Re: OS2 Warp vs Win95

["Phillip P. Ferreira" ferreira@xxxxxxxx]

A comment (and a question) on operating systems and XyWrite.

Although I have been using OS/2 for several years, I too was a DOS
diehard. My DOS was, however, DR DOS which, in its last incarnation,
became Novell DOS 7. For those who want "task switching" (if not full-blown
multi-tasking)
without the 32-bit system overhead, Novell DOS is still a viable
alternative.

I did have OS/2 and Win95 on my machine at the same time. I used the
OS/2 boot manager (also packaged with Partition Magic). However, Win95
was somewhat unstable, and for some reason was regularly going into
Scan Disk on boot up. I am not
sure why. But since I had Win95 on my machine only so that my four
year old daughter could run some of her games, I replaced my Win95 partition with
straight DOS/Win311.

This has worked out quite well for me (and I would urge others who want
to experiment with OS/2 to give it a try). While 95% of my work is done
from OS/2, I will go to the DOS/Win partition to run those few pieces of
software that either don't run under OS/2 or run too slowly. (e.g.
Conversions Plus from Data Viz and Some of the 'Print Shop' programs.) I
install each operating system in its own primary partition. But I keep
all programs and data within an extended partition that can be accessed
by both.

I was also fascintated by a comment someone made the other day. (Was it
D. Say?) Someone mentioned an OS/2 version of XyWrite that was once used
by some of the big Chicago newspapers. Does such a creature really
exist?? How can I get my hands on a copy??

Phil Ferreira
ferreira@xxxxxxxx