Re: XY-4 and OS/2 Experience

[hseaver@xxxxxxxx (Harmon Seaver)]

> I believe the choice has already been made and the choice is clear.
> The installed Windoz base is too large; not enuff apps are being
> written for OS/2. Microsoft 45, IBM 7.

  What you are forgetting, Leslie, is that all those windoz apps will soon be
archaic hulks left behind in the cyberrace. They are all 16bit applications
-- which means that they don't even begin to take advantage of the power of
386/486/586 cpu machines, but instead depend totally upon the speed of those
machine to even be remotely usable. We now have
64 bit machines on the market. Windoz apps are ancient history -- and the
bottom line for them is that they CANNOT be simply ported over to
32 or 64 bit, they must be completely rewritten to become native 32 or 64 bit
apps.
  Sure, they will run on 586 boxes, and maybe on PowerPCs under dos/windoz
emulators --- but in comparison with the new native apps (OS/2 primarily and
soon WOS -- the OS/2 for the PowerPC) they are pathetic dogs. Even now,
dos/windoz apps are in a real backwater -- for instance, you can't use long
file names in them, like you can with OS/2 and Unix. So when I do a DIR in XY4,
for example, a lot of files on my machine don't even show up. I had to quit
using XtreeGold and Norton for that reason, which I hated doing -- but then I
found native OS/2 apps that were miles ahead of either, took up much less
diskspace, and cost very little in comparison.
The windoz base is really meaningless -- except for those who are content with
their horse and buggy while the rest of us ride rocket sleds.
  BTW, there are still people using C/PM also, and Tandy Color Computers.
Locally we still have an active user's group for the Tandy 16B/6000 machines
running an early version of Xenix -- a very nice machine, I agree -- back in
1983. I liked mine a lot. Some people, especially older people, are resistant
to change. "Good enough" is always the enemy of "better", eh?