From: rommel@Informatik.TU-Muenchen.DE (Kai-Uwe Rommel)
Subject: Re: NT goes "late Beta" in 8 weeks! (was Re: Windows NT 'Alpha')
Organization: Technische Universitaet Muenchen, Germany
Date: Sat, 22 Aug 1992 05:46:41 GMT

In article <1992Aug21.161844.24296@hellgate.utah.edu> brian%jaguar.cs.utah.edu@cs.utah.edu (Brian Sturgill) writes:
>>And as for the C compiler.  Look at other C compilers?  Watcom C/386
>>sells for $700 (discount), TopSpeed sells for $500, Borland C (for
>>DOS) sells for $500.  IBM's list price of $300 is abig discount.
>>
>>What do you want?  Free?  It'd be nice, but it ain't gonna happen

>THOSE COMPILERS HAVE C++ TOO! (Sigh... I'm having that angry problem again :-))
>Borland at least is much less buggy, and is otherwise full featured
>(it has a class-library, it comes with documentation, it has a source
>profiler, it has an assembler, ...).
>I'm not as familiar with the others, but as they compete with Borland I'll
>assume they have similar features.  Watcom for example OEM's Microsoft's MFC
>class library.

Watcom C is pure C, no C++, Topspeed too (they have a *separate* C++
too). Borland is A DOS compiler. And may people just don't trust it
being usable as a professional development tool (including me). When a
friend got BC++ (2.x?) he demonstrated it to me and invited me to play
around with it. I did so and within 15 minutes I crashed the IDE at
least twice just by using it. Sorry, doesn't count for me.

>>MS, on the other hand, enjoys dropping products.  They won't support
>>the MS-OS/2 packages they sold - they just tell you to "wait for NT".
>>They won't support Windows 3.0 - they tell you to upgrade to 3.1, etc.
>>It's not very nice to customers to be told to wait for the next
>>version of a product when you have a problem.

>Ah... where's your proof that beyond the IBM/Microsoft dispute that
>MS enjoys dropping products.  Even w.r.t to OS/2, I sincerely doubt
>that Microsoft is enjoying it...  isn't this a wee bit irrational?

I recently tried to get support for Microsoft's WLO (a Windows->OS/2
porting tool which is still sold). The man on the phone (support line!)
did not even know that it exists. When I asked him to record a bug
report (at MS Germany) he replied that he could not guarantee that he
could pass it on to the developers and that I should better try to send
my report to MS USA directly. However, he could not even tell me the
address where to send the report to in the US but promised to fax me
that address within a few days. This has been months ago. What do you
call this? Support?

>>Consider Word for DOS 5.5 - it's about the slowest program around.
>>They took a good package (Word 5.0) and saddled it with a slow
>>interface and didn't add any features.  When you report a problem,
>>they tell you to get Word For Windows.

>You should try Word for Windows... it's great!  :-)

The same friend with the BC++ is an enthusastic WinWord fan but
repeatedly stated that he cannot use it to prepare longer (>20 pages)
documents because it becomes much too unstable and many features
(spelling etc.) don't work anymore on such documents. To prepare such
docs he later got DeScribe 3.0 (32-bit!) for OS/2 2.0 and is satisfied
with it's ability to scale up to very large documents.

Kai Uwe Rommel

/* Kai Uwe Rommel --- rommel@informatik.tu-muenchen.de */

DOS ... is still a real mode only non-reentrant interrupt
handler, and always will be.                -Russell Williams