"The words coming out of Microsoft are quite bullish, but the numbers aren't, at least according to Wall Street. The problem is those words won't match reality mainly because MS does not grasp the situation it is in. The problem, credibility, the solution, Google."
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Member since:2005-10-02
You absolutely no nothing about OS/2.
OS/2 1.x>1.1, 2.x, 3.x and 4.x<4.5 were and are desktop OS'es.
WindowsNT was meant to compete with OS/2 on the desktop, but Microsoft couldn't get it ready (it didn't get ready until 2001, known as XP), so Microsoft molested Win4.0 API and made it work somewhat on top of DOS. Windows9x became Microsofts desktop answer to OS/2.
Member since:2006-03-10
OS/2 1.x>1.1, 2.x, 3.x and 4.x<4.5 were and are desktop OS'es.
I never said otherwise.
WindowsNT was meant to compete with OS/2 on the desktop, but Microsoft couldn't get it ready (it didn't get ready until 2001, known as XP)
NT had OS/2 beat at version 4, no matter how you look at it. It had more developers (IBM charged for their SDK, MS gave it away), more users, and more drivers and native apps. No clever trick or feature in OS/2 could outweigh that. IBM fumbled, and MS took the lead.
I saw this happen while doing tech support for both systems. But there's no need to believe me, it's all documented history by now.
Member since:2005-07-12
OS/2 2.0 and 3.0 was an OS that excelled at running DOS and Windows 3.1 apps, and it was specifically targetted at Windows 3.1 and then Windows 95 users -- mainly at consumers (and not business users) during its heyday, especially in the OS/2 Warp 3 days in 1994.
Backwards compatibility was never an issue. If anything, it was a strength that ended up backfiring a bit and costing OS/2 some native development.
(1) OS/2's VDM was (and is) as good as Windows 95 when it comes to running DOS software. Not only was an individual OS/2 VDM more customizable, but it could also be configured to use a real DOS boot diskette image to run actual DOS versions, and one could run actual copies of MS-DOS, DR-DOS, or PC-DOS concurrent for DOS program testing. Windows 95 couldn't do that.
Both OSes also had the option to boot to a real DOS (Windows 95 disquised this as "DOS mode" while OS/2 allowed both itself and DOS+Windows to be installed on the same FAT16 partition uising something called Dual Boot mode) for problematic applications.
(2) OS/2's WinOS2 subsystem was a literal recompilation of the actual Microsoft Windows 3.0 and 3.1 source code that IBM obtained the rights to after the IBM/MS split, and it was almost 100% compatible with MS's version (except for a few bugs like the infamous calculator bug that IBM fixed).
The only reason that it later had compatibility issues was because Microsoft started releasing a new version of their WIN32S.DLL extensions every three months or so, and IBM did their best to keep up until WIN32S v1.25a. Versions after that substantially changed the virtual memory map.
OS/2 was basically NT with a lighter footprint and a decent level of legacy compatibility. Microsoft needed three products instead of two because they didn't make NT able to run DOS applications effectively, and because most new Windows 95 users had no appreciation at all for the house-of-cards architecture on which that platform was built. They just cared that it came from Microsoft and was called "Windows".
Member since:2006-03-10
OS/2 2.0 and 3.0 was an OS that excelled at running DOS and Windows 3.1 apps.
Excelled compared to what? Is it not more correct to say that it could sometimes run some windows apps, slowly, if you had more memory in your machine than most people could afford at the time? My memory of (trying) to run windows 3.11 apps in OS/2 is admittedly hazy by now but I recall it as being almost like running a windows emulator. A buggy windows emulator, that could crash the entire machine.
Windows 95, while inferior in many many ways, would run windows 3.11 apps as if they were native win95 apps, multiple apps, side by side, and it needed far less memory and cpu power to do so than OS/2 did.
Member since:
2006-03-10
Why do you compare win95 to OS/2? Win95 was not a similar product to OS/2 - Windows NT was.
OS/2 was almost literally "Windows NT made by IBM". If you compare OS/2 to NT back in 1995 they were about even I'd say, and they both lost out to win95 for many reasons - backward compatibility, application availability, driver support etc, since they were both basically completely new OS's written from scratch.
For that reason, NT and OS/2 were both inferior products to win95, even though they were technically superior. While MS had win95 and WinNT to sell to PC users, IBM had only DOS and OS/2.
"Modernising" all the apps and drivers and everything else took years. When the time finally came to end the win9x-line, MS released XP and IBM still only had an old abandoned OS/2.