RE: The Future of IBM ..

The real reason Windows succeeded and OS/2 didn't: Microsoft gave their devkit away, IBM wanted something like $6000 for theirs.

I was fairly well established as a software developer when Windows and OS/2 first came out. For some reason, probably because I had a yellow pages listing under Software Development, I started receiving complete pre-release versions of the Windows devkit in the mail every couple of weeks as they'd work through new versions. The decision as to which environment to learn was simple. I already had machines that would run either of them. I got plenty of cards in the mail from IBM, offering to sell me their devkit. So once again, the difference was MARKETING.

-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Jon Paris
Sent: Sunday, June 30, 2013 10:49 AM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: Re: The Future of IBM ..

To my memory Jerry this is the wrong way round.

IBM wrote their OS/2 components in C/C++ for portability to future hardware platforms. Microsoft continued writing their pieces in assembler despite having agreed earlier to use C/C++. They claimed that it was a performance issue - but there were rumours that keeping Intel sweet by effectively tying themselves to the Intel platform was part of the picture.

MS were supposed, as part of the OS/2 agreement, to stop development on future versions of Windows. They didn't.


On 2013-06-29, at 6:49 PM, Jerry C. Adams <midrange@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

OS/2 was written in Assembler, which is not, well, very transportable.
At the same time that Microsoft was working on it, they were coding
Windows in C or C++, which is highly portable. [At least, that's what
I heard while at a conference at the Palisades conference center eons
ago - which, by the way, had OS/2 PCs in every room.]

Jerry C. Adams
IBM i Programmer/Analyst
Queen Victoria loved _Alice in Wonderland_ and requested a copy of
Lewis Carroll's next book. It was _Syllabus of Plane Algebraical Geometry_.
--

Jon Paris

www.partner400.com
www.SystemiDeveloper.com




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