RE: IBM loses its Unix license - Jun. 16, 2003

> From: Tom Liotta
>
> In short, it does seem that MS wrote large parts of OS/2 at least
> up to Version 2 and retained various rights to some of the
> critical code; but I'm not clear on how much of OS/2 became part
> of WinNT's core.

This isn't how I remember it.  I worked with the first release of OS/2,
which didn't even have a GUI.  The OS/2 kernel was written from the ground
up to be a true multi-tasking operating system, not just a windowing
environment on top of DOS.  In fact, if you remember, the marketing phrase
was "a better DOS than DOS, a better Windows than Windows" (probably the
best marketing I've ever seen IBM do, and sadly pretty much all they ever
really did for OS/2).  At that time, Windows 3.11 was the de facto standard,
and as a multi-tasking OS it plain sucked.  No memory protection, no
inter-process communications, and only the most limited of multi-tasking
constructs.

OS/2, on the other hand, was written from the ground up to be a completely
protected multi-tasking, event driven operating system.  I'm making
assumptions here, but it was my understanding that IBM did the kernel work
and MS did the GUI.  And since MS basically stole the GUI from Apple in the
first place and thus didn't really understand how to write their own, it was
natural that making it truly multi-tasking was a nearly impossible task.  So
OS/2's first release was character only.  Ah, fond memories <grin>.

And once NT was shipped, you could for quite some time go through the code
and actually find OS/2 copyright strings.  It took them a couple years to
get that out, and I wouldn't be surprised if old OS/2 code still lingers
deep in the bowels.

Anyway, as far as those of us in the trenches could tell, MS couldn't write
an operating system if their lives depended on it.  That's why to this day
they simply keep bandaiding what they have, and proudly label it "built on
NT technology".  Which we always insisted stood for "Not Tested", but that's
us bitter old OS/2 folks.

The only company that has consistently built operating systems from the
ground up is IBM.  The Mac folks did for a while, but now they, like just
about everyone else, are pretty much running Unix, which is basically a
35-year-old OS (with Linux sort of a mini-me clone <grin>).  Not exactly
cutting edge.

Anyway, I'm sure people can take issue with many of these statements.  I
will simply present them as how I remember the past, back when bread was a
nickel and we didn't have these infernal horseless carriages to worry about.

Joe