Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!van-bc!ubc-cs!unixg.ubc.ca!cheddar.ucs.ubc.ca!ballard From: ballard@cheddar.ucs.ubc.ca (Alan Ballard) Newsgroups: comp.os.os2.misc Subject: Re: Is OS/2 dead? Message-ID: <1991Feb1.075050.7009@unixg.ubc.ca> Date: 1 Feb 91 07:50:50 GMT References: <4993@lure.latrobe.edu.au> <1991Jan30.065454.11451@unixg.ubc.ca> <1991Jan31.231237.22301@sbcs.sunysb.edu> Sender: news@unixg.ubc.ca (Usenet News Maintenance) Organization: Computing Services, University of British Columbia Lines: 83 In article <1991Jan31.231237.22301@sbcs.sunysb.edu> cfreas@csws12.ic.sunysb.edu (Terry Freas) writes: > >>[...] it to run Windows applications."Microsoft will outline plans for OS/2 >>and Windows at a press seminar held at Microsoft on Tuesday. > >will and held in the same sentence? Did this occur already or not? >Either way, can someone post a summary? I'm very interested in >Gatesian philosophy at this point... > The following is a brief article from PC Magazine's editorial forum on Compuserve, summarizing the "Microsoft System's Strategy Seminar" held on Tuesday. It is by Bill Machrone, editor of PC Magazine and is reproduced here with his permission... ----------------------------- Sb: Msoft Strategy Seminar Fm: Bill Machrone [PCMAG] 72241,15 To: All Steve Ballmer launched his session today with, "I am not dead. I was not dropped. I have not been scrapped. And neither has OS/2." He went on to say, "We were wrong in April, 1987. OS/2 won't replace DOS." And so unfolds Microsoft's systems strategy. They are now categorizing the market in 3 tiers: low, mid, and high-end. The low-end solution continues to be DOS, and DOS will be enhanced beyond DOS 5, through DOS 6 and 7. They talked of something that sounded much like HPFS for some future version of DOS, plus other advances. The midrange today is the Win3/DOS combination, and will evolve to Win32 some time next year. The new kernel will be 32-bit, will feature preemptive multitasking and multithreading, 2GB address space, and advanced interprocess communication. Sound familiar? It will include the current 16-bit API, and the goal is to have 16- and 32-bit products working side by side. DOS apps will work in separate address spaces, as will Win32 apps. Win16 apps (current apps) will share one address space, making them potentially less robust. UAEs and similar errors are a big target. Win32 will also have Bezier curves, transforms, and other advanced graphical support. Now for the interesting part: Win32 is a technology, not a product. It will run over DOS as a future version of Windows, or over OS/2. In the latter mode, it'll support the existing OS/2 API as well. OS/2 3.0 will run all the Windows APIs as well as the PM API. It's primarily there for people who need strong peer-to-peer communications, as a foundation for LanMan, and as a way to support their big customers with an investment in SAA. Microsoft and IBM are fully cross-licensed on this and other versions. OS/2 3.0 will be based on a new kernel, called NT, for New Technology. Think of it as VMSjr, since it's designed by Dave Cutler and a crack team formerly of DEC. It's intended to be fast, portable, and thoroughly modern. They already have it running on 4 different processors. It runs all APIs: Win16, Win32, OS/2, *and* POSIX, for you Unix/Federal Gov't fans. It will be a high-security OS, meeting C2, B-level standards. It will provide fault-tolerance services, too. It will also be the foundation upon which they build a true distributed operating system, with fully distributed services and location transparency. NT also supports symmetric multiprocessing and threads across processors. The NT redirector and server are intended to interoperate with LanMan 2.0. When asked if IBM will adopt OS/2 3.0 after it's done with 1.x and 2.x, Microsoft stated that "IBM may choose to continue OS/2 2.0 for some indeterminate time in order to provide some special features and to address some special situations." This is a very condensed version of one section of 9 hours' worth of briefings; I'm sure the rest will be widely publicized in the trade press. This will doubtless suffice to launch a comment or two here. My interpretation is that Microsoft is stating clearly that it has come back to being customer driven, not IBM-driven, in operating systems. It is also saying that it is user-driven, not software developer-driven. For those reasons, I expect this strategy to work. I can't wait for next year's version of Windows, and OS/2 3.0 becomes the Swiss Army knife of operating systems. - Bill ------------ Alan Ballard | Internet: ballard@ucs.ubc.ca University Computing Services | Bitnet: USERAB1@UBCMTSG University of British Columbia | Phone: 604-228-3074 Vancouver B.C. Canada V6R 1W5 | Fax: 604-228-5116