Re: [opensuse] Ah, Sanity Returns to the Release Schedule

On Fri, Mar 13, 2009 at 4:42 AM, G T Smith
Not when first released .... some parts of the API did not work properly
(i.e. as described in the docs) for a couple of years... and without the
web trying to find out what the hell was going on from IBM even as a
'privileged' customer was damn near impossible....

That was in the 1.x days. From 2.0 on, it was stable. I got my first
copy at 2.1.

One of the reasons OS/2 lost to Windows 3.x is that it was very
unfriendly to much legacy DOS stuff and there was little available to
replace these on OS/2 originally... (and an OS without usable apps is a
useful as a chocolate teapot, no.. correction... you can eat a chocolate
teapot so the latter is more useful :-) )... At the institution I was
based in about 90 days of receiving a bundle of OS/2 based PS/2s at
least three quarters ended up running DOS/Windows 3.0..

Windows won because of M$'s illegal contracts that required that we
sell a copy of win/dos on every machien we sold, whether it went out
the door with it or not. To get a discount, you had to agree to these
draconian terms, or you couldn't make much money. They were never
nailed for that, even though that was what was actually happening.
Even now, they are still trying to do the same thing by threatening to
jack the price up. And the US Gov has never done anything about it.

As for running DOS programs, I ran a 3 node BBS on OS/2 for a while.
Helped me have 1 machine instead of 4, because I could work while the
BBS was running. I rarely ran into a DOS program that wouldn't run
right. Now, the 1.x brain dead version was based on the 286, and you
could only run a DOS program in the front session and only 1. 2.x
fixed all that. And there were plenty of programs for OS/2 just like
there are plenty of programs for Linux. IBM did a bad job marketing
it, and with the illegal tie down of Windows to pcs, it was no wonder
that it lost. Same with BeOS. It's a hard inertia to break.

When the problems were eventually sorted it was very useful, but by then
the intended audience had left the auditorium. Something which maybe
those in charge of openSuSE releases need to bear in mind....

So long as a majority of PCs come pre-installed with Windows, it will
be a windows world. Breaking that concept is the only way any system
will gain. The biggest reason the MacOS is gaining is because it is
on an x86 now and you can run windows on it. That and the fact that
they've managed to tie their image with the iPod/iPhone to their macs.
However, I don't think MacOS will move to 20% anytime soon. They are
still hovering around 10% right now, which is much better than the 2%
they used to have. Further, Vista's flop has been their gain. If 7
fixes those problems, I doubt their share will continue to grow.
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