2 Good news and Bad news  (OS2 & a little windows too)
Keywords: os2
Organization: Motorola Inc., Cellular Infrastructure Group
Distribution: comp.os.os2.advocacy
Date: Tue, 21 Jul 1992 20:26:12 GMT

I saw OS2 demo'ed by an ibm rep. on Saturday, here is my unbiased opinion
and a discription of the demo.


1.) What happened to the 3 piece suit, white shirt red tie dress rules for ibm?
The rep., a young lady, was wearing jeans I believe (although the "spokes model"
handing out info. looked more in uniform).

2.) What appeared to be a battered old 286 demo machine, turned out to be a 486
with 16 M of RAM, hmmm.

3.) Liked the interface.  Drag & drop like the Mac - seems much simpler than windows.

4.)  No windoows group.  Good - I think they look bad in in windows.  (3 & 4 are
my complaints with the windows GUI.

5).  Saw DOS, windows and I think and OS 2 app work okay.

6)  I asked them to run AMi Pro, my chosen word processor.  Oh dear oh dear!  It
was oh, so , slow to come up.  The rep. tried to cover up by stepping up
the talking - but it was too long for that.  It seemed like about 4 minutes to
load, but it was probably less.  It was certainly embarrassingly and painfully slow.
The rep. said it had to load a lot of things, DOS then windows, then AMI, but even
so - it was SLOW  (remember 486 16M RAM ....).

Ray of hope?  May be the addition of windows 3.1 compatibility will help
speed things up.

7) Two user (father & son, or colleagues) mentioned several windows and DOS
programs which they could not run in OS2 (I did not recognise the names of
the progs., so they may be obscure).  The rep. claimed to know of a fix for one,
and thought there would soon be one for another.

8)  No SVGA driver yet. Rep. claimed that their would be one/some.

9) Nice cut and paste capability between any apps (or so it appearedZ).  Looks slicker
than windows.

10) Apparently a resource hog.

Conclusion:  nice GUI, DOS and windows compatibility is not 100%, its buggy
, VGA reslotion only.  Slow at times.  Call me when its finished (full compatability, 
SVGA drivers, stacker-like compression, or code size reduce by run-time linking).

I hope the price does shoot up by the time OS2 isd really ready.  Watch out for
OS2 software price premiums  (MKS toolkit OS23 is about $50 more than the DOS version,
- it used to be the same price) - this might turn out to be the real OS2-killer.

I hope OS2 gets fixed and succeeds,  but its still in the alpha/beta stage IMHO.

----
Just got the window3.1 upgrade (only because it was $19.95 at a new local store),
in the same vein as the DOS5 upgrade, I installed the software and SUDDENLY......
nothing happened!  (No severed head.... Monty Python).  To think some people pay
full price for these upgrades - what a shameful business.  windows 3.1 does have a new
game "Minefield", which is without doubt the most pathetic computer game that I have
ever come across ...lame.  The "multi-media" feature is useless to me (multimedia =
sound recorder!! as I don't have the card for it).  Otherwise everything looks pretty
much the same.  I'm hoping that it will be faster  (certainly beats OS2 bringing up Ami Pro).
There is no improvement in the windows GUI :( , although file manager seem to be
a bit better, or may I was just more patient  (I don't have much toime for this particular
program!).
-----

Is it time to buy a Mac?  (WOT! - No command line?! No character-based shell?!
How do you program the darn thing?  Drag and drop a wysiwyg word processed files
to a compiler icon? )