From: dic5340@hertz.njit.edu (David Charlap)
Newsgroups: comp.os.os2.advocacy,comp.os.ms-windows.advocacy
Subject: Re: Tidbits about NT and OS/2 from the trade rags.
Date: 8 Oct 92 16:18:22 GMT
Organization: New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, N.J.

In article <1992Oct6.183702.2713@solaris.rz.tu-clausthal.de> ch@sg1502.chemie.uni-marburg.de (Christoph H. Hochstaetter) writes:
>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.

I'd say this is amazing, since they said this wasn't going to be
available for a few years.

>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.

Perhaps.  Maybe it's because business clients are asking for it.

>It is really hardly understandable, what reasons there are to keep
>OS/2 alive.

You can't understand why IBM wants to keep OS/2 alive?  Perhaps
because they invested so much in it.  Perhaps because they don't
abandon users.  Perhaps they don't think NT is going to be the OS of
choice on everything from Crays down to my toaster.

>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.

By your logic, it isn't understandable what reasons there are for NT,
as well.  There are very few apps for it, and most people can't use it
as their sever.  Considering that it was originally slated for
shipment almost a year ago, I can call it a big flop as well.

What the heck.  Why don't we all erase our hard drives and run DOS 1.0
again.  After all, nobody ever used a product until it had been
released for a few months (or years in some cases).

>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.

You know as well as I do that that beta was very stripped down.  It
was OS/2 1.3 with some new API's grafted onto it.  It bears about as
much resemblance to today's OS/2 as Windows 2.1  has to NT.

>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.  

Who said that?  You ask a question, you answer it, and then you get
offended by the answer.  You're incredible, do you know that?

-- 
David Charlap         |"there aren't 50,000 things for which it's worth writing
dic5340@hertz.njit.edu| software; and the computer industry doesn't have enough
----------------------+ programmers to create that much good software.
Therefore, most of it must be worthless" -- Boris Beizer "The Frozen Keyboard"