Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!bbn!oberon!ucla-cs!cc1
From: cc1@valhalla.cs.ucla.edu (Max Kislik)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Microsoft, OS/2, and UNIX
Message-ID: <22501@shemp.CS.UCLA.EDU>
Date: 3 Apr 89 20:34:51 GMT
References: <267.2434BA33@medsoft.uucp>
Sender: news@CS.UCLA.EDU
Reply-To: cc1@cs.ucla.edu (Max Kislik)
Organization: UCLA Computer Club
Lines: 53

In article <267.2434BA33@medsoft.uucp> Ed.Maurer@p4.f10.n135.z1.fidonet.org (Ed Maurer) writes:

>highly paid and trained administrator. And OS/2 is no more buggy than the 
>first release of most OS's and it certainly is not slow. Admittedly, the 

I worked with a pre-released version of OS/2 extended 1.0 this summer. 
Was it slow.  YES.  Very slow.  
Why?  
To measure of how fast/slow an is a certain OS, the most critical part
is response time:  how fast does it react to whatever you typed on the
keyboard.  
OS/2 simply failed (that's my opinion of course) there.
With about 5-6 sessions open, one of which is a Communication package
connecting a mainframe to the PC, and another being a network
management package, I sometimes had the computer locked.  The cursor
on the screen simply did not move when I pressed the arrow keys.
And, it did not move for 5-10 seconds.

Not to mention compiling a 1000-1500 line C program, with admittedly
large include files, takes about 3-6 minutes.

Believe me, it is slow if you have a large, multi-thread process
running in the background (something like a comm. package).   

As to being buggy, it's not too bad.  It crashed a few times, but
that had to do with applications what had I/O priveleges being buggy
more than the OS itself.

>DOS compatibility box is a 'kludge', etc. but overall it's quite useable -

Yeah, I'll accept that.  For a DOS literate person, OS/2 is almost a 
natural transition.  For someone who isn't, it's still more user
friendly than a non-windowing UNIX.

>there is NO official UNIX support in the PC arena. Software is late? 

Neither is there an OS/2 support.  Unix simply is a more logical migration
path to computer literate people:  OS/2 is almost as expensive, and 
as to having a full time system admininstrator, well it depends what size
Unix system we're talking about?  Is it a single user Unix on separate
PC's on a small LAN.  No full time sys admin is required there if the
LAN is reliable enough.  
Most people can take care of their own computer, whether it's Unix, Dos
or OS/2.  Sometimes, you need some time and effort, but mostly it's 
manageable.

>vanilla OS/2; to read into this that OS/2 is dead is ridiculous. I could go 

OS/2 isn't dead, but it is destined to die sooner or later.  If someone
wants an OS to replace dos, he'll purchase something like Desq-view for
his 286 or a Unix system for his 386.  OS/2 wastes the 386, and is too 
expensive for the average 286 user.