Re: XYWIN and w95, etc.

[Dorothy Day day@xxxxxxxx]

On Sat, 26 Oct 1996, Harmon Seaver wrote:

> What I was talking about was the announcement MS made back when w95
> came out that this was the end of 16bit win app support. At the same
> time, IBM announced that they would continue to support 16bit win apps,
> as did Sun for the unix world with WABI.


And MS has since found that it's still selling more Win3.1 packages than
Win95, largely because big corporations continue to use 3.11, see NT 4.0
as the next real step they'll probably take, and don't want to mess with
an "intermediate" Win95. However, there are plenty of individual buyers
too, who continue to get support from software developers who aren't
willing to cut off the very large and very lucrative Win 3.1
market. Even Microsoft acknowledges the situation in practice, despite
its earlier words. We should know better than to take any "definitive"
statement by Microsoft, IBM, or other giant as cast in concrete. They
have been known to eat their words (while pretending the new version is
what they really meant all along..)

Of course things are moving toward 32-bit (and even 64-bit) app support.
But they're not moving as quickly as many pundits predicted, and 16-bit
support is very much alive and well in the Windows world. New Win32S
versions continue to be produced for running semi-32-bit under
Win3.11. By the time the most reluctant of us is forced to change, the
environment will have made that an easy move. No need to panic about
something that's moving pretty slowly (by computer industry standards).

Meanwhile, Win95 is a pretty good 32-bit step for most of us. It was
tested to death to provide support for virtually *all* current (i.e.
16-bit) Dos and Win3.1 programs and existing hardware. I'm not enamoured
with problems associated with long filenames and backups, but it mostly
works quite well. Even WinNT 4.0 runs XyW and NB quite solidly, by early
accounts (including one from a former very dedicated OS/2 user).

You pick your OS and use it and leave off the wrangling and handwringing
about where the industry is going (since the best forecasters are
usually wrong anyway). Waste of breath (and bandwidth)...


---
Dorothy Day			
School of Library and Information Science
Indiana University
day@xxxxxxxx