Linux in a World Where Windows 3.0 Never Happened

covertbadger writes "Larry Osterman said farewell yesterday to David Weise, the developer he credits with getting applications to run in protected mode on Windows 3.0, which led directly to Microsoft choosing to push Windows instead of OS/2. Today he speculates on what the IT world would be like if Weise had never completed this work. Windows 95 would never have existed, OS/2 would be the de facto standard, and IBM would never have put weight behind Linux because it had its own operating system to push."

Comments

Who is to say someone else wouldn't have

[Shnizzzle]

put weight behind Linux? Maybe Apple goes that route instead of using Darwin.

Re:Who is to say someone else wouldn't have

[justforaday]

Apple did briefly explore that route (mkLinux - linux on the mach kernel). Instead, they used their experience there, along with that little bit of technology they acquired known as NeXTSTEP to make OSX...

Re:Who is to say someone else wouldn't have

[bombadillo]

OS X ( DARWIN ) is based off of NEXT OS. Steve Jobs was head of NEXT after he left Apple. When Steve came back to Apple he basically brought NEXT OS back with him. Apple would not have chosen Linux when they already had another solid *nix alternative.

Ever notice that the home directory icon on OS X resembles the NEXT home icon.

Re:Who is to say someone else wouldn't have

[LoRdTAW]

Or even microsoft if they still existed.

Re:Who is to say someone else wouldn't have

[Anonymous Coward]

dream on

Re:Who is to say someone else wouldn't have

[FuzzzyLogik]

well when steve went back to apple.. not particularly that simple.. next was bought by apple and they put steve back in his old position and used nextstep for os x... if i recall correctly... there's a book that has all this info in it.. i've been meaning to buy it

Re:Who is to say someone else wouldn't have

[Have Blue]

Ever notice that all the Cocoa classes, including brand-new ones added in later versions of X still start with NS, and that remnants of NeXT features like tear-off menus are still in the headers?

Re:Who is to say someone else wouldn't have

[squiggleslash]

That's something we can safely rule out. Microsoft is a company that has only ever produced software, and while they may have flirted with Linux based systems in the same way Corel and Caldera did, ultimately they'd have given up. Again, in the same way Corel and Caldera did.

The big companies that have to do with GNU/Linux and remain supportive of it are either start-ups, consultancies, or hardware manufacturers, or a bit of everything. Microsoft is not a consultancy, not a hardware manufacturer, and is established.

There are, of course, two other issues with Microsoft becoming Linux's saviour in this parallel universe. The first is that Microsoft is owned by Bill Gates, a pioneer of proprietary software who believes, strongly, in using copyright to restrict redistribution. The other is that Microsoft would probably be weaker than Novell is today if IBM did this. They'd be little more than an application vendor tied to OS/2, with no way of changing their business model without rebuilding their entire business.

Re:Who is to say someone else wouldn't have

[AvitarX]

I would say Oracle.

With IBM having OS/2 and DB2 they would be able to push them together like MS does with SQL Server for Windows.

To fight this Oracle could commit to Linux (which they have done) and had a platfor that they had control of on both sides.

Re:Who is to say someone else wouldn't have

[lav-chan]

Is there really anybody left on Slashdot that hasn't heard the NeXT-became-OS-X story 909850949850480984098409589408545 times?

Re:Who is to say someone else wouldn't have

[Leo McGarry]

It seems like some people don't know the story there.

Back in the mid-90s, Apple developed their own port of Linux running on Power Mac hardware. It was called MkLinux. Apple shipped a number of developer releases.

The problem was that, compared to the work Apple was doing on what would eventually become XNU, the Linux work was just not very encouraging, particularly in the area of device drivers. The Linux modular kernel model was also inferior to XNU's. So when it came time to choose a kernel for their new operating system, Apple dropped Linux like a hot potato and chose XNU with I/O Kit instead.

This Web page gives a decent very high-level overview of how XNU was designed, explaining why it was a better fit than Linux for a robust, general-purpose, reliable operating system. Of course, Apple's Darwin documentation is the best source for up-to-date information.

Re:Who is to say someone else wouldn't have

[Anonymous Coward]

> Microsoft is a company that has only ever produced software

Actually at one point, they did produce PC systems, but not in US markets. They sold like sand to bedouins.

Re:Who is to say someone else wouldn't have

[Leo McGarry]

That doesn't actually have anything to do with Darwin, or with XNU. See, on top of the kernel are two user-space frameworks called Foundation and AppKit. These both started out on NeXT, and were ported to the new hardware and kernel as part of the Mac OS X development process, but they've both evolved significantly since.

Yes, if you go spelunking in the AppKit classes, particularly NSWorkspace, you find lots of NeXT-y looking things. But at that point you're not really programming; you're doing archaeology.

Re:Who is to say someone else wouldn't have

[bonch]

There are even bits of Linux code here and there in Darwin. Darwin borrows from a whole bunch of sources. I believe a lot of the command-line tools are from OpenBSD, for instance. A lot of people enjoy this "best of the best" aspect of Darwin.

If Windows 3.0 had never happened, we'd all be bitching about IBM right now, though I think Apple would have had a much healthier 1990s.

Re:Who is to say someone else wouldn't have

[Angostura]

>I think Apple would have had a much healthier 1990s.

Ah, but what processor would it be using now? Would IBM have opened up its RS/6000 chip-set to produce the PowerPC line? I doubt it.

Re:Who is to say someone else wouldn't have

[Leo McGarry]

There are even bits of Linux code here and there in Darwin.

No, there aren't, for licensing reasons. Linux is encumbered by the proprietary Gnu license, which Apple has rejected out of hand. There is no Gnu-licensed code in Darwin.

If Linux were available under an open license, maybe Apple might have been able to benefit from some pieces of it. But as of right now, it's impossible.

Re:Who is to say someone else wouldn't have

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently, considering how the story is virtually always told wrong. NEXTSTEP did not become OS X. OS X is a new operating system that contains aspects of NEXTSTEP (as Cocoa) and the Mac OS (as Carbon) and FreeBSD (through the shell and the core UNIX runtime), on top of an entirely new kernel called Xnu.

People who say that "NeXT-became-OS-X" are just flat-out wrong.

Re:Who is to say someone else wouldn't have

[Chris Burke]

Yeah. And it would be OS/2 whose ass Linux would be kicking in the commodity server market instead of Windows, and Linux would still be kicking the ass of AIX in the UNIX server market. The existence or non-existence of Windows would do nothing to change the appeal of using one CD to load an entire server farm with operating systems at zero cost.

