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From: martin@felix.UUCP (Martin McKendry)
Newsgroups: comp.os.os2
Subject: Re: Why is OS/2 a memory hog?
Message-ID: <124944@felix.UUCP>
Date: 8 Nov 89 17:15:26 GMT
References: <89304.173824GIAMPAL@AUVM.BITNET> <3056@ccncsu.ColoState.EDU> <89307.092707GIAMPAL@AUVM.BITNET>
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Reply-To: martin@felix.UUCP (Martin McKendry)
Organization: FileNet Corp., Costa Mesa, CA
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In article <89307.092707GIAMPAL@AUVM.BITNET> GIAMPAL@AUVM.BITNET writes:

>You said that OS/2 is small for its power.  I'm naive about what it offers at
>a technical level, so I'd like to know what it's power is.  All that the
>press about it has mentioned is that it multi-tasks, and that is NO reason
>to require such a large amount of memory.  I really would like to hear
>a technical discussion of what it offers.  Nothing I have read (which isn't
>much) has mentioned if it has virtual memory or protected memory, etc... 
> What about the IPC support that it has?  Is it easy to use?  What about
>spawning child processes, etc...

You need to read, or at least peruse "Inside OS/2", by Gordon Letwin, 
Microsoft Press, 1988, ISBN 1-55615-117-9, $19.95 at a store year
you.  I got mine at B. Dalton.

OS/2 has almost everything that Unix System V Release 4 has, and then a
few things.  It is very extensive, and in general contains the most
current version of whatever feature you want.   For example, it has more
support for process management -- lightweight processes & semaphores 
etc -- than most versions of Unix.

Discussions about OS/2 tend to be a little religious, and tend to be
based on previous experience with MS-DOS.  OS/2 is a real operating
system, just as current versions of Unix are.  Its 'power' is just
what you would expect -- no more or less.  However, when contrasted
with MS-DOS, it looks very powerful, and this tends to dominate
discussions.

In fact, OS/2 has so many features derived from the Unix world, that
you have to wonder if royalty avoidance didn't play a part in the
decision to build a new operating system.  (Not that there is anything
wrong with learning from Unix: any competant engineer studies the current
state of the art before building something new).




--
Martin S. McKendry;  FileNet Corp;  {hplabs,oliveb,spsd,zardoz}!felix!martin
Strictly my opinion; all of it