> On 22 Jun 1999, Kai Henningsen wrote:
> > Wrt. OS/2:
> >
> > Its death is a pure marketing effect: IBM didn't really market it.
>
> Not only. They've failed to leak enough information to create a productive
> culture (see Lions, etc.). BTW, I'm completely serious - AFAICS there is
> nothing similar to UNIX culture around OS/2. There goes the possibility to
> affect future designs.
AFAICT, the culture was definitely there. And I certainly don't know about
any serious missing information. And it was definitely Uniy-like.
In fact, back when I was running OS/2, I had ext2 access from OS/2. Plus
*two* different gcc ports. Plus a real GNU tar able to work with my SCSI
tape drive, and all manner of other Unix-like utilities. Not to mention
loads of OS/2-specific utilities.
IBM killed it.
They had a PowerPC port that they never marketed at all - I'm told you
could buy it if you somehow manages to get the product number from
somewhere. Their marketing was rather infantile, and got only cheaper.
They delivered hardware and software with better NT than OS/2 support.
Now if it had been Open Source, it might have survived this.
> > Wrt. NT:
> >
> > Interesting enough, when you look at M$'s *technical* documentation,
> > you'll find that they have a number of nice things to say about Unix in
> > general and Linux specifically. Don't tell the marketing guys!
>
> <shrug> if their marketing guys would have zero influence on the
> development... As much as I dislike VMS, NT *might* become very
> interesting. If they could keep PHBs away. And keep featuritis where it
> belongs.
*IF* M$ decided to port Win32 to some Unix platform (that is, something
supporting most of the Single Unix spec, not some lame excuse like the NT
POSIX subsystem), *then* they might get a real hold in the server market.
As is, they seem to even have trouble selling NT to their desktop
customers, which is why they have decided to do another installment of the
95/98 saga after all. Hey, customers WANT unstable-as-hell MS-DOS based
don't-look-at-it-wrong-or-it-crashes solutions!
MfG Kai
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