Newsgroups: comp.os.os2.advocacy
Date: Mon, 23 Nov 1992 15:38:03 -0500 
From: Carl B Jabido <cj00+@andrew.cmu.edu>
Subject: My impression of NT Beta. . .

NT is the ultimate Unix killer!  NOT!!!!  Currently, the beta running in
8 megs is a real DOG.  Worse than OS/2 in fact.  Imagine speedy File
Manager running at the speed of the drives object in OS/2.  I'm talking
SLOW here folks.  And, that was with a 25-30 meg swap file!  That's
bigger than my whole system partition for OS/2.  (BTW, I think it was PC
World that said that even the final release will have a 25-30 meg swap
file.)  Installing networking stuff isn't straight forward.  My friend
kept getting errors and whenever he ran Setup, it would give him an "out
of memory, reboot" error.  Booting up took longer than booting up pure
OS/2 (ie, no networking, no "daemons" like sendmail, pmx, talk, etc). 
Basically, the NT beta sickened me!  It was disgusting, hard to install,
low quality stuff.  And why no NTFS? I mean if it's supposed to be
released in a few months, why haven't they put the "awesome
C2-compliant" file system into beta yet?
There are some other non-NT specific things that turned me off even
more.  First, the Program Manager/File Manager setup.  That is a real
unintuitive setup.  OS/2 object-orientedness is so much better.  In
fact, I've decided that if OS/2 fails (ie, no software, etc) I'm gonna
go to NeXTStep 486 first, then if that doesn't work, I'll scrap my PC
and buy a Mac and A/UX.  That's right, no more Micro$oft OS's for me.
One thing I did like about it (mixed in with some things I didn't).  We
had a Dos program from IBM which showed job opportunities at IBM.  We
ran it in a window in NT and for some reason, the mouse worked, but the
mouse tracking was so bad that we went to full screen.  Going to full
screen produced a jumbled screen, but we could read it.  Then, the
system died for some reason. The screen blanked out, and we panicked
(sp?) and then started pressing keys galore.  (Here's the one thing
liked about NT)  We then went back into a window.  The system was still
locked, but it recognized the alt-enter to get us in a window.  We let
it sit for 3 minutes, and it gave us a dialog box, please logout or
something to that point.  So we logged out, but at least the system was
still up.
So, my conclusions about that example are that Dos emulation is NOT up
to par with real Dos or OS/2's Dos.  Mouse tracking really sucked, and
full-screen wasn't working.  But, it seems that NT will be a stable
system.


So, NT advoacates, care to tell me why NT is THE ultimate OS?

If NT makes it as big as Windows 3.0, it'll be because people are afraid
of anything new.  NT's requirements are on par with a Unix station.  At
least twice that of the "recomended" OS/2 requirements.  Come on, a swap
file of 25 megs?  What exactly is it doing?  Mach running on a PC here
at CMU usually only gets 20 megs while doing some heavy stuff.  My OS/2
swapper once got to 25 megs because I was converting 2 100k jpegs,
compiling 2 programs, dumping emacs, had Windows 3.1 running in seamless
mode, had one person telnetted in, and had 1 X client.  Yes, it was
slow, but it did it all, and it got done, and the swapper maxed out at
25 megs.  I'd like to see what NT's swapfile would be doing all that, 40
megs?  If NT makes it, it'll be because people are jumping on the
Micro$oft marketing bandwagon.

Well, I've babbled on and on, but hey, it's an advocacy board, so too bad.

Carl Jabido
cj00@andrew.cmu.edu
Newsgroups: comp.os.os2.advocacy,comp.os.ms-windows.advocacy