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From: rommel@lan.informatik.tu-muenchen.dbp.de (Kai-Uwe Rommel)
Newsgroups: comp.os.os2.programmer
Subject: Re: OS/2 2.0 APIs
Keywords: OS/2 2.0 API
Message-ID: <4274@tuminfo1.lan.informatik.tu-muenchen.dbp.de>
Date: 4 Sep 90 16:19:24 GMT
References: <1990Sep4.130929.16442@sun1.ruf.uni-freiburg.de>
Sender: news@lan.informatik.tu-muenchen.dbp.de
Reply-To: rommel@lan.informatik.tu-muenchen.dbp.de (Kai-Uwe Rommel)
Distribution: comp
Organization: Inst. fuer Informatik, TU Muenchen, W. Germany
Lines: 32

In article <1990Sep4.130929.16442@sun1.ruf.uni-freiburg.de> seifert@sun1.ruf.uni-freiburg.de (Ulrich Seifert) writes:
>Well, what I don't see in the moment is how software development is supposed
>to work in future. My line of reasoning is that there are quite a few systems
>around running on a 286. As far as I understand there will be no way to have
>the new 32-bit API on these machines (?).

Anybody who already works with OS/2 1.x knows, that for serious work, a
386 is required for 1.x too, because of the speed. I would not recommend
using OS/2 on a 286 with up to 12MHz. A 386 with 25MHz and no cache is
just fine. It's the same with memory (at least 8MB). For the 286's even
Windows 3.0 becomes very slow when used on a machine with less than
3-4MB. And because of the new capabilities of 2.0 with a 386 (or 486) I
don't think that the 286 machines will play a big role for the OS/2
market. Most *existing* 286 machines can rarely be used for OS/2 because
hardware upgrade costs are too high (many don't even have sockets for
enough 1MBit chips and require expensive RAM cards).

>Assuming this I would really like to know if anybody plans to use these new
>features since I guess that the market will get completely crazy dealing with
>two kinds of OS/2 software for different versions.

I was so often angry about the 16bit architecture (when using programs using
very much data, ported from 32bit Unix systems, GNU diff, for example)
that I *will* use the new features even in such small utility programs,
as soon as I get an upgrade to 2.0 ...

>Uli


Kai Uwe Rommel
Munich
rommel@lan.informatik.tu-muenchen.dbp.de