Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!unmvax!ncar!tank!shamash!nic.MR.NET!hal!ncoast!allbery From: allbery@ncoast.ORG (Brandon S. Allbery) Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc Subject: Re: Microsoft, OS/2, and UNIX Message-ID: <13539@ncoast.ORG> Date: 8 Apr 89 00:54:16 GMT References: <267.2434BA33@medsoft.uucp> <29182@bu-cs.BU.EDU> Reply-To: allbery@ncoast.UUCP (Brandon S. Allbery) Followup-To: comp.sys.ibm.pc Organization: Cleveland Public Access UN*X, Cleveland, Oh Lines: 62 As quoted from <29182@bu-cs.BU.EDU> by madd@bu-cs.BU.EDU (Jim Frost): +--------------- | In article <267.2434BA33@medsoft.uucp> Ed.Maurer@p4.f10.n135.z1.fidonet.org (Ed Maurer) writes: | |And OS/2 is no more buggy than the | |first release of most OS's and it certainly is not slow. | | You sure must not be trying to run 10Mb in 8Mb of memory. Under UNIX | it's painless. Try it under OS/2 and watch what happens. +--------------- That, of course, assumes demand paging. Log into ncoast some time.... +--------------- | |to read into this that OS/2 is dead is ridiculous. | | OS/2 isn't dead, but neither is COBOL. Take 'em if you want 'em and | let the rest of us get some work done. +--------------- There *is* a good point here... many people use COBOL because the applications exist for (in) it already. Ditto FORTRAN in the scientific arena. However, it's questionable whether COBOL-85 will hold its own against 4GL's *and* COBOL-74, and equally questionable that OS/2 will make any headway aginst UN*X *and* MS-DOS. I personally think that OS/2 would have taken the market by storm... if it had come out two years earlier than it did. By now, it's far too late. If only because those two years have seen products come out 286 and *native* 386 UNIX that were originally DOS-only (how long will it be before native 386 OS/2 comes out?) -- and, once ported to 386 UNIX, they can be trivially ported to other UNIX bases on 680x0/88000, 32x32, RISC processors, etc. (trivially compared to porting direct from DOS at least). By the time native OS/2 (rather than compatibility box) applications come out, they will already be available under UNIX. Shells? sh, csh, and ksh are historical, and therefore considered to be the only shells by many. But there exists at least one DCL (VMS "shell") for UNIX and several CP/M shells... and the latter are easily converted to MS-DOS shells. Not to mention the "WIMP" environments. Desk accessories? Consider either (a) job control or (b) JSB Multiview (as shipped by SCO, Altos, and almost certainly others)... neither of which requires fancy terminals like the windowing environments do. Multiview even comes with a selection of SideKick-like accessories, available from anywhere with a few keystrokes, and information on how to add your own (try *that* with SideKick!). Not to mention that, since Multiview is a kind of windowing environment for ASCII terminals, *any* program can be used as a desk accessory.... Everything OS/2 promises (but doesn't yet deliver, at least not well) is available on the AT386 I use at work under Unix... and in 3MB of memory. It's even got WordPerfect, Microsoft Word, SCO Professional, and FoxBase+, and *not* under VP/ix. OS/2 has a *lot* of catching up to do. ++Brandon -- Brandon S. Allbery, moderator of comp.sources.misc allbery@ncoast.org uunet!hal.cwru.edu!ncoast!allbery ncoast!allbery@hal.cwru.edu Send comp.sources.misc submissions to comp-sources-misc@ NCoast Public Access UN*X - (216) 781-6201, 300/1200/2400 baud, login: makeuser