[TUHS] Why BSD didn't catch on more, and Linux did

[Wesley Parish]

On 2/8/18, Nemo <cym224 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 7 February 2018 at 03:27, Wesley Parish <wobblygong at gmail.com> wrote:
>> OS/2 and Windows (including WinNT 3.x) just
>> added a pretty-pretty interface. OS/2 was more sophisticated than
>> WinNT's because OS/2 expected to share the hard drive with some other
>> OS; Microsoft believed it had the computer to itself and is thus not
>> as sophisticated - but they're still MS/PC/DR DOS  writ large.
>
> I would disagree with this assessment.  NT's VMS heritage has already
> been discussed.  I do not know the heritage of OS/2 but to call it DOS
> is simply not true.  (Among other things, OS/2 did an excellent job of
> virtualizing dosboxes. We were developing PCMCIA drivers with OS/2 in
> dosboxes.  When one crashed, you simply opened up another and
> continued.)
>
> N.
>
I was referring to the installation procedures. IBM OS/2 2.0 to 4.0
installation procedures were more sophisticated than the equivalent in
MS WinNT from 3.x to 5.x because Microsoft did not show any interest
in sharing the disk with anyone.

But it's still true if one refers to single user versus multiuser -
WinNT's got a lot of OS/2 and VMS in its history, and OS/2's got a lot
of IBM's MVS and related mainframe OS knowledge in its background, but
they're not native multiuser. You need to get add-ons to make them
truly multiuser. In that they are still MS/PC/DR DOS writ large.
(Which is ironical considering that there have been at least two
genuine multiuser DOS clones on the market that I know of, DR's
Multiuser DOS - not Concurrent DOS: that was a similar but different
product - and PCMOS.)

Wesley Parish