Ron Johnson wrote:
I must admit I was a bit disappointed in the outcome of OS/2. Not to get off topic, but credit is due.On Fri, 2003-11-07 at 13:20, techlists wrote:On Thu, 2003-11-06 at 17:52, David Millet wrote:all I have to say is that I personally want linux to rule the desktop, simply because I will stand to make alot of money when big companies start picking it up. a lot of us will, in fact.i'm extremely confident that it will rule the desktop market, because of the speed at which the desktops have improved, which i have been lucky to observe during the past year i've been doing the linux thing. i've seen major improvements, unlike how windows upgrades their operating systems these days. i use winXP at work and haven't seen yet too much of an improvement from win2000. i agree with that guy from red hat. give kde, gnome, etc a few more years to mature and it will be night-night time for the M$ monopoly.Not until Broderbund releases a Calendar Creator that works with Linux. Ditto for Reader Rabbit, Math Blaster, etc, etc, ad nauseum.Or not until wine begins running these and every windoze app that everyone uses flawlessly, which hopefully happens soon. davidAs much as I like Wine, and use it myself for some products, I fear that the wine project may do to linux what win-os/2 did for os/2. If your system will run win32 apps, what insentive do companies have to develop native programs for you.One difference is that Big Blue bungled the marketing of OS/2 worse than DEC did of VMS, and that's saying something.
My first experience with OS/2 was version 2.0 - attempting to run in on a 386 with 4M RAM. It didn't run, it didn't even stagger - it crawled. But it did install, and it did function. This being in the '80's, I returned my 40+ disks to their package and got a refund from the store (it wasn't Egghead, I forgot the name).
Then I tried version 2.1 - this time with 8M RAM. There was something a bit unusual here - the distribution had about half the disks, required less hard drive space - and ran faster with more features.
This I had Warp version 3.0 - again, smaller distribution, smaller installation requirements, more features. This was my platform of choice for running Windoze 3.x applications.
I don't think I've ever seen a better example of programmers taking more pride in their work and continually refining their code - instead of just throwing more hardware at a performance problem. I've seen exceptional programs written from scratch - Q, later TSE comes to mind - but the level of improvement displayed by OS/2 I haven't seen anywhere else. If IBM had decided to tackle a Win95 emulator - I think the market would be bit different today.
Sigh. I guess they already knew whatever undocumented functions they emulated - Microsoft's next version would just add more.
Oh well. Maybe I need to start scrounging pennies and forwarding my meager contributions to the Wine effort - being able to eliminate Windoze while retaining my existing application library is quite appealing.
Daniel