🚀 go-pugleaf

apoulsen@athena.mit.edu (Andy Poulsen) writes:

> >>>>> On 23 Jan 93 12:22:18 GMT, Steve.Withers@bbs.actrix.gen.nz said:
> 
> >At risk of starting the FTC thing again.......i just read through most of th
> >ads in the December Computer Shopper (mine comes by boat...OK?).
> >  
> >"* includes MSDOS5 and Windows 3.1!" 
> >  
> >got pretty boring by the 300th ad. A couple mentioned other OS's being
> >available...usually OS/2 was first mentioned as an alternative.
> >  
> >But why virtually NO vendors will offer OS/2 as an option has me wondering.
> >People who use OS/2 almost have to go out and *find* it. I don't blame IBM f
> >this completely. The MS lock on the mail-order PC market *is* a virtual
> >monopoly. No one else gets a look in. 
> 
> >How can OS/2 get vendors to ship it with systems? I don't know what the answ
> >is: make it $10 a copy to OEMs like MS has done with their software? 
> 
> i think this is a great idea; however, i think that if it comes with
> os/2 it should also come with a boot manager or dual boot option, since
> there are a few pieces of software (most notably CAD stuff -- i use
> personal designer by computervision) that won't run under os/2 (or
> windows, for that matter) because their dos extender doesn't support
> dpmi memory (i've heard it's just a command-line option on the compiler,
> but couldn't get anyone at the company who knew anything about the
> programmer's side of things...).  so i still have to boot dos if i want
> to use that package.  as (if ?) support for os2 grows, then i could run
> it under os2.  for now, however, i'm stuck booting dos.
> 
> the bottom line is that although i think shipping systems with os2 is a
> great idea, there will be people who will need the dos option.  (also,
> perhaps people are still afraid of a big new thing like os2 and would be
> afraid to have it as their only option...)

The next step is to have IBM PS/2  and  PS/1 systems that are able to ship
with OS/2 on it ready to go instead of DOS/Windows.

Greg

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