Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!csd4.milw.wisc.edu!lll-winken!uunet!microsoft!paulc
From: paulc@microsoft.UUCP (Paul Canniff 2/1011)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Microsoft, OS/2, and UNIX
Message-ID: <5541@microsoft.UUCP>
Date: 22 Apr 89 00:17:45 GMT
References: <2434@<267> <45900221@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu>
Reply-To: paulc@microsoft.UUCP (Paul Canniff 2/1011)
Organization: Microsoft Corp., Redmond WA
Lines: 44

Uh-oh, another Microsoft person rises to the bait of
OS/2 bashing ... well, it's not my fault, this guy said
so many nice things, then dropped this non-sequitur (sp?) ...

In article <45900221@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu> mcdonald@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu writes:
	[ favorable comments on OS/2 deleted ... ]
>
>The big minus is that it was originally decided to run it on the
>genuinely brain-dead 286. This is, unfortunately, fatal. Nothing
>else really matters.
>
>Doug McDonald

This is no more fatal to OS/2 than the PDP-8 was to UNIX.
UNIX didn't appear full-blown on the 386 or any othe processor
from some developer's forehead, nor did it's humble original
platform invalidate the architecture.  

Now you COULD argue that the current OS/2 is closely
tied to segmented architecture.  That should provoke someting
more akin to a fair fight, givne that this is the PC forum.
But that's hardly fatal and there are a lot of other things
that really matter, in contrast to what you claim.

And now that you've got me started ...  I do appreciate the
points you made in favor of OS/2.  Though I did not develop or
design it, I have done a lot of development ON it and FOR it.
I must agree that the threaded system is much better than forcing
a process-creation for each execution path -- fork() is very
costly and can be awkward.  UNIX flavors are now appearing which
have threads of sorts under various guises.  Those whom I have
talked to, who have used these "mini-processes" to handle
intra-process multi-tasking, have had only good things to say.

The OS-defined UI is also a plus.  It has helped me quite a bit,
speaking as a long-time micro developer.  I well remember writing
termcap entries and such for CP/M and UNIX.  Maybe XWindows will
be the saviour of portable UNIX UI, beyond the command-line that
techies like to use.

Paul Canniff
Microsoft

Speaking wholly unofficially, as an OS/2 user and developer.