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From: billg
To: pascalm; russw; tomle
Cc: philba
Subject: Dr dos
Date: Thursday, September 22, 1988 12:41 PM

You never sent me a response on the question of what things an app
would do that would make it run on MSDOS and not run with DR-DOS.
Is there any version check or api that they fail to have? Is there
a feature they have that might get in our way? I am not looking
for something they cant get around. I am looking for something
that their current binary fails on.

This is a fairly urgent question for me and I have received
nothing.

http://www.os2museum.com/wp/ho...

--If you have $99 to spare, you can expect it to be pretty much immune to most virus infections - nobody's targeting it.

--OS/2 Warp 3 came out right before Win95 did. It had a very stable object-oriented GUI that basically wouldn't crash unless you had a driver issue; had an advanced filesystem for the time (HPFS supported long filenames and was fragmentation-resistant), great DOS support, native REXX scripting that was "better" than command.com, good multitasking (you could format a floppy in the background and do $other-things on a single-CPU 32-bit system without the whole interface bogging down) and better 16-bit multi-program Win 3.1 support than *native* Windows 3.1.

--I dropped out of Warp when it wouldn't boot anymore after I inserted a space before an REM in config.sys back in the day. (Win95-98 could handle that with no problem.) There weren't really good bootable OS/2 recovery tools back then... Linux was the place to be after that, circa 1996-1997.

--I would say that Linux is still the place to be these days, but trying out OS/2 on modern hardware for grins will add to your non-Windows experience at least, and who knows - you might like it.

REF:
http://www.os2museum.com/wp/os...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

What part of OS/2's user interface isn't intuitive? Here's a sample screenshot for reference. It's very clear what's a window, what are buttons, what are menus, and what clicking on the various buttons or menu items will do. It's a clean, sensible UI. Anyone who could use Windows XP or Windows 7 would have no problem with OS/2.

Using the left mouse button to highlight and right mouse button to drag screws up many people. Luckily OS/2 is very configurable, including which mouse button does what.

What part of OS/2's user interface isn't intuitive? Here's a sample screenshot for reference. It's very clear what's a window, what are buttons, what are menus, and what clicking on the various buttons or menu items will do. It's a clean, sensible UI. Anyone who could use Windows XP or Windows 7 would have no problem with OS/2.

Before OS/2, there was multitasking DOS v4, http://www.os2museum.com/wp/mu... which was the direction that MS was taking DOS before branching out to what eventually became OS/2, http://www.os2museum.com/wp/be...
There was also the family mode programs that ran on simple DOS and OS/2 v1 (as well as NT up to Win2k using the OS/2 sub-system) where the program basically had a minimal OS/2 environment grafted on. The text mode Word v5 is a good example.

Before OS/2, there was multitasking DOS v4, http://www.os2museum.com/wp/mu... which was the direction that MS was taking DOS before branching out to what eventually became OS/2, http://www.os2museum.com/wp/be...
There was also the family mode programs that ran on simple DOS and OS/2 v1 (as well as NT up to Win2k using the OS/2 sub-system) where the program basically had a minimal OS/2 environment grafted on. The text mode Word v5 is a good example.

Shouldn't that be 1985 (released in '86). Couple of better links, with screen shots, second includes a zip, third includes more images as well as a (broken?) simulator. http://www.os2museum.com/wp/mu... http://www.os2museum.com/wp/mu... http://www.pcjs.org/devices/pc...

Shouldn't that be 1985 (released in '86). Couple of better links, with screen shots, second includes a zip, third includes more images as well as a (broken?) simulator. http://www.os2museum.com/wp/mu... http://www.os2museum.com/wp/mu... http://www.pcjs.org/devices/pc...

Also see the original MS OS/2 2.0 SDK announcement from 1989:
http://www.os2museum.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/1989-12-29-m3974.html
And my blog post on is at here (notice the mention of DR-DOS and PX00307, which is another exhibit that don't seem to be well known:
http://yuhongbao.blogspot.ca/2012/12/about-ms-os2-20-fiasco-px00307-and-dr.html

And they broke the JDA in the middle of OS/2 2.0 development after the first SDKs was already sent out by MS to developers, only to later attack OS/2 with tactics that ended up being much worse.