And IBM would still be making their money from selling hardware. The motivation to ditch AIX in favor of free community-developed Linux would be the same. Hell, they might have seen the benefit to creating binary or at least library compatability between OS/2 and Linux. but that might be stretching it.

Apple, on the other hand, I don't see going for it. Yes, they make money selling hardware like IBM, but they get too much out of controlling the software. But I could be wrong; this is all hypothetical anyway.

Re:Who is to say someone else wouldn't have

[Guy Harris]

No, there aren't, for licensing reasons. Linux is encumbered by the proprietary Gnu license, which Apple has rejected out of hand. There is no Gnu-licensed code in Darwin.

There is GPLed code in Darwin; Samba is part of Darwin, for example.

There's no GNU-licensed code in the Darwin kernel, so, no, there's no Linux code in the Darwin kernel.

Re:Who is to say someone else wouldn't have

[bombadillo]

I believe the micro-kernel is based off of NEXT. Last time I check FreeBSD does not use a micro-kernel.

Re:Who is to say someone else wouldn't have

[Marcus Green]

Could you explain in what way the GNU licence is proprietary?

Re:Who is to say someone else wouldn't have

[babyrat]

good point - it's a good thing IBM didn't have another solid version of unix, then they wouldn't have backed linux either...

Re:Who is to say someone else wouldn't have

[Leo McGarry]

Samba is part of Darwin, for example

Samba is distributed along with Darwin. It's not part of Darwin. Similarly, iTunes is distributed along with Mac OS X. It's not part of Mac OS X.

Re:Who is to say someone else wouldn't have

[Brandybuck]

In the strict dictionary definition of "proprietary", the GPL is indeed proprietary. Despite RMS' rants that software should not be owned, the GPL is a concrete legal stamp of ownership, and gives the owner considerable control over the software.

If the license holder can prevent you from doing something with the software, then it is technically proprietary software.

Re:Who is to say someone else wouldn't have

[villy]

Steganalytical results: 909850949850480984098409589408545 hides the phrase "Hot Grits"

Re:Who is to say someone else wouldn't have

[Guy Harris]

Samba is distributed along with Darwin. It's not part of Darwin.

What is the basis for that assertion? Apple appears, by including it on their page of Darwin projects (note: "project" just means "component"), to consider Samba to be part of Darwin.

Re:Who is to say someone else wouldn't have

[Anonymous Coward]

Ever notice that the home directory icon on OS X resembles the NEXT home icon.

Ever notice that literate fucking people put question marks at the end of... GASP!... questions?

Re:Who is to say someone else wouldn't have

[Leo McGarry]

I'm pretty sure you're plunging into semantics here. I don't mean to be rude, but that kind of back-and-forth does not interest me. If you want to call software that's bundled with an operating system part of the operating system, that's no skin off my nose.

Best wishes.

Re:Who is to say someone else wouldn't have

[Jeremy Erwin]

The "NS" namespace comes from OpenStep-- the original Nextstep used the "NX" prefix. NS stands for Next/Sun.

Re:Who is to say someone else wouldn't have

[dillon_rinker]

"proprietary Gnu license"

Well-played, sir, well-played. I admire the constructor of a good troll, and it's so rare to actually see one these days.

Re:Who is to say someone else wouldn't have

[Guy Harris]

I'm pretty sure you're plunging into semantics here.

As were you, when you asserted that Samba was "not part of Darwin".

But if you want to call software that the supplier of an operating system lists as part of their operating system, and that the supplier does more with than just repackage, not part of the operating system, I guess that just means that not everybody uses "part of" in the same fashion.

Re:Who is to say someone else wouldn't have

[Anonymous Coward]

But if you want to call software that the supplier of an operating system lists as part of their operating system, and that the supplier does more with than just repackage, not part of the operating system, I guess that just means that not everybody uses "part of" in the same fashion.

Just can't let somebody else have the last word, eh? (You're wrong, by the way...)

Re:Who is to say someone else wouldn't have

[Guy Harris]

Just can't let somebody else have the last word, eh?

Better than than preemptively dismissing all last words as "semantics" when the person so dismissing all last words is also just debating the meaning of a particular term. If you don't like to be involved in debating something, don't get involved in those debates.

(You're wrong, by the way...)

"Wrong" about what?

Wrong that Apple lists Samba as part of Darwin? No, I'm right - see the link in my previous posting.

Wrong that Apple doesn't just repackage it? If so, are you saying that the OpenDirectory support in Samba was not developed at Apple? I wouldn't argue that they made a *huge* change (diffing the vanilla samba 3.0.5 source and the samba-59 source from Darwin doesn't show many changes), but that's not just repackaging.

Re:Who is to say someone else wouldn't have

[808140]

If the license holder can prevent you from doing something with the software, then it is technically proprietary software.

Don't you mean "copyright holder" and not "license holder"? The license holder, by definition, can't prevent you from doing anything -- the license only specifies under what terms the non-copyright holder may distribute the software (usually, none).

In defense of RMS, he has often stated that the copyleft legal hack would be unnecessary in a world without copyright. You understand that the GPL grants rights -- it does not limit them. Copyright law in the US (and in all nations that are Berne convention signatories) default to an "all rights reserved" status, where only the copyright holder has any distribution rights at all as long as the copyright is valid (it usually expires after some time, but how long depends on the material being copyrighted).

What this means, practically, is that you are by default "prevented" from doing anything (related to distribution, ie, copying) with software that you don't explicitly hold the copyright to.

You are correct that the GPL does not grant all rights; there are some that it reserves. Specifically, it does not grant the right to distribute a binary form of the software without the source code, and aditionally requires that any derivative works also be available under the GPL.

In this sense, the BSD license (and cognates) grant more rights, but even they do not grant all rights.

The only "license" that grants all rights is not a license at all: public domain. On the face of it, public domain code may seem like a good idea, but in fact, it isn't. Why not? Because of liability. If I author code and contribute it to the public domain, I am not making distribution of the code contigent on the receiver abandoning his or her right to take me to court should the code not behave as expected. This is why every license (including BSD) have a clause about "MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE."

Without this clause (a clause that you legally cannot enforce with PD, because you have voluntarily forfeited copyright, and thus there is no licensing or legal agreement) you are liable, implicity, if someone should use your code and have it not work as they expected it to.

Given all the legal explanations I've just given you, you should understand that the statement you've made makes no sense. It makes no sense because licenses, by their definition, cannot "prevent" you from doing anything, as no license by definition means "all rights reserved to the copyright holder and none for anyone else."

