OSNews

Okay, I'm almost 67, retired, and not a guru; just an Australian guy who was asked by the editor of Australia's Multi-CAD Magazine in early 1995 to look at Windows 4, Windows NT3.5 and OS/2 as better platforms for Computer Aided Design and Draughting applications. I wrote articles regularly about shareware and evaluating new products.

Most of us into CAD used AutoCAD on a DOS platform in thosedays, and most only used (16-bit) Windoze® for email and such stuff.

Insatllproblems with OS/2? I only had to do the install on Warp Connect 3 twice to get it right... on a 486DX4-100... and it ran like a bird. Windows 4 (known to the greater unwashed community as Windows95) - when it did finally come out - looked so much a copy of in so many ways, it was quite funny!

The number of times I have installed and reinstalled w95, w95osr2, win98 and win98SE sincemakes that seem small beer in comparison.

I also only installed Warp 4 twice over before I got it right! And this was before I ever attended an OS/2 User Group meeting!

So, I do think it's unfair to suggest that OS/2 is limited by its installer. Sure, it isn't slick. But many slick apps give you no choices. "When all else fails, read the instructions. I do this several times before being intimidated by a machine!!

I also do not accept that you have to have a pretty looking desktop with gizmos. How often do we actually see our desktop? Perhaps at startup... then it immediately gets covered.

And pretty desktops use resources... something I continually tell folk who complain to me that their machines are running slowly - when I physically look at the machine, its a minimal RAM with a 1024x768 picture of a tiger in the jungleor something in 16 million colours!

What I have found is that I have a number of 16-bit apps that run far better in win-OS2 than in 32-bit Windoze.

Why do I still use them? Because they WORK! Beacuse they work fast, because they do what I bought them to do.

The few apps whose work I need to share with others have cost me hundreds of dollars in upgrade fees, then os upgrade fees, then hardware costs for more facilities, then newer apps to take use of the extra hardware, then alleged upgraded operating systemes which within a couple of years have sucked all the new resources dry. Sound familiar?

Also, I have found that 16-bit apps - known sneeringly in the Microsoft community as "legacy" apps - don't run well in any version of Windows after OSR2, because both the OS manufacturer and the applications manufacturer want you to replace them with newer ones.

The original Win95 ran them very well, to persuade you to buy the OS <grin>

And another thing, you can't generally speaking run more than one appearance of a "legacy" app concurrently under any version of win32 from 95 onwards.

You can under OS/2's Win-OS2 and WIN-DOS.

I ran five appearances of DOS AutoCAD in Warp3 Connect, each with a substantial data file loaded. And the OS still did its other tasks.
Okay, who would want to? I don't know. But it just shows me that it handles threads and stuff an awful lot better than win32.

So where are we? I got lost!

Following my editor's brief, I found that NT 3.5, and then NT3.51and finally NT4 were most definitely not as fast as OS/2, running identical applications. I used a System Commander switched boot to ensure that my evaluation was on truly idedntical machines. However I found that the Microsoft afficionados wrote scathing comments to me about my evaluations, which is really a pity.

I did many timed tests using a stopwatch, loading applications, and loading large data files, and then saving a change to those data files - all essential measurements to compare the products/platforms.

Funny about NT3.51, by the way. This was an emergency fix to NT3.5 when it was discovered that WinNT3.5 would not run 95 applications!

Another funny one too, there was a version of AutoCAD that would not run under WinNT3.51 either... we had to wait for NT4 before it could be used.

Reading the WINE HQ website and looking closely at the successes and failures recorded there for everyone to see, all the succesful running of win32 apps under Linux were Third-Party ones. All the Microsoft ones were disasters. I have a theory.

Could it be that unpublished api calls were being used by the Microsoft products? So, therefore WINE knew nothing about them, and therefore ground to halt?

Nasty thought, I should go and wash my mouth out. Professional engineering firms wouldn't dream of doing that!!

To conclude... OS/2 Warp 4 is still on that machine... well, at least it was, until I lost the boot portion of its first disk (yes, it was installed into C:\ partition). So I'm now looking at setting up an ethernet with that machine which has a new first HDD, and two other machines, with two of them on OS/2, and one on Windoze to run the few win32 applications I actually need, to demonstrate my being convinced that it is truly a better system - specially after I upgrade it toWarp 4.5

Okay, I've bared my soul. Shoot this antipodean down!Actually I don't mind... freedom to state one's opinion is one of the few real freedoms we have left, isn't it?

Antipodean? Ummm I know two ozzies programming stateside. One is Kim Henkel who wrote brand new 32-bit code for XTree look-alikes - called ZTreeBold (for OS/2) and ZTreeWin for (Win32). I use them both. Fantastic products. Check out his website at www.zedtek.com

Drop me a line at eagles@chatministries.org if you like. As long as you aren't abusive, I'll reply <big toothy grin>