🚀 go-pugleaf

David Charlap <david@visix.com> wrote:

>OS/2 is not dead.  It's just not as visible as you'd like.  IBM made
>a conscious decision to push OS/2 into the business market and pretty
>much forget the home market.  And I can understand completely.  The
>home market only wants games, and you lose money on every copy sold,
>because every customer needs tons of tech support.
>
>And I'll tell you right now: if all I wanted to do with my computer
>is play games and do web surfing, I'd be using Win95.  And if all I
>wanted to do is run office suites and web surfing, I'd be using NT.
>
>But I do more than that.  I develop and use large complex programs
>that must be fast and reliable.  I can do that far easier on the
>OS/2 platform than I can do on any other PC-based platform.  (I
>also have this idea of using VoiceType for hands-free web surfing,
>which I will do once I get a computer fast enough for VT.)
> 

For reliable programs you need reliable system, not OS/2!

An some comments from an educational institution (Jagiellonian University,
Faculty of Chemistry):
We aren't "home users", so we don't need games. We aren't business 
institution, so we cannot dictate our users what to use, we should
convince them. But we need something more reliable and secure than
system for playing Mahjongg (I wonder what business users need if they
may be happy with OS/2)

And there are some questions about the system we need:

- is OS/2 stable?    NO!
  (We have seen to many disappearing desktops after the system hung-up)
- is there local security with access rights?  NO!
  so that each unexperienced user can destroy system configuration,
  delete programs, format hard drive and so on
  you will probably answer that the system was designed for single user -
  but this means "home user" 
- are you able to compile and run large programs? NO!
  I have to use UNIX machine: under OS/2 I can compile my FORTRAN
  program but IBM link386.exe cannot link it. Of course there's no 
  description of linker options. 
  you will say this means "tons of tech support", I would say this
  is basic documentation
  of course this is only a example: the point is that for anything
   more complicated you need Unix
- is there OS/2 software (like editors) which can be replacement
  for Microsoft Office or Perfect Office?       NO!
  if someone thinks that there is such a thing, please check first
  how many scientific journals  accepts documents written in it, and
  with how many people you will be able to exchange our files
- can you easily (and securely) set up Internet services using Warp? NO!
  we run IBM LAN Server - however we are not aware of any mail server
  of ftpd daemon which uses information about user accounts, their 
  passwords and access rights from the server database. Is this too
  difficult or too strange to invent? 
  IBM ftpd strores unencrypted passwords in ASCII file! Is this all
  what guys from IBM are able to write?
    

So why we use Warp - because Win 95 or NT are even worse, and under OS/2
we at least can run some usefull Windows applications. And we didn't want
to install Linux everywhere. But it seems that only Unix clones and 
Windows NT can survive - at least I don't see that IBM does anything to
convince me that OS/2 may be reliable, secure

Regards,
			Andrzej Eilmes