Re: Windows vs DOS XyWrite vs the future?

[nsivin@xxxxxxxx (Nathan Sivin)]

Harmon:

You were disagreeing with points I didn't make. Here are the points I did
make:

1. Chicago is a knockoff of OS/2, duplicating most of its features. How well
they work I don't know, and neither do you.

2. I found that there were so few applications being written for OS/2 that one
had little choice. IBM has the economic clout to make that happen, but as
usual is shooting itself in the Achilles heel. Much of your message was
agreeing with me in the case of XyWrite. Since I tried
OS/2, I know it runs DOS and Windows programs well, but it is a hell of a lot
of overhead just to get XyDOS to run a little faster and to multitask (which is
not one of my main desiderata).

A LOT of developers flatly refuse to write for OS/2. Not only did NEC,
Gateway, and IBM make it clear that they have no plans to write a driver for my
CD-ROM drive, but WordPerfect decided to give away "adapter" files instead of
doing an OS/2 version. Etc.

3. I have read a number of reports of conflicts using OSWin, and no serious
ones using OS/2. That suggests that one ought to think twice about buying the
former to save money.

4. I hope that OS/3 and PowerPC will win over the computing world. Having been
satisfied with DOS and watched it increasingly being abandoned for gooeys, and
watching PC's evolve toward being bad imitations of the
Macintosh, I decided last year that, for Chinese etc., the time had come to
move to Mac and Unicode. I have just postponed a year because just at that
time the PowerPC macs came out, and I would prefer to let my esteemed
colleagues do the gamma testing. Unless I see the changes you predict taking
place within the next year, over I switch.

-- Nathan Sivin
History and Sociology of Science
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia PA 19104-3325