From: dic5340@hertz.njit.edu (David Charlap)
Newsgroups: comp.os.os2.advocacy
Subject: Re: OS2 Good news and Bad news  (OS2 & a little windows too)
Keywords: os2
Date: 22 Jul 92 16:59:48 GMT
Distribution: comp.os.os2.advocacy
Organization: New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, N.J.

In article <yeates.711750372@beryl17> yeates@rtsg.mot.com (Tony J Yeates) writes:
>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 ....).

That's a minor complaint of mine as well.  When you start an WIN-OS2
session, you must start a DOS session, run the DOS session's
AUTOEXEC.BAT file, and then run WINOS2.COM.  Once that's going, your
application can load.  It can take a while in some cases.

The rep should have had a WIN-OS2 session started in the background,
and switch to it to launch AMI Pro.  It would have looked better that
way...

Imagine re-booting your computer into DOS, and starting Windows before
launching your app.  That's what OS/2 had to do.  Not that it makes
things better, but it is a very valid reason.

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

There are many third party SVGA drivers.  Contact your board
manufacturer.  I'm using SVGA modes on my ATI VGA-1024 board with no
problems. 

>10) Apparently a resource hog.

But there are enough resources that it's not a problem.  Under DOS, a
512K program is too big.  Under OS/2, it's not that significant.

>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).

Your opinion.  Nobody claimed it's DOS compatibility to be 100%  As
for Windows, it runs anything you have if it works in Standard mode.

SVGA drivers are avilable from your board manufacturer.  Contact them.
Neither DOS nor Windows ships with stacker-like compression, why do
you insist that OS/2 provide this?  Anyway, Stacker corp. is working
on stacker for OS/2.

OS/2 has run-time linking in it already.  If you look closely, you'll
find a directory FULL of dynamic link libraries (DLL's).  Look in the
\OS2\DLL directory.  Without them, the simplest PM-based program would
be about 3MB in size!  Applications developers can create their own
DLL's for their own code - Excel for PM has about 1.5MB of them, as do
many other OS/2 apps.  What else were you thinking of?

Of course, DOS programs have to do their own dynamic linking.  Windows
programs can use Windows DLL's just fine - place them on the PATH or
in the Windows\SYSTEM directory, just like under DOS.

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

I guess you consider DOS and Windows also in the alpha/beta stages,
too.  They've got all the same problems, and sometimes more.

>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? )

Unfortunately, it doesn't work this way.  It'd be neat if it did,
though.  Mac compilers usually work as an integrated development
system, much like Borland does with their Turbo languages.  You start
the editor, and tell the compiler what to do with the edit buffer(s)
via the menu bar.


-- 
   |)  David Charlap           "I don't even represent myself
  /|_  dic5340@hertz.njit.edu   sometimes so NJIT is right out!.
 ((|,)
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Newsgroups: comp.os.os2.advocacy