> > Well, when I tried it (which was a good few years ago now) Windoze
> > 3.1 was king, Win95 was still a dream project called Chicago, a
> > college student called Linus Torvalds had just started releasing a
> > (then very basic) Minix/unix clone on an unsuspecting world, and
> > my 486 with 8megs of RAM made me the envy of my colleagues. OS/2
> > was a slug on 8megs, and really needed 16megs to start performing.
> > Now, I was living in the UK at the time, with RAM costing
> > $130/meg...
>
> I seem to recall a ZD article suggesting that OS/2 was king if it had
> 16 megs of ram; however, comparing OS/2 to Win3.1 is a lot like
> comparing minix to unix. You get what you pay for in a sense. If
> you were to open five applications in os/2 and the same five
> applications (or close substitutes) in win3.1, I think you'd see os/2
> just beating the snot out of windows.
Maybe, but at what price? It cost me (at the time) the equivalent of
over six week's rent just to upgrade the machine from 4mb to 8mb RAM.
Having to pay another three month's worth just to get to a hardware
level that would support the OS was not economically viable - at least,
not to me.
Yes, you do get what you pay for. But, in terms of value for money, the
cost of the OS plus hardware placed an effective OS/2 system WAY beyond
the means of J. Random User. It was a heavy price even for me, and I
was one of those geeks who spent every available penny on my Beloved
System. (Which is probably why I didn't marry until I was in my
thirties, and even then, perhaps predictably, to a girl from another
continent who I met on the Internet...)
The same sort of thing could be said of NetWare vs. NT. I used to be
the Network Administrator for a company that ran old hardware (IBM PS/2)
with a legacy DOS-based stock control system. One of the servers was a
486 PS/2 with 32 megs of RAM, with mirrored drives and 50 users. It ran
well using NetWare 3.12, even after I added TCP/IP support (it continued
to run IPX/SPX for the DOS app.) so that it could talk to the new
(Linux) fax server over the WAN. Try THAT with NT...
The configuration was painful too, for anything that was not
specifically written for OS/2 (which, let's face it, was most things).
For example, Doom (which was ported to almost everything!) was a pain in
the @$$ to set up, with a list of configuration settings as long as your
arm. And back then, NO-ONE could live without Doom #;-D (The main
reason I decided to network the four PCs (one 486, three 386) that I had
at the time was so that my friends and I could DeathMatch at weekends.
Oh yes, those were the days, especially when the Internet patch came out
so that we could finally use the Internet for the REAL reason that Al
Gore invented it. <G>)
> > Anyway, I'm interested in your comments, as I gave up with OS/2
> > fairly quickly and would love to hear a more informed opinion,
> > although I think we ought to take this thread to private e-mail
> > before the net.police get us #;-D
>
> Please don't ... I'll cheerfully add a <OT> and look forward to more
> conversation on the subject.
My main concern is aimed at those who have to pay for their on-line
time. I for one used to work overseas a lot, and connected to the
Internet using a laptop and cellphone (frequently at no better than
2400bps thanks to crap international connectivity) and was paying
$1.60/min for the International call to my ISP (thanks to the rip-off
International Roaming rates). Too many off-topic posts used to cost me
a fortune.
I WAS thinking of setting up a separate list for off-topic stuff once I
got my ADSL set up, but as BellSouth (my ADSL ISP) only gave me a USB
modem (un-supported by Linux) the only machine I have access to with
ADSL connectivity is my Wife's Win98 box. Call me old-fashioned, but it
just didn't seem right to host Linux lists on Micro$oft boxen. Having
said that, if it is an off-topic list...
Once things settle down financially (i.e, the INS give me my green card
so that I can finally work again!) I'll get the necessary hardware to
network everything. Then, assuming that no-one else has done it by
then, I'll set the other list up - unless you guys are desperate, in
which case I could set up a basic 'forward to group' rule on this
machine...
What to you think?
Regards,
Ozz.
