[Info-vax] OT: IBM to buy Sun

[yyyc186]

On Mar 19, 7:02 am, billg... at cs.uofs.edu (Bill Gunshannon) wrote:
>
> Comparing OS/2 to VMS is like comparing a Yugo to a Porsche.

Wellll....at the time they killed it, OS/2 was way out in front of
Windows.  Of course, that was right after they successfully ripped
most of the MS code out of OS/2...around Warp 4.5.  It came pre-
bundled with the Lotus Smart Suite (at least I never bought a machine
that didn't come with both) and SmartSuite was a full decade ahead of
MS Office.  Even today, WordPro is still a full decade ahead of MS
Word and WordPerfect.  It's at least 8 years in front of OpenOffice.

IBM simply wasn't willing to fight for the turf.  MS truly screwed IBM
too.  The only way you could do driver or kernel development was to
use MSC 6.0, which had been out of production for several years.  Yes,
IBM had Visual Age for C++ already on OS/2, but they didn't have all
of the source code required for driver and kernel development.  Some
critical pieces existed only in object form and the objects would only
work with MSC 6.0.  IBM was faced with having to reverse engineer the
objects to make them work with the existing OS/2 compilers.

Everybody bitched that MS gave driver development kits away for
Windows driver developers, but IBM charged lots of money.  The truth
is (from those I've talked with who actually worked on OS/2) they
actually had to license all the stuff from MS.

I actually miss OS/2.  I've had a lot of Linux distros on my desktop
as I follow the industry to Open Source and away from MS products, but
I haven't found one I liked as much as OS/2.  I managed to use Ubuntu
for a few years.  That "Just Works" slogan they had was quite a
stretch.  I've lived through RPM hell with RPM based distros.  Sadly,
I'm back to using SuSE.  Ubuntu kept releasing kernel patches that
broke critical stuff for much of their installed base and never backed
them out.