The exception, as I stated, is Public Domain, in which you renounce your copyright. Not a good idea from a legal liability standpoint -- use BSD or MIT, it's almost equivalent.

Given this, your understanding of what "proprietary software" is is most certainly somewhat muddled, as no license grants all rights, for sound legal reasons. That would mean that all software is proprietary, which would make the term rather useless, wouldn't it?

At any rate, "proprietary software" is a somewhat subjective term -- I believe it lacks a formal definition. Normally, the implication is that it's software that isn't free, but what free software is will be different depending on whom you ask -- RMS, Theo De Raadt, and ESR all have different views on this question. None is objectively "right", so you'll have to find your own middle ground.

Hopefully this information proves useful in helping you find it.

Re:Who is to say someone else wouldn't have

[Feztaa]

Linux is encumbered by the proprietary Gnu license

This is a strange thing to say. All licenses are inherently "proprietary". Proprietary in the sense that somebody owns it, and is licensing it to you to use. Based on your phrasing in other parts of your post, you make it sound like Linux is tied up in some kind of license that doesn't permit anybody to use it for anything, which is demonstrably untrue -- the GPL is a very, very permissive license, compared to something like an MS EULA.

Re:Who is to say someone else wouldn't have

[Leo McGarry]

All licenses are inherently "proprietary".

Bingo.

the GPL is a very, very permissive license

Swing and a miss.

Re:Who is to say someone else wouldn't have

[Breakfast Pants]

" the license only specifies under what terms the non-copyright holder may distribute the software (usually, none)." Have you ever heard of an exclusive licensing agreement?

Re:Who is to say someone else wouldn't have

[lav-chan]

You know what i meant. -_-

Re:Who is to say someone else wouldn't have

[Feztaa]

Swing and a miss.

Anything can be wrong when you take it out of context. Are you claiming that the GPL is more restrictive than a Microsoft EULA? Because that is demonstrably false.

Hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

If Microsoft had pushed OS/2 instead of windows, Apple would have been the monopoly instead of Microsoft...IMHO.

Re:Hmm

[TheKidWho]

And we would still be on OS 8 right now, waiting until 2006 for OS 9.

Re:Hmm

[mirko]

Apple, or Be ?
In 1996 BeOS stood as the most promising environment around.
There was also RiscOS, BTW. which could have gone very far (it's actually present in loads of set top boxen).

Re:Hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly my point :)

I think in some ways it's kind of good that microsoft is the monopoly... We get some real gems like Apple.

Gosh, I never thought I'd say that...

Re:Hmm

[Thu25245]

Apple would have been the monopoly instead of Microsoft...IMHO.


Sure, because everyone would have installed Macintosh System 7 on their 386s.

I mean, everyone would have ditched their 386s and bought Mac II-series machines.

I mean, everyone would have kept using their cheap DOS boxes.

Re:Hmm

[dduck]

It's pretty well documented today that Apple chose NeXT as the basis for the future of MacOS rather than BeOS for very sound engineering reasons. NeXT was simply a much more mature and complete system.

A supporting story with links to more sources

Re:Hmm

[mirko]

Yes, it was also because it was Job's returning present.
BeOS was already up and running on Mac and it could have offered more than the existing MacOS at this time.
Anyway, I am glad OSX is like it is now.

Re:Hmm

[Altus]

depends really... if there never was a windows... jobs might never have left apple... perhaps next step would have been developed by apple and we all would have been using next style machines since the early to mid 90s

who knows really... the world would have been a very different place.

Re:Hmm

[LurkerXXX]

You need to find better documentation. Actually Apple did make an offer to buy BeOS, but they didn't offer as much as Jean-Lois Gasee and the other Be stockholders wanted, so their offer was turned down. Rather than up their offer on BeOS and pay more than they thought it was worth at the time, they went with NeXT. Those 'sound engineering reasons' came as justification after the financial ones had already been made.

http://macspeedzone.com/archive/art/con/be.shtml

Re:Hmm

[dduck]

From the next article in the series I quoted:

When Apple decided to go with NeXT over Be, Be couldn't even print. Be, while blazingly fast, was blazing fast for a reason. Nothing was running on it. Apple chose to go with the OS that was stable, proven, and gorgeous. Apple also got NeXT's unbelievably fast development environment, the leading application server software WebObjects, and the Mac's father and Apple's savior, Steve Jobs. (Personal note: I still remember leaving work late for Christmas vacation ecstatic after reading that Steve Jobs was back at Apple.)

Now, nothing I have read about it so far contradicts the facts mentioned here. In fact, at least one member of the team at Apple that evaluated the options has posted here at /. saying pretty much the same thing. Well, at least someone who CLAIMED that he was ...

Yes, I know it doesn't make for quite as good a story... but personally, as a recent switcher and software developer, I'm ecstatic that Apple went with the NeXT (and hence, the Next Step) environment. The X-Code environment absolutely ROCKS!

Re:Hmm

[norwoodites]

actually Apple would have died because the PPC would not have got started. POWER would be still stuck there and no 64bit processor at this point.

warning

[X43B]

IBM evil (again) and no Linux? I think you're going to blow a lot of /.'s minds.

Re:If Windows had never existed on the home deskto

[justforaday]

And then they would've been slapped with a "look and feel" lawsuit that they wouldn't have had the resources to fight off...

"What if?" can be fun

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, "What if?" can be fun, especially when you apply it to wars. What if Hitler had never invaded Russia? What if he had invaded Britian earlier in the war? Fun, if you're in that mind set.

This one is a little bit too "If" for my liking; it goes back a little too far and tries to extrapolate too much. None the less, it's an interesting read.

So heres some more:

• What if AT&T never sued and BSD386 had been completed?
• What if MULTICS hadn't been cancelled?
• What if Dave Cutler didn't join the NT group at Microsoft?
• What if Ed Roberts laughed Paul Allan out of MITS with their BASIC interpreter?
• What if the Lisp Machines/Symbolics split had never happened and the hacker stayed at the MIT lab?

Re:"What if?" can be fun

[TheKidWho]

What If the industry had switched to GaAs microprocessors?

Re:"What if?" can be fun

[Anonymous Coward]

Seymour Cray would have made even more money?

Re:"What if?" can be fun

[955301]

Hitler? What are you trying to kill the conversation?

Re:"What if?" can be fun

[Anonymous Coward]

I wondered how long it would be for someone to mention Godwin. Sorry to disapoint though; merely mentioning Hitler or the Nazis is not nearly enough to invoke Godwin.

