I like, and still use, OS/2, in the form of ArcaOS, but it and windows still have lockout issues.
I would certainly have liked for IBM to open source SOM, DSOM and WPS, but I'm not sure that there would have been any value in an open source PM, unless the SIQ problem was really solved. I would love to have WPS support for, e.g., KDE. -- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3 ________________________________________ From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [[email protected]] on behalf of René Jansen [[email protected]] Sent: Sunday, December 12, 2021 9:56 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: AWS Outage Analysis: December 7, 2021 Hi David, > On 12 Dec 2021, at 05:29, David Crayford <[email protected]> wrote: > > On 12/12/21 4:10 am, Tom Brennan wrote: >> People say OS/2 was far better in design, operation, and security than >> Windows, but it's gone now. > > I worked a company in the 90s who used OS/2 Warp IMO it was terrible. Under > the covers it had preemptive multi-tasking, memory protection etc so was a > far better kernel then Windows but the GUI sucked. Major issues were that it > would hang, crash and was totally unreliable. All the useful applications > were written for Windows so when MS crippled compatibility OS/2 was > effectively dead. Then Microsoft hired Bill Cutler from VMS to head the > Windows NT team who knew a thing or two about fault tolerant operating > systems. Windows NT was the final nail in the coffin for OS/2. > I beg to differ here. This might have been true before IBM fixed the event queues. The single event queue in Presentation Manager (which I think is the hang thing you refer to, was there because Gates forced IBM (which knew better) to implement that, of course Windows got multiple event queues later, which did not help through and including Windows 98, which was still DOS with lipstick on it, including really terrible memory extension technology which I hope nobody suffered. It was Dave Curler (not Bill) who redesigned the Windows OS based (actually took some of the design that DEC did not let him Implement). The most advanced thing imho of that was interruptible interrupts. Windows NT was an OK OS until, in 4.00, someone took the very questionable decision to move graphics and its drivers from user space to kernel space, reputedly because of a few percent more performance in gaming. After that, it was less reliable. I run Arcae Noa Blue Lion sometimes, but that is more to see if Rexx code is still compatible - this includes NetRexx. In my opinion, Linux could have gained the desktop if IBM would have been wise enough to open source the Presentation Manager and SOM implementations (which, by the time, also ran on RISC but hardly left the building before being killed). If that incurred paying MS some money, that would have been fine. There was enough to pay to Red Hat to only gain the server side back, to enable the hybrid cloud business. OS/2 failed in the eyes of naive users mainly by confusing startup time with performance, (which was mostly the file system, HPFS, an MS effort) and by IBM’s failure to give enough stuff to the developer community. Which is a constant factor - don’t complain about students not knowing z/OS if you do not hand out study systems. I agree that in its early times there were some issues, but this also goes for OS (MVS,z/OS) - I remember it falling over at least three times a week in the early eighties. Even when OS/2 had its problems, it was a lot better then the alternatives, like TopView, Windows or Desqview. Best regards, René. > >> Sometimes the "best" system is simply what everybody else is using. Got to >> go now because I just put in a betamax. > > Amen /\ Linux was no match for Unix systems such as AIX but because it was > free and open source it exploded in popularity. Now it runs on billions of > machines from mainframes to routers. Same for the C programming language > which is fundamentally flawed but free compilers were made available so it > became ubiquitous. > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, > send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
