[rescue] Sun Kit Needed for EE Student Here

[Dan Duncan]

On Fri, 5 May 2006, Sandwich Maker wrote:
> where in all of this would you-all rate os/2?

I loved it.  I guess I still do.  I came in at OS/2 2.0 and
went on to 2.1, warp 3 and warp 4.
Prior to that I was running DOS with Desqview (and playing
a bit with Desqview/X) because Win 3.0 and 2.0 were so truly
horrible.  (a trait which continues)

> remember, the better dos than dos, the better windows than windows?

And it was.  It ran DOS apps better than DOS did.  In fact, I got
it to run a lot of DOS games I couldn't get to run PERIOD under DOS.
Part of this was because everything (including the command interpeter)
were "loaded high" leaving all 640k of conventional RAM free.  I
could also provide up to 32MB each of extended and expanded memory
to each DOS session which could come from either RAM or swap.  I used
to run Wing Commander and Xwing simultaneously in 320x240 (320x200?)
windows on my desktop and then check email as a demo just to annoy Wing
Commander or Xwing players because running either alone under DOS (or a
DOS session in Win3.1) would peg their OS.

I could run Win 3.1 apps by themselves ("seamless" mode) without the
need to run *gag* Program Manager.

> i've heard stories of
> all the 'fixing-up' ibm programmers did to the ms code; it wouldn't
> surprise me if os/2 ran faster and more reliably than w98, but can it
> run all the same programs?  and it doesn't apparently support as many
> systems, for instance my hp notebook.

OS/2 didn't keep up very well past win32s but by the time win95
came out I was running *nixes at home instead of just accessing
them remotely.  A recent OS that reminded me of OS/2 was BeOS.  I'm
not really sure why.  I guess the environment just felt similar.
(Despite documentation to the contrary, I've found that BeOS seems
to work just fine under VMWare except for NIC drivers which reduces
its usefulness to me somewhat)

-DanD

-- 
#  Dan Duncan (kd4igw)  dand at pcisys.net  http://pcisys.net/~dand
# "I can almost bend steel with my mind. I can bend anything
# if I try hard enough. But you can get too strong like that,
# so you have to be careful." - Martha Stewart to Oprah Winfrey in O Magazine.