Re:"What if?" can be fun

[Anonymous Coward]

"Q: What if my mother had a moustache?"
"A: Then I would have two fathers."

The point is that "What if" questions can be applied to anything, thus it is not that funny.

Re:"What if?" can be fun

[Anonymous Coward]

What if Gates and Allen had been dragged into the Gents' for a Damn Good Kicking after writing that letter, and the world came to the conclusion that sharing was not at all the same thing as stealing?

Re:"What if?" can be fun

[Anonymous Coward]

"What if [Hitler] had invaded Britian earlier in the war?"

He didn't invade Britain at all. He had plans, but never executed them. The German Navy didn't have the means to get his armies there. He needed air superiority so that he could suppress the Royal Navy, so he stumbled at the first hurdle. Of course, if you're American you won't remember any of this because it was you guys who were the reason we survived.

Re:"What if?" can be fun

[Thud457]

" You wouldn't have had much fun in Stallmingrad, would you... "

Aw crap, now look what you've gone and done!

Re:"What if?" can be fun

[Anonymous Coward]

Being British, I'm well aware. Actually the Channel islands were invaded and captured by the Nazis, as I believe was Gibralter. So technically although Hitler never invaded mainland Britian, he did invade and capture some British teritory.

It was a simple thinko. I originally wrote "What if he had planed to invade Britian earlier in the war?" but that didn't have quite the same impact, so I changed it. I just forgot to change the "earlier in the war" to "early in the war" E.g. "What if he had invaded Britian early in the war?"

Re:"What if?" can be fun

[Otter]

• What if Gary Kildall hadn't been too busy to negotiate with IBM about licensing CP/M for the PC?

Re:"What if?" can be fun

[bsd4me]

What if the initial release of 386bsd had been before the initial linux release?

Re:"What if?" can be fun

[Nevermore-Spoon]

We must grok each situation in fullness. Consult with the old ones, only then can we act rightly at cusp. Paraphrase, Stranger in a Strange Land R. A. Heinlein

Re:"What if?" can be fun

[Anonymous Coward]

That's coincidental that you should mention the Channel Islands. PBS' Masterpiece [Theatre] has been showing a British war time drama about the German occupation. Too bad PBS isn't mainstream or there might be fewer ignorant Americans.

Re:"What if?" can be fun

[Dogtanian]

"What if?" can be fun, especially when you apply it to wars. What if Hitler had never invaded Russia? What if he had invaded Britian earlier in the war?

What if Germany had been able to continue fighting for another 3-6 months?

Significance? Although the atomic bomb was used against Japan, it was developed in response to the threat of the *Germans* developing one themselves.

It was completed 2 months after Germany surrendered, and used against Japan approx. 1 month after that.

Although we now know that Germany was nowhere near building a true atomic bomb during WWII, this was not known at the time.

Well, bearing in mind that the atomic bomb was used against Japan, who- whatever else happened- were never a likely risk when it came to atomic weapons, I find it hard to believe that they would not have used them against Germany to bring the war to a swift conclusion.

Re:"What if?" can be fun

[Anonymous Coward]

What the space ship had never crashed in Rosewell and we never reversed engineered all this nifty technology.

Re:"What if?" can be fun

[Anonymous Coward]

What if Spider-Man saved Gwen Stacy?
What if Spider-Man never married Mary Jane?
What if the all new X-Men died on their first mission?
What if the X-Men lost Inferno?

Re:"What if?" can be fun

[Anonymous Coward]

What if Commodore hadn't killed the Amiga market?

Re:"What if?" can be fun

[wenit]

I do not grok you in fullness. All well waiting is.

Re:"What if?" can be fun

[SydShamino]

Are you implying that, if Hitler hadn't invaded Russia, Stalin would have had enough extra troops after WWII to move into the northern Europe, occupying Sweden and Finland? Then, given how many more US troops were required to defeat Hitler without Soviet help, the United States was left in a weaker position compared to USSR that later prevented the Soviet collapse in 1991?

In other words, if Hitler hadn't invaded Russia, Linux today would be greatly changed because Linus would have been a Soviet citizen in a communist state?

"What if" scenarios are fun...

Re:"What if?" can be fun

[Anonymous Coward]

Thats the spirit!

Re:"What if?" can be fun

[jdowland]

What if he had invaded Britian earlier in the war?

Do you mean: what if, earlier in the war, he invaded Britain? I read that and thought "Hitler never invaded Britain!"

Re:"What if?" can be fun

[AlanS2002]

yep, and as they say 'In Communist Russia Linux reboots you'

Re:"What if?" can be fun

[AsimovBesterClarke]

I used to have coworker who was fond of shouting "What if Sparticus had a piper-cub?" in meetings whenever the what-ifs started. My personal favorite is still "What if Aunt May was a Herald of Galactus?" Unfortunately, more people watch SNL than read Marvel comics......

Re:"What if?" can be fun

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah and if Hitler had been killed in the trenches in the first world war, the second wouldn't have happened, Britain wouldn't have been bankrupted by it and would still be a superpower with an empire covering a quarter of the globe, and the US would never have reached the levels of power it did.

Re:"What if?" can be fun

[Have Blue]

• What if Xerox had prevented Steve Jobs from acting on the inspiration he found at PARC?

Re:"What if?" can be fun

[westlake]

Gibraltar

No. Franco had the sense to remain neutral and was the lone fascist of the big three to survive the war.

Re:"What if?" can be fun

[elgatozorbas]

What it all these nerds had girlfriends? /. would not have existed!

Re:"What if?" can be fun

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, Stalin was planning to invade Germany anyways and was gathering troops to do so. He didn't believe however that Hitler would break their pact (he executed the spies that suggested this) so was caught off gaurd when this happened. However, their build-up of troops to invade Germany is what helped them keep Germany at bay and then eventually drive them back.

So the common assumption that Hitler should have finished off Britain before moving on to Russia is quite an overstatement. Either way, there was going to be a conflict with Russia, and it was better to do a surprise attack. The flaw was the assumption that the blitzkrieg would finish off the Russian army. The winters are a bitch with no winter clothes and poor rations.

Probably the biggest mistake for Germany in the war was to let a large portion of the French army escape to Britain at the beginning of the war. Either that or retaliating the bombing of Berlin by bombing London instead of finishing of the British air force.

Re:"What if?" can be fun

[fejikso]

In other words, if Hitler hadn't invaded Russia, Linux today would be greatly changed because Linus would have been a Soviet citizen in a communist state?

