Re: [TUHS] If not Linux, then what?

[Steffen Nurpmeso <steffen@sdaoden.eu>]

Nemo Nusquam wrote in <8cb953ef-ef6d-fdfa-76a4-1074cf46f598@gmail.com>:
 |On 08/28/19 18:27, William Pechter wrote (in part):
 |> On 8/28/2019 4:27 PM, Adam Thornton wrote:
 |>> I was an ardent OS/2 supporter for a long time.  Sure, IBM's anemic 
 |>> marketing, and their close-to-outright-hostility to 3rd-party 
 |>> developers didn't help.  But what killed it, really, was how damn 
 |>> good its 16-bit support was.  It *was* a better DOS than DOS and a 
 |>> better Windows than 3.11fW.  So no one wrote to the relatively tiny 
 |>> market of 32-bit OS/2.
 |>>
 |> OS/2 was slick and if they could've kept the W\indows 3.x 
 |> compatibility (the Win32S was a sliding target that Microsoft kept 
 |> changing.  There was a pretty decent Unix work-alike ported to the top 
 |> of OS/2 that made most of the public domain and open source (the term 
 |> didn't exist yet) stuff available.
 |>
 |> I could telnet into the box and run a pretty slick Unix work-alike shell.

 |Indeed -- forgive my nostalgia here... We were developing a DOS-based 
 |PC-Card (often incorrectly called a PCMCIA card).  With OS/2, you opened 
 |up a DOS box. If the driver crashed, you just opened up another and went 
 |on.  Under Windoze, the whole box crashed (and sometimes took the 
 |file-system with it).  We used a combination of Eberhard Mattes' emx, 
 |the MKS toolkit, and case-sensitive file-systems to give us a reasonable 
 |approximation.

For a few holiday weeks i once worked in the IBM factory in Mainz
Germany in a hard disk production line clean room.  One of the
gauges were driven by OS/2 which not only catched my attention but
also crashed randomly up to several times per shift, causing
automatic reboots (reliably).  (The factory as such was not worth
it, it has been closed after fifty years, in the new Heiligkreuz
Viertel (holy-cross quarter) there have been build 242 flats and
a supermarket in the meantime.)

I liked 4DOS.

--steffen
|
|Der Kragenbaer,                The moon bear,
|der holt sich munter           he cheerfully and one by one
|einen nach dem anderen runter  wa.ks himself off
|(By Robert Gernhardt)