Micro$oft Biz'droid Lusers (was: OT email response format)

From: Douglas H. Quebbeman <dquebbeman_at_acm.org>
Date: Wed Apr 24 06:26:51 2002

> On Tue, 23 Apr 2002, Fred Cisin (XenoSoft) wrote:
> > On Tue, 23 Apr 2002, Richard Erlacher wrote:
> > >
> > > > such as when Bill Gates said, "The 80286 is brain-dead." ?
> > >
> > > Did he really say that? I can't imagine what he'd have meant. Perhaps he was
> > > mad at the Intel folks.
> >
> > Yes, he did.
> > Also, Gordon Letwin (author of OS/2 at Microsoft) compared mode
> > switching of the 286 to having to shut off your engine to change gears
> > on the freeway.
>
> Interesting you bring up Gordon Letwin...I picked up a copy of his book
> _Inside OS/2_ last Friday at the annual library book sale. I haven't
> started to read it yet, so I hope it was worth the $1 it cost me.

OS/2 is/was a nice OS, but it embraced some architectural flaws
that persist in Windows and are part of of makes Windows a sucky
operating system. Gordon is obviously very proud of his many
pronoucements in the book, such as his belief that GPF indicates
a program bug and your program must therefore be terminated.

GPF is just a fault condition, and can be programmically used
to implement OS features. What OS/2 and Windows call dynamic
linking isn't dynamic linking at all, for example.

The interesting thing is that so much of Letwin's book contradicts
a magazine article by IBM's Ed Iaccabucci, where Ed described
a dynamic linking mechanism that worked exactly like the one in
Multics. So at one point, *early* on, there were divergent path
of development for OS/2, that ended up coalescing into one, the
wrong one...

-Douglas Hurst Quebbeman (DougQ at ixnayamspayIgLou.com) [Call me "Doug"]
  Surgically excise the pig-latin from my e-mail address in order to reply
  "The large print giveth, and the small print taketh away." -Tom Waits
Received on Wed Apr 24 2002 - 06:26:51 BST