My first employer, in my IT career anyway, was a dyed in the wool true blue IBM shop. They bought all their hardware from IBM, and when they started buying PC's, the decision to use OS/2 or Windows was a real one that started with OS/2. But Windows for Workgroups was coming out as well, and the choice was an operating system that supported networking out of the box, or one that required you to purchase networking tools separately. You could order IBM PC's with windows for Workgroups, or with OS/2 for about the same price. Only problem was that if you chose OS/2, you couldn't connect it to the network without spending another couple hundred bucks. So Windows won. And eventually the company moved toward non-IBM hardware as well.
Mark Murphy
STAR BASE Consulting, Inc.
mmurphy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
-----Dan Kimmel <dkimmel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: -----
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion <midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
From: Dan Kimmel <dkimmel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: 07/01/2013 10:17AM
Subject: 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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