From: furballs@sequent.com (Paul Penrod)
Newsgroups: comp.os.os2.advocacy
Subject: Re: Windows 3.1 an "operating system"?
Date: 8 Nov 92 19:37:29 GMT
Article-I.D.: sequent.1992Nov8.193729.8493
Organization: Sequent Computer Systems Inc.

In article <1992Nov8.141255.16690@u.washington.edu> tzs@carson.u.washington.edu (Tim Smith) writes:
>furballs@sequent.com (Paul Penrod) writes:
>petesk@microsoft.com (Pete Skelly) writes:
>>>Funny, I know people who have the opposite viewpoint.  They Like DOS
>>>because it stays the heck out of their way.
>>>Then again, they are just embedded systems designers, and game designers,
>>>and the like.
>>Not true. [irrelevant anecdote deleted]
>
>So you are saying Pete Skelly lied when he said he knew such people?
>He didn't name names, so how do you know who he was thinking about?
>Are you psychic?  Or do you know everyone he knows?
>
>--Tim Smith

No, I did not say Pete Skelly lied; you implied by your question I
accused him of such. 

Now, my irrelevant anecdote, as you put, was posted to make the
point that DOS is not the haven of the niche market, nor is it the
exclusive play area for games people. Pete's last comment left that
implication hanging. DOS is and will be for a long time an
important consideration in any furture revisions of OS's that play
under the IBM PC banner, which has grown to encompass
quite a few variations since it's inception in 1981. There are
businesses out there, large ones infact, that do not have the
budgetary means during this lousy economic period to justify the
added expense of taking perfectly good working DOS based machines
and adding the addtional hardware and software, plus the outside
contract services, to bring them to that level. The same applies to
OS/2 as well. Everything comes down to the bottom line, and if you
can not justify the expenditure, based upon the projected returns,
then most companies won't move forward.

Now, that is a compelling reason, more than any other, for
Microsoft and IBM to continue to perpetuate DOS, which is single
tasking, and limited in it's memory addressability and file system
as well. IF they are going to move these companies forward, they
have to give them a migratory path to do so and keep them
productive and in their comfort zones long enough to get them
accross the bridge as it were. Once the market has shifted to the
new platforms, like CPM, DOS will become a footnote in the history
and CS books.

Features and concepts are nice to trumpet about amongst the people
who understand them, but the average user could care less. They
want to do something with the computer, not admire it for the
clever features it has. If consumers were driven solely by the need
for technological inovation, we would all be using XEROX equiptment
rather than PC's, driving Tuckers rather than Fords or Chevys, the
list goes on.

I have no doubt the OS/2 2.0 has earned it's place amongst the
users, developers, and more importantly the business community
because it has percieved value. Windows itself has established it's
market because of it's perceived value, but remember, there are
over 110 million Intel machines in use today, and the vast majority
of them, 90 million plus, use DOS. Why ? Because it has percieved
value; not because it's technically superior in anyway, which it's
not.

'Nough said..

Pete:

Sorry if the last post came off a bit hard.


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