No, Linus Torvalds simply wouldn't exist... and neither you and me. Even a smaller change at that time would have had a drastic impact in the current state of the world.

Re:"What if?" can be fun

[Anonymous Coward]

What if Spider-Man became one with the Venom symbiote in the way Carnage did later?
What if they made a Maximum Carnage movie?
What if it didn't suck?

Re:"What if?" can be fun

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, I was about to mod this whole thread "Offtopic," but you managed to draw a connection between Third Reich historical speculation and Linus Torvalds. Sir, I salute you!

Re:"What if?" can be fun

[operagost]

You mean Germany had no WMDs? I say we dig up Truman and put him on trial for WAR CRIMES! Truman lied, people died!

Re:"What if?" can be fun

[MysteriousPreacher]

It's not big or clever to make fun of Master Yoda's posts.

Re:"What if?" can be fun

[Anonymous Coward]

Wouldn't we all then be playing GNU/Tetris?

Re:"What if?" can be fun

[Anonymous Coward]

What if Gates and Allen had been dragged into the Gents' for a Damn Good Kicking after writing that letter, and the world came to the conclusion that sharing was not at all the same thing as stealing?

What if stallman and the FSF didn't go after people in court for not continuing to spread "freedom"?

Re:"What if?" can be fun

[byolinux]

They probably wouldn't have invested in Apple.

Re:"What if?" can be fun

[Anonymous Coward]

What if you all actually got laid?

Re:"What if?" can be fun

[MagicBox]

What if Hitler had never invaded Russia?

He never did invade Russia! I'll tell you what would've happened if he did though:

Communism would've been a small cult that never took off, confined within the borders of it's most devout follower(s): Russia(ns), eventually dying with that generation. Instead of becoming the beast it did and kill millions and slowly cause the death of 1/2 of the European continent it owned.

But then I cannot say what else would've happened, that's just one part of it.

Re:"What if?" can be fun

[krygny]

"What if Hitler had never invaded Russia? What if he had invaded Britian earlier in the war?"

What if he had just been accepted to art school in Vienna? Now try and figure out how the last 2/3 of the 20th century would've gone.

Re:"What if?" can be fun

[Anonymous Coward]

Noted American myself saw some of that, along with some of the programming explaining the historical background of the German occupation of the Channel Isles. All I can say is, the way the British totally sold out the Jews on the islands has convinced me that if Britain proper were invaded, the majority of Brits would have collaborated and we'd have to lump in the British with Quisling and Vichy France. I realize not all Brits would do such a thing, and there'd most certainly be a British Resistance (and maybe even a Free U.K. government operating out of India), but I must say the thought was rather troubling.

Re:"What if?" can be fun

[Anonymous Coward]

what if my penis never invaded your mom's meat hole? there would be no you!

Re:"What if?" can be fun

[geekoid]

maybe, but it doesn't have to.

I fail to see how I wouldn't exist. My family wasn't in either war, and have been in america for over 100 years.
Now if you mean our minds, and not our bodies, then yeah, we would be different.

Re:"What if?" can be fun

[jthayden]

Using the bomb on Germany would really depend on when Hitler kills himself or if somebody else does it for him. If Hitler stays alive and in power, we use the bomb because the impression is that Germany will fight to the last man and take quite a few of us with them. ( This is the logic for using the bomb in the pacific. )

If Hitler is killed by rebels or commits sucide due to his impending doom I think it is unlikely that Germany chooses to fight to the death, and the war in Europe ends in a whimper not a bang.

Re:"What if?" can be fun

[Minna Kirai]

You mean Germany had no WMDs? I say we dig up Truman and put him on trial for WAR CRIMES! Truman lied, people died!

In fact, it was Albert Einstein who warned that Germany must be defeated before it could get the atomic bomb. And if you want to punish him, there's no need for sweaty digging, because the brain is in a jar on a shelf.

Re:"What if?" can be fun

[Minna Kirai]

AC: So technically although Hitler never invaded mainland Britian, he did invade and capture some British teritory.

Well, obviously. He took nearly the whole north coast of africa from britain.

Re:"What if?" can be fun

[Minna Kirai]

( This is the logic for using the bomb in the pacific. )

Correction: that's the publicly claimed logic.

The real logic was that if Japan didn't surrender to the USA immediately, it would hold out until the USSR had conquered part of it's territory, and the USA didn't want to be forced to share, like they were with East Germany.

Re:"What if?" can be fun

[geekoid]

Computers would Just Work, and we would have nothing to bitch about.

Re:"What if?" can be fun

[Minna Kirai]

"What if Sparticus had a piper-cub?"

He, and 4 close friends, would've made it 900 kilometers north before running out of fuel after fleeing the imperial devastation of his army. Instead of proudly displaying his severed head, the Romans would just swap stories about his spectacular disappearance.

Re:"What if?" can be fun

[SilverspurG]

What if IBM had been a little more reasonable with their licensing demands?

Re:"What if?" can be fun

[jthayden]

True, that is one theroy.

There is also the theory that we just wanted to scare the hell out of the soviets.

We also may have wanted to do a test.

In the end, it is likely that all of these reasons played some part. But in order to get the public to play along, the trumpted reason is to save American lives. All of these arguments really would have held up for dropping it on Germany too.

Re:"What if?" can be fun

[Anonymous Coward]

now you're just being silly

Re:"What if?" can be fun

[Tuzanor]

Your mom (or grandmother or great grandmother depending on your age) could have met somebody who would have otherwise died in the war an married him instead. There are a millions of possible outcomes. You COULD have still exsisted, but you more than likely would have not. Even if the same people were married, then it's possible that different circumstances could have let a different sperm get through.

Don't think too hard about the chances, it will hurt your head.

Re:"What if?" can be fun

[fejikso]

You fail to realize the sensitivity of causality in history. Even a small change, can make the whole world different after 50 years. Even if your mother had met your father just one hour later, it's very likely that you would have been conceived (or not at all) by another sperm cell and hence, you would not exist.

Of course, the most likely thing is that your present mother and father wouldn't exist either...

Re:"What if?" can be fun

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm, lets be fair. Commonwealth countries are not the same as Britian. I don't think many Canadians or Australians would describe themselves as British, and neither did the people living in those African Commonwealth nations.

Re:"What if?" can be fun

[FatherOfONe]

Ok, how many Spitfires did you guys have left? Where exactly was Churchill? How was the food supply?

