28 Aug
2019
28 Aug
'19
10:27 p.m.
I tried three times to respond by phone but the lack of a decent
environment for mail killed my first attempts.
Anyway, without top posting:
On 8/28/2019 4:27 PM, Adam Thornton wrote:
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. Unfortunately, I left IBM and IBM dumped OS/2 support and future
releases.
<snip>
I have a hypothesis about Linux's ascendance too, which is a personal
anecdote I am inflating to the status of hypothesis. As I recall, the
*BSDs for 386 all assumed they owned the hard disk. Like, the whole
thing. You couldn't, at least in 1992, create a multiboot system--or
at least it was my strong impression you could not. I was an
undergrad. I had one '386 at my disposal, with one hard disk, and,
hey, I needed DOS and Windows to write my papers (I don't know about
you, but I wanted to write in my room, where I could have my
references at hand and be reasonably undisturbed; sure Framemaker was
a much better setup than Word For Windows 1.2 but having to use it in
the computer lab made it a nonstarter for me). Papers, and, well, to
play games. Sure, that too.
I love Framemaker. I run a 2nd hand version of Windows Framemaker since
I no longer have any Unix boxes that would run the Unix version unless I
pull an old CD and rebuild a SunOS 4 box. Wonder if the NVRAM battery's
dead in the Sparc2 or Sparc10?
I did a training Unix Admin for DC/OSx course for Pyramid that could
print a full doc with instructors guide (on back side of the pages) and
all the pages and overheads for the class in a single Frame doc. And
everyone told me it couldn't be done in Frame 1.2 or 1.3 on Pyramid OSx.
Sure you can if you force it. Come here and hold my Xterminal keyboard
and my beer. 8-)
Anyway, I thought I had a 386 running with Win3.1 and OS/2 and FreeBSD
on a single drive. I checked the FreeBSD archives and it COULD install
in a primary partition (partition type 165) and share the disk with
other OS types.
The one thing that was a PITA was the docs --- since they used the
partition term as well as "disk slices" with partitions meaning ONE
thing to Unix folks and another to DOS/Windows/OS2 types. So it was
explained multiple times on the FreeBSD mailing lists. I never had any
issue with it and until ZFS which wants it's own drives to control (and
drives are now cheap and large -- so why not splurge a bit for data
protection...)
Bill