29 Aug
2019
29 Aug
'19
6:40 p.m.
On 08/28/19 18:27, William Pechter wrote (in part):
On 8/28/2019 4:27 PM, Adam Thornton wrote:
Indeed --
forgive my nostalgia here... We were developing a DOS-based
PC-Card (often incorrectly called a PCMCIA card). With OS/2, you opened
up a DOS box. If the driver crashed, you just opened up another and went
on. Under Windoze, the whole box crashed (and sometimes took the
file-system with it). We used a combination of Eberhard Mattes' emx,
the MKS toolkit, and case-sensitive file-systems to give us a reasonable
approximation.
N.
I was an ardent OS/2 supporter for a long time.
Sure, IBM's anemic
marketing, and their close-to-outright-hostility to 3rd-party
developers didn't help. But what killed it, really, was how damn
good its 16-bit support was. It *was* a better DOS than DOS and a
better Windows than 3.11fW. So no one wrote to the relatively tiny
market of 32-bit OS/2.
OS/2 was slick and if they could've kept the W\indows 3.x
compatibility (the Win32S was a sliding target that Microsoft kept
changing. There was a pretty decent Unix work-alike ported to the top
of OS/2 that made most of the public domain and open source (the term
didn't exist yet) stuff available.
I could telnet into the box and run a pretty slick Unix work-alike shell.