Now I will grant you this. We Americans came over and thought we could take our B17's and just go bomb Germany in the middle of the day. So I concede that we were a little arrogant :-)

But without the spitfires, you wouldn't have had much protection, and your ships wouldn't have lasted long. If Hitler wouldn't have waited after taking France, and let a large part of your military escape, he would have probably had your country. Thank God he didn't do that. I believe that he would have eventually lost anyway but it would have taken a lot longer, and many more lives would have been lost. Hitler made many mistakes, so it is hard to speculate what would have happened if he changed just one item. However it is fairly safe to say that if the Americans hadn't helped England wouldn't have lasted.

Re:"What if?" can be fun

[Anonymous Coward]

Spermatozoa are remarkably sensitive. Any change that had even the slightest effect on what a male ancestor did -- a change in what he ate, wearing one set of clothes instead of another on one day, a one-second differnce in time of copulation, virtually anything -- has a pretty good chance of resulting in a different one fertilizing the egg.

Given the economic effects of Lend-Lease to the USSR before U.S. entry into the war, and the incidental changes that would have followed mobilization and rationing in a world where the Soviets didn't enter the world war, almost every American conceived after June 1941 would be, at the least, merely a sibling (genetically) of the person who would have been born.

Re:"What if?" can be fun

[danila]

Are you aware that in Soviet Russia programmers were supposed to send their algorithms to central repository so that they can be reused? And I am not making that up.

One of the projects was " " (the collection of software libraries and applications of Academy of Science of the Soviet Union).

So my guess is that Linus would feel rather at ease in Soviet Union and Linux would be better off, since it's communist in nature anyway. May be he would even call it Red Flag Linux...

Re:"What if?" can be fun

[Sabalon]

Okay...so I'm slow catching up :)

What if Gary Kindall's wife had talked to IBM under the NDA?

What if QDOS was not avail for Microsoft to buy?

What if Bill stayed in school?

What if Steve's daughter wasn't named Lisa? :)

Re:If Windows had never existed on the home deskto

[Anonymous Coward]

Two Borg Bill stories in a row... thanks Slashdot.

Re:If Windows had never existed on the home deskto

[dave1791]

Nah, they would have been ripping off WPS, which would have made a better Linux. I used to run OS/2 back in the early 90's and the win95 interface was a step backwards.

Doom only ran on DOS

[Dancin_Santa]

So all those college-age kids with their DOS computers would still be using DOS.

Microsoft would have ruled the roost.

Nothing is different than it is now.

Re:Doom only ran on DOS

[edwdig]

Doom ran on practically anything. I remember playing it on SparcStations and SGI Indy Workstations back in 95. Doom would've just been written for whatever was the dominant platform at the time.

Games go where the users are. Not the other way around. Gamers are too small a percentage of computer users to dictate platforms to everyone else.

Re:Doom only ran on DOS

[angelfly]

I disagree, considering the fact that dos is uses a command I doubt we'd have all the lazy users we have now that ache and crave a gui to do every single task. "non-lazy users"="users willing to learn new things" and not users who stick with windows because they don't want to learn something new. And besides the doom code is open source so the same people who play it now on linux, bsd, etc would still be playing it.

Re:Doom only ran on DOS

[SCHecklerX]

It ran fine on OS/2. And the (illegal) port of quake I to OS/2 ran far better than it did on dos. The only reason I bought Quake was because I had a native OS/2 version, and I let Id know this.

Re:Doom only ran on DOS

[TheSpoom]

Nah. There would be OS/2 95.

History repeats.

Re:Doom only ran on DOS

[Anonymous Coward]

Gamers are too small a percentage of computer users to dictate platforms to everyone else.
And yet they created the entire 3D accellerator market, and have been a major driving force behind making already excessivly fast processors even faster.

Re:Doom only ran on DOS

[NanoGator]

"Gamers are too small a percentage of computer users to dictate platforms to everyone else."

You do realize that we all have CD ROMs and sound cards because of games, right?

Windows gamers are numbered in the 10s of millions. If you don't believe me, then I'd like you to explain why EB is stuffed with Windows games on the shelves with little to no support for any other OS.

Re:Doom only ran on DOS

[edwdig]

And yet they created the entire 3D accellerator market, and have been a major driving force behind making already excessivly fast processors even faster.

Does the average computer user buy a 3D high end NVIDIA or ATI card just because gamers do? No. They either have an integrated graphics card or bottom of the line graphics card that came with their computer. They just have the cheapest graphics card simply because you have to have one. They don't care what it is, nor do they really know that there is a difference.

And are you really trying to imply that Intel and AMD would stop releasing faster chips if people didn't play games on their computers? If nothing else, the movie industry and scientific computing have a far higher need for increased speed, and are far more willing to pay for it.

Re:Doom only ran on DOS

[edwdig]

You do realize that we all have CD ROMs and sound cards because of games, right?

Sound cards certainly did originate because of games, sound feedback is useful in everyday computing.

CDROMs were sold on the basis of things like encyclopedias and information archives. CDROM games weren't that common until well after CDROM drives became standard.

Windows gamers are numbered in the 10s of millions. If you don't believe me, then I'd like you to explain why EB is stuffed with Windows games on the shelves with little to no support for any other OS.

EB is stuffed with Windows games because there aren't enough people not using Windows to bother. I don't see how to statement is supposed to disprove my point that games go to the dominant OS. Do you really think that if EB cleared their shelves of Windows games and replaced them all with Linux games that Linux would become the dominant OS ?

Re:Doom only ran on DOS

[jal-vani]

But, on that, it makes a cycle. Games originally went where the users were. Now, users are attracted by the games. That's why Playstation rapes GameCube in sales, despite its technical inferiority.

Re:Doom only ran on DOS

[Anonymous Coward]

> And are you really trying to imply that Intel and AMD would stop releasing faster chips if people didn't play games on their computers?

They would release them less often and for a higher price jump. That said, they might have concentrated on more efficient (less die space) design to save costs, and the result could have been a better chip earlier. It's fun to speculate, no?

Re:Doom only ran on DOS

[Leo McGarry]

Er, no. CAD/CAM and visual simulation created the need for accelerated 3D. Video games got it for free. After all, what is a video game but a visual simulation with a really lousy simexec?

Re:Doom only ran on DOS

[bonch]

Doom would run anywhere. In fact, it was actually developed on a NeXT machine.

