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From: rommel@lan.informatik.tu-muenchen.dbp.de (Kai-Uwe Rommel)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: OS/2 vs. Unix
Message-ID: <1022@tuminfo1.lan.informatik.tu-muenchen.dbp.de>
Date: 3 Jan 90 13:36:53 GMT
References: <2590cf5b@ralf>
Sender: news@lan.informatik.tu-muenchen.dbp.de
Reply-To: rommel@lan.informatik.tu-muenchen.dbp.de (Kai-Uwe Rommel)
Organization: Inst. fuer Informatik, TU Muenchen, W. Germany
Lines: 49


Please change you subject line for this discussion to "DOS vs. Unix"
(this is a very unfair comparison) or discuss about real OS/2 and Unix !

The most important feature of OS/2 above DOS is its memory protection
and virtual memory management which makes it directly comparable to
Unix.

Sometimes i tried to copy a 1.44M Disk as a single piece with my own
copydisk program on a system only having 2.5M RAM (the system takes
about 1.5M to 2M) - it worked well. When I tried to load about 1.5M
sources into the MicroEMACS editor on the same machine running
Xenix/286 (also having virtual memory) this lead into serious trouble,
the machine was really unusable because of the swapping which blocked
the CPU.

What I want to say is, that OS/2 is much more flexible than Unix on
machines with hardware not supporting demand paging (like the 80286,
for which both OS/2 and Xenix/286 were designed). And the OS/2-386
version will support demand paging too. Also, take a look on OS/2's
dynamic linking (ever heard about dynamic linking of Unix versions on
286/386 class computers ?). And, the separate screen groups for
concurrently executing processes are fine. Of course, PC versions of
Unix also have this feature, but did you ever work on a Unix terminal
(alpha) having two or more processes running on your terminal and all
of them producing output to you ?

Unix is not a bad system, I like it too, but OS/2 is developed several
years later and therefore is more modern than Unix is. Unix was
designed to run with terminals, when computers were expensive and there
were many terminals connected to single machines over slow lines and
the users were running mostly command line driven batch programs with
stream in/output. But the PC has a memory mapped display with high
speed access which allows very interactive programs. And using termcap
with a PC monitor is not very fine. Of course, there exists X-Windows,
yes. But its a rather expensive system (system ressources) because its
build OVER Unix, the Presentation Manager is built INTO OS/2 and when I
think about our university computers (Microvax) running Ultrix 3.1 and
X11R3 I must say that they are rather unreliable !

Well, I would say OS/2 and Unix are different systems for different
purposes and Unix was ported to the PC (286, 386) because no other good
time-sharing, virtual-memory OS was available. But they are still a bit
uncomparable. We in Germany say "Da werden Aepfel und Birnen
verglichen". (Do you speak German ? :-)

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