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From: | amicus_curious |
Subject: | Re: consider the facts of the Stac case.. |
Date: | Tue, 3 Mar 2009 14:44:56 -0500 |
"Vincent Fritters" <Vince@nowhere.invalid> wrote in message news:gojolo$fv0$1@news.albasani.net...
OS/2 with PM was released well before Win3.0 as I remember, but it was pricey, over $1000 as I remember. OS/2 needed 4 mb of memory, too, and Win3.0, when it first came out, worked in the old 640K. Back then memory was almost $1 per K and moving to OS/2 cost a lot of money compared to the advantages it had for most people.On 2009-03-03, amicus_curious <ACDC@sti.net> wrote:Stick with the bologna and goetta, Vince, you are likely to be better at that than you are at remembering the chronological order of things. Microsoft had their falling out with IBM over Windows 3.0, not NT.Microsoft were actively developing NT at the time which is why I said posioning the marketplace with FUD. It was a "wait until NT comes out rather than OS/2 because NT is going to kill OS/2". They kept companies from comitting to OS/2 while at the same time smiling and helping IBM develop OS/2.NT came much later, after OS/2 and Win95 were locking horns.Yes. That was version 2.0 I was speaking as far back as 1.3 which is as far as I go.That was direct competition in the marketplace to see who got released firstand who was better. IBM blew that one big time for reasons you state below.
I remember that time. The OS/2 dev kits were $2000 and you had to go to a week-long course in Boca Raton. At that time I worked for a company that was an IBM Industrial Computer partner and we had a factory floor data distribution and collection system that was base on their industrial PC hardware. We started playing around with a Windows version of our stuff and IBM's sales guy reacted by sending us 20 or so sets of the OS/2 SDK gratis. Microsoft virtually gave away their SDK for free, including it with a copy of Windows for a total of $50 for anyone who owned a Microsoft C compiler package. It cost more than $50 to ship the huge box of manuals that came with the SDK.IBM didn't want acheap GUI based platform like Windows as competition for their rather priceyOS/2 with its Presentation Manager. Gates saw the future differently, ofcourse, and was able to gain the upper hand. If IBM would have had its way and managed to kill Windows at an early age, we would all be using OS/2 on IBM's PS/2 or maybe by now it would be OS/5 on the PS/5, but there would be no massive competition for Wintel PCs, that much is certain. IBM was unableto recapture the PC market in the early 90s because they were opposed byMicrosoft and the cloners like Compaq and Dell and many others. Would yourather IBM had the monopoly in hardware and software? Silly boy.That was true for the 1.x versions, but IBM opened up for the 2.x version. The problem was it was too late and Microsoft was holding developers hands to write drivers. IBM was charging for the privilage.
Presentation manager was in OS/2 1.x not OS/2 2.x
Correct.
Well, the war was over by the time 2.0 came out. "A better Windows than Windows...". What I was saying was that without Microsoft to beat up IBM, IBM would have been the guy beating up on everyone and I believe that they would have held onto the hardware business, too. They certainly tried with the PS/2 and MCA patents.2.x had the workplace shell, although technically it was built on PM. OS/2 2.0 was not tied to the PS/2, it's not PS/5 BTW. That was OS/2 1.x.
As for us using OS/2 compared to Windows, OS/2 was light years ahead of anything Microsoft had at the time. IBM was arrogant, Microsoft were very good a product promotion and we got stuck with Windows.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Microsoft is always crappy and they always win due to promotions even though they constantly abuse their customers. That is the COLA mantra and you can say it from dawn to dusk. It still makes no sense. You can say that Microsoft goes to extremes to bribe customers to use their stuff, and that might be somewhat true, but at the end of the day, the customer has not gone elsewhere and Microsoft is still in charge.
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