[rescue] NeXTSTEP or OPENSTEP?

[Liam Proven]

On 6 August 2014 11:34, Michael-John Turner <mj at mjturner.net> wrote:
> That brings back some memories - I remember joining Team OS/2 as a student
> back in 1994/1995. Sadly I never got any freebies, possibly because there
> wasn't a strong OS/2 presence in South Africa in those days. I do remember
> bumping into Mark Shuttleworth at the OS/2 Warp launch though - I could be
> wrong, but I think he may have gotten one of the free copies they gave away
> on the day.
>
> OS/2 2.1 was so much better than Windows 3.1 - I still have very fond
> memories of using it on my "high-end" 486 DX2/66 with 340MB HD and 4MB RAM
> back in 1993 <nostalgia/>.


Yes, same here. I had a 486DX50 laptop -- not a DX2/50, a native 50MHz
CPU -- with 8MB of RAM, a 80MB internal IDE HD and an external 120MB
SCSI one plus a SCSI CD-ROM.

I got OS/2 2.0 and 2.1 running on it really sweetly -- but with 3.0
all my drivers broke. Couldn't get 800*600 any more, no sound from my
external Logitech parallel-port audio adapter. Had to go back to the
PC Speaker driver.

Then I tried the beta of Windows 4 "Chicago" -- and everything Just
Workedb". 800*600*16 graphics, external sound, my ProHance PowerMouse
(which gave me a numeric keypad on my serial port, too), even my
Mustek hand-scanner on its dedicated scanner port.

It made me really sad, but Chicago delivered everything I needed from
OS/2 -- fairly smooth DOS and Windows multitasking, long file names
/and which were still accessible from Win16 apps/, etc. -- plus all
the things OS/2 didn't: rich driver support and Internet networking,
for example.

--
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