OS/2

From: Iggy Drougge <optimus_at_canit.se>
Date: Thu Jun 28 21:18:37 2001

Bill Pechter skrev:

>> Bill Pechter skrev:
>>
>> >I'd liked a cross between OS/2 and VAX/VMS... maybe with FreeBSD
>> >thrown in.
>>
>> Isn't that Windows NT?

>Not if you have to use the GUI to admin it and reboot to change
>network addresses.

You have to? I haven't used NT myself, but we all know about its OS/2 roots,
and it was developed by old VMS engineers.

>> >Always liked OS/2 and always will. IBM was screwed by M$ who kept
>> >changing Win32 and keeping new apps from running on OS/2.
>>
>> So what? OS/2 is OS/2 and Windows is Windows. You can't just rely on some
>> other OS vendor to supply you with the right API and applications.

>But M$ promised if you code to Win32S it would be portable to OS/2,
>Win3.1 and Win95/NT and kept changing the DLLs to break it.

But OS/2 should really each its own. I really don't think that compatibility
with foreign systems is really beneficial to evolution. If people can just run
application X under Windows or Mac emulation, or rebooting into Windows for
that matter, or even just run some UNIX/GNU port, why would anyone ever bother
to develop application X for platform Y?
People tend not to exploit the particular features of platform Y if running
platform X software or hardware will do the job, and then there is little
incentive to keep running platform Y.
Look at the Mac, probably the world's most incompatible machine, yet probably
the non-Wintel platform with the most balanced software and hardware
selection.
Similarly, I think that Linux's lack of many packages which are considered
common appliances on other platforms owes much due to the fact that a sizable
portion of "Linux users" run dual-boot systems.
A lot of people have also complained about the fact that the ISA slots on big-
box Amigas were inactive (something Ethan Dicks has got a solution for =), but
if people could have used cheap ISA cards from the beginning, there would
probably never have been many Zorro cards developed, and Amiga users would
have had to deal with jumpers en masse instead of autoconfig and high transfer
rates.

>The only problem in OS/2 was if the Workplace Shell threads blocked and
>locked up you'd lose the desktop... but all the server services
>like network kept going.

I'd say the Workplace Shell is a problem in itself. It's so very IBM-ishly
unelegant.

>Getting a prompt and login from Telnet was possible on OS/2 when it
>wasn't standard in NT.

Possible != standard.

>The ftp and telnet servers made OS/2 pretty compatible to
>FreeBSD/Linux/Unix in what it could do on a lan.

Dito for just about every OS made after 1975. ;-)

>Miserable Redmond $%*s.

Amen.

--
En ligne avec Thor 2.6a.
Vi m?ste vara r?dda om varandra - det ?r v?rt enda reciproka pronomen.
Received on Thu Jun 28 2001 - 21:18:37 BST

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