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Bill Gates On Linux

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the stuff-to-read dept.

King-of-darkness writes "USA Today had an interview with Bill Gates on june the 30th. Gates seems to be considering Linux as a passing thru competition just like OS/2., and That Microsoft are the ones that keep pushing new technologies."

11 of 1,194 comments (clear)

  1. Re:But... by Dot.Com.CEO · · Score: 5, Informative

    Let me assure you, lots of banks STILL use OS/2 and they will do so for the foreseable future. The fact that you don't use os/2 does not mean it is dead. It is as dead as Fortran and Cobol.

    --
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  2. Re:Uhm, yeah. by bstadil · · Score: 4, Informative
    Yes, Google is your friend

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  3. Re:I liked this part by JeanBaptiste · · Score: 4, Informative

    nobody used OS/2?
    I briefly worked for 'fortis' a huge international company, did insurance and investing. thousands, if not tens of thousands of OS/2 seats.
    and just the other day i pulled up to a wells fargo atm, and it was out of order... OS/2 in a reboot loop....
    OS/2 was a major player, if not for very long...

  4. Re:I liked this part by Sentry21 · · Score: 4, Informative

    Gates is right though. OS/2 was huge - just not in the desktop home-user circles. Hell, my bank still uses OS/2. They're one of the largest banks in Canada, and they're an IBM shop through-and-through. They run on IBM's big iron mainframes, they use IBM's WebSphere (JSP and the whole shebang), and they use OS/2 on their desktops (with Netscape 4).

    People nowadays just seem to think that nothing happened, but while it might have been as big a phenomenon as Windows, it sure isn't dead.

    --Dan

  5. Re:But... by nolife · · Score: 4, Informative

    If you've ever checked in at a United Airline ticket counter or one of the gates at one of thier hubs, your information was being run on Win3.1 with TCP/IP and Netbeui run off of an OS/2 backend over token ring. The advantage back then was the mainframe connectivity and protocols OS/2 provided (now they have a Linux machines to convert the protocols when needed). They are slowly (and I mean SLOWLY) moving away from this but it is still running fine and has been for over 10 years. Almost all of the smaller stations have been converted to straight TCP/IP without the OS/2.

    --
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  6. Re:But... by bladernr · · Score: 5, Informative

    Actually, J2EE is built using RMI-IIOP (or Internet-InterORB Protocol, or the CORBA protocol), not the original RMI-JRMP (Java Remote Message Protocol). J2EE transactions are CORBA transactions. J2EE security is CORBA security. JNDI naming is CORBA naming. That is how all of the cross-app-server compatability works (or rather, will work, in the future, hopefully, but thats an entirely different topic)

    You should read the J2EE specifications, its all in there. J2EE hides all of that CORBA stuff, but its in there.

    CORBA is quite alive and well, with new specifications arriving all the time, especially in the telco arena (for network management, etc, there is still lots of active work).

    --
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  7. Re:But... I remember OS/2 and I worked for a bank by aldousd666 · · Score: 4, Informative
    I worked for a bank and we definately did use OS/2 as a platform for IBM Personal Communications. PCOMM (as we called it) was a terminal emulations program that worked on the NCP based (actually they called it LLC2 protocol -- works over tokenring with netbeui) IBM 3270 mainframe. OS/2 wasn't very robust with other applications, in fact, the only apps I remember running were in a DOS session, like WP5.0 and then, we also used the built-in windows3.1 desktop to run just about everything else. PCOMM was it. Interestingly enough, we had a buch of IBM 3270 dumb terminals, which were just as good as a machine to the users, nobody cared that they couldn't use wordperfect, there were typewriters everywhere. We only had one machine in the IT department with internet connectivity, and it was an NT box with a 33.6 modem (top of the line) Users could forget about the internet, and email? That was for managers only! This is why people stopped using os/2, it had no apps, (and nobody expected it to, they all just used DOS and win3.1 even with warp.) and when 3270 started going away, or being replaced by linux clients that can do the same thing, there was never a need to develop it any further.

    It wasn't even really competing with MS, because the people who used apps on os/2 ran them in windows (which was conveniently bundled with it out of the box)

    I fail to see mr. Gate's analogy here.

    --
    Speak for yourself.
  8. Re:Typical by terkozer · · Score: 5, Informative

    As great of a quote as this is to bash on Bill.. it is simply not true, but is in fact an urban legend of sorts that has been widely circulated on the internet.

    Here is an interview with him clarifying the fact.

    There is also a good interview in the New York Review of Books that also attempts to shed a better light on the matter.

  9. Re:doesn't matter by zog+karndon · · Score: 5, Informative

    Get it right. IBM chopped 384K off the top. There were several other manufacturers (Victor, Zenith, Tandy) who had MS-DOS implementations with 900K usable memory.

    Microsoft didn't spec the IBM PC, and IBM didn't spec MS-DOS.

    Furthermore, since MS-DOS didn't provide a memory allocator, it's stupid to say that MS-DOS can't address non-contiguous memory.

  10. Re:doesn't matter by GreyPoopon · · Score: 4, Informative
    I'm no fan of Bill Gates, or his buggy software... but one has to realize that at the time, 16bits was all you had to work with. That gives you 65,536 byte addresses.

    Although the rest of your comment is accurate, I wanted to point out that the number of bits the processor is capable of wasn't the problem. In fact, to the external world, the 8088 processor only handled 8 bits, although internally it processed data in 16 bit chunks. The important fact was the number of address lines. There were 20, but due to the way the system was implemented, the upper four were rendered unavailable. I think someone else pointed out that there were other 8088-based systems that had 900+KB of memory available.

    --

    GreyPoopon
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  11. Re:doesn't matter by Trepalium · · Score: 5, Informative
    The x86 processors used a segment:offset addressing scheme, and could address a total of 1 megabyte of memory. The mapping of addresses to physical addresses was simply (segment*16)+offset (this actually gave a maximum addressable range of 1MB + 65516 bytes. This additional <64k range became known as the HMA in DOS 5+). IBM wisely reserved the upper 384kb of addressable memory for expansion, BIOS and video memory. For a system that was originally shipped with only 64 to 128kb of RAM, it left lots of room for expansion, and the EMS systems used that reserved memory area to provide a 'window' into the add-in memory. However, with most video cards occupying the region at A000h, it was impossible to use more than 640K of conventional memory.

    For the record, the 8088 had an 8-bit bus, 16-bit registers, and 20-bits of address space. The 8088 is to the 8086 as the 80386SX was to the 80386DX, and few people claim that the 80386SX was a 16-bit chip, otherwise we'd be claiming that current consumer CPUs are anywhere from 64-bit to 512-bit.

    --
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