Re:Doom only ran on DOS

[Locutus]

funny you mention Doom and OS/2 because IBM hired Id Software to help them build a direct video interface so games like Doom could run in a window with other applications on oS/2. As you mentioned, Doom was a DOS application and only ran in full-screen. The OS/2 API created is called DIVE( Direct Interface Video Extension ) and later enDIVE( enhanced ). It was used for the video conferencing application shipped in OS/2 v3 Connect in 1994 called Person2Person. IBM and Id showed off Doom on OS/2 at a early 90's Comdex show in L.V. and huge crowds gathered to see it. Microsoft caught wind of this and had to have Doom running in a Microsoft window. Eventually, Microsoft DirectX was the result.

I think IBM and Id had a falling out over development practices or something like that and that's why Doom/2 was never released to the public. I'm sure Microsofts blocking of OS/2 everywhere IBM tried to push it helped in IBMs descision to stop working on gaming on OS/2. Along with other future OS/2 technologies and eventually the OS/2 all together.

Oh, and without Microsoft, OS/2 would not have had the synchonous input queue. That was Microsofts doing and it hobbled OS/2 for years and years because one stuck application could freeze the queue and all input to other applications.

I think the way Microsoft tracked and attacked OS/2 technology and development would make a great book. But I doubt many would believe it.

LoB

Re:Doom only ran on DOS

[operagost]

The source for Doom was released many years ago. FWIW, IBM ordered and almost completed an OS/2 port. The DOS version also ran on OS/2, but only up to 1.1 because someone at ID took a shortcut when they updated the sound support.

Re:Doom only ran on DOS

[modecx]

I remember there being loads more porno CDs than there ever were encyclopedias. You're right about the games though... There were only a few CD-ROM games before CDs became standard equipment. Like Return to Zork, and The 7th Guest.

Re:Doom only ran on DOS

[operagost]

Oh man, the SIQ. OS/2's Achilles heel. IBM refused to rewrite that thing. They just put a band-aid on it in Warp 4. You could usually get the naughty app out of the queue, but they you couldn't kill it. They must have had one or two huge customers with veritcal apps that relied on that SIQ to work.

Re:Doom only ran on DOS

[operagost]

I guess you don't know much about OS/2. It doesn't run on a DOS shell and is very stable. Instability is why Windows 95 lives in infamy.

Re:Doom only ran on DOS

[NanoGator]

"CDROMs were sold on the basis of things like encyclopedias and information archives. CDROM games weren't that common until well after CDROM drives became standard."

CD-ROMs sold because a bunch of games came out that used them. Companies like Sierra and LucasArts were taking their popular adventure game and adding voice to them. Games like Rebel Assault effectively used FMV to make for a distinctive game. Etc. CD-ROM drives were a must have for gamers long before they became standard hardware.

"Do you really think that if EB cleared their shelves of Windows games and replaced them all with Linux games that Linux would become the dominant OS ?"

Yes. Games are pretty much the only thing most people can't do effectively on Linux. Make Linux the must-have-gaming-OS, and suddenly it takes off like wildfire.

Re:Doom only ran on DOS

[doinky]

My understanding at the time was that MS wasn't purely responsible for the single input queue, possibly not even primarily responsible. I remember hearing legends that big customers insisted that their drones be able to "type ahead" (i.e. plan for a dialog box popping up as a result of something they just did and type stuff that would go in it when it DID show up on the screen).

Re:Doom only ran on DOS

[Hymer]

We bloody need a CD ROM drive 'cause some idiots in Redmond can't write small code...
Have you triede to install Win95 from diskettes ??

Re:Doom only ran on DOS

[NanoGator]

"We bloody need a CD ROM drive 'cause some idiots in Redmond can't write small code... Have you triede to install Win95 from diskettes ??"

Have you tried to install RedHat?

Re:Doom only ran on DOS

[16K Ram Pack]

We all have CD Roms for software as well. When I bought my first PC (a P75), Windows 95 came on CD and the first game I installed was a floppy based golf game.

Also a lot of people like to listen to their CDs while they are working/watch dumb movie clips on the internet.

Re:Doom only ran on DOS

[Locutus]

that definately is the results but I've only heard, til now, that it was a Microsoft design/request. It would be nice to learn the real history in this... Thanks for the comment.

LoB

Re:Doom only ran on DOS

[Hymer]

yep... but there is a small diff.: I'm getting much more sw. with Linux...

Re:Doom only ran on DOS

[tim_bissell]

Hardy-har.

It ran on NeXTStep before it ran on DOS - that is what it was developed on. Networked DOOM on NS rocked.

Re:Doom only ran on DOS

[Anonymous Coward]

> > We bloody need a CD ROM drive 'cause some idiots in Redmond can't write small code... Have you triede to install Win95 from diskettes ??

> Have you tried to install RedHat?

No, but I have installed Debian yesterday using two floppies. The rest was downloaded from the net. I don't have a CD-ROM drive in that computer and I don't need it. Your point again?

Re:Doom only ran on DOS

[GrahamCox]

I even ran Doom on the Digita OS of my Pentax digital camera! Quite cool to be able to flip it into Doom mode and knock off a few aliens in between shots....

Re:Doom only ran on DOS

[Doc Ruby]

We all have CD-ROMs and soundcards because Apple wanted to create a market for the multimedia their users were developing. Shipping every Mac since 1993 with those devices pressured Microsoft into spec'ing the "MPC" platform, also including them, to compete. The growth of games and that MPC spec are intertwined, but Apple explicitly kicked it all off - and not because the Mac was a more popular game platform, nor did it become one.

What if?

[Malc]

If "ifs" and "ands" per pots and pans then tinkers would be rich men.

Who says Microsoft wouldn't have embraced and extended OS/2 and shut IBM out, leading to the same conclusion?

What a waste of space stories like these are.

Re:What if?

[codifus]

IBM owned OS/2 and we can be safe to assume 100% that IBM would not make the same mistake (selling DOS to Gates for pennies) of giving it away. So Microsoft could hardly shut IBM out of its own OS. CD

Re:What if?

[AyeRoxor!]

Your rhyming adage is so immature
and so's iambic-style pentameter.

/bow

Re:What if?

[operagost]

Because of the contracts. IBM was responsible for the "old" OS/2 (1.x and the 2.x 32-bit kernel that was backwards compatible). MS was working on the "new" OS/2, which became NT. It was backwards compatible with OS/2 1.x apps. Your "embrace and extend" scenario is meaningless because you can't embrace and extend something that's patented.

Re:What if?

[operagost]

What are you talking about? IBM didn't own DOS. They did sell their own version called IBM DOS and later PC-DOS.

Re:What if?

[codifus]

Back in the 70s, or perhaps late 60s, before IBM DOS, IBM created DOS. IBM did not see much profit in the OS, preferring to concentrate on their "new" at the time PC business. They practically gave all the rights to that original DOS ,which eventually grew to become MS-DOS, to this young collge Dude named Bill Gates. Thus, Microsoft was born. CD

Re:If Windows had never existed on the home deskto

[Document]

Not flamebait, just ignorance. Use an alternative desktop that doesn't look like Windows. For example, take a look at XFCE.

Perhaps even Lycoris or Lindows....wait, bad example.

Engineer?

[Anonymous Coward]

FTA: The title of Distinguished Engineer is the title to which all Microsoft developers aspire

I thought "Engineer" was a term applied to people with degrees in actual engineering not something to be passed around like a gold watch or a fancy pen.

Re:Engineer?

[Anonymous Coward]

Rule #1 of language: It evolves.

Deal with it. ;)

Re:Engineer?

[grub]

Actually I think that there was an Engineering group in the US that had a problem with MS' naming of "engineer" in the MCSE designation. You don't call people "Doctor" that don't have an MD.

Re:Engineer?

[SCHecklerX]

Actually, just having a degree doesn't make you an engineer. Passing your EIT is the first step to that path. "MSCE" is a disgusting use of the word engineer to anybody who is a real engineer.

Re:Engineer?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's easy to be an engineer in Great Britain. Just ask any (what we would call) engine mechanic or garbage man.

Re:Engineer?

[budcub]

People with a Phd can be called doctor too.

Besides, not all engineers design bridges.

Re:Engineer?

[gowen]

Rule #2 of language : Whenever a pseudo-intellectual misuses a word, they will make a spurious appeal to Rule #1 in an attempt to get out of it.

Re:Engineer?

[Anonymous Coward]

The guy has a PhD from MIT in molecular biophysics.

I don't know how else to say this, but:

He's about a million times smarter than me (or you).

Shut up.

Re:Engineer?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, there are all types of Engineers but you aren't one until an acredited Engineering group bestows that title on you. As Tyler Durdan said "Sticking feathers up your ass doesn't make you a chicken."

Re:Engineer?

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought Engineer was a term applied to people who ran trains, not something to be passed around like a slide rule or a mechanical pencil.

Damn you pointyheaded nerds for stealing our label! =)

Re:Engineer?

[Anonymous Coward]

That doesn't matter. A PhD or MD is a "Doctor" not an "Engineer" and even then, MS can't be bestowing the title of "Engineer" on people.

Re:Engineer?

[mzwaterski]

They are probably using this part of the definition of engineer

a person who carries through an enterprise by skillful or artful contrivance (Webster's)

While I'm an engineer and find it annoying that they use this term, I'm not so certain that it's incorrect. People with engineering degrees are not the only ones that can engineer things...

Re:Engineer?

[Anonymous Coward]

phD?
Dsc?
engD?

you can have a doctrate in things other than medicine you know.

I can though really see how real engineers get upset at microsofts use of the term though.

Re:Engineer?

[tomstdenis]

"Besides, not all engineers design bridges."

But just because you gradudated the AM class of some MCSE money-gouging center doesn't mean you're any more qualified than a hampster to design and implement software.

Tom

Re:Engineer?

[Evil W1zard]

Degree's don't mean crap. If you have the experience and skillsets and not the degree you still can be an engineer.

Re:Engineer?

[Hal_Porter]

Having a degree doesn't make you engineer, solving problems does.

Re:Engineer?

[Anonymous Coward]

Try getting into an engineering faculty or organization (ie: IEEE.org) without a degree.

Re:Engineer?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've never read so much uneducated bullshit by people (read: NON-ENGINEERS) as I have in this thread.

FACT: The title 'Engineer' is bestowed upon someone when they have completed a degree in an engineering discipline then have completed tutorage under an Engineer in whatever field the person chose.

ONLY THEN can a person put "Engineer" on their business card/shingle/whatever.

Most of you are the same ones saying "University is a waste, install RedHat and wire up your neighbors!"

Re:Engineer?

[Anonymous Coward]

Faculty and Engineers are orthogonal.
You can be one, the other, or both.
There really is no dependency.

Re:Engineer?

[Anonymous Coward]

And just because you graduated from MIT with a PhD doesn't mean you are more qualified than a hampster to design and implement software. I worked with one of those hampsters years ago at Bell Labs. His 'efforts' alone caused us to miss a delivery date by six months. He got the axe and we got to clean up the bloody mess.

Re:Engineer?

[justforaday]

That doesn't matter. A PhD or MD is a "Doctor" not an "Engineer" and even then, MS can't be bestowing the title of "Engineer" on people.

You're right. It would be far more apt for MS to be calling people MS Certified Systems Doctors...

Re:Engineer?

[shaka999]

Hmmm, are you a civil engineer?

I ask because I've been and electrical engineer working in chip design for 12 years now and I've yet to meet anyone who give a crap about the EIT or professional engineer title.

Re:Engineer?

[DocUi]

Not that I want this stupid ass argument to start again, because it is stupid, but.

People who drive trains are Engineers, I have yet to see any of the damn ERTW blockhead start trying to sue CN/CP/Amtrack or any one like that.

~The Doc.

PS, No I'm not an MD or a PHD, but you know what? I can still call myself a doctor. As long as I don't do so in a hospital, or try to practice medicine without a license then guess what? I can do that.

I think, (note I say think, so I accept the fact that I might be wrong so don't get all smug if you point out I am,) the only occupation you can't impersonate is a police officer. I know that in Ontario, if you try to push yourself off as a "Professional Engineer" then the PEO can come in and kick your ass. But they don't own the rights to the word "Engineer" No one does.

Re:Engineer?

[DrSkwid]

garbage man

who calls them garbage men here the the uk ?

no-one I know, but then again, I'm from north of Watford

Re:Engineer?

[Dr.Zong]

Actually it was Canada Canadian Council of Professional Engineers

Having been a grad of only a Technical College for Computer Engineering, I cannnot even call myself an Engineer. I am working through the OACETT tests currently, and only then will I be able to actually call myself an Engineer by title if/when I pass them all.

It's like a big cult. Seriously.

Re:Engineer?

[burnin1965]

Actually it was "...feathers up your butt..."

But thats beside the point. What I find interesting is how the quote could be used either way. You see, it is quite possible that some may view the bestowal as being similar to sticking feathers up your butt.

IMO it is more likely that the actions of the individual which led to the bestowal is what made the person an engineer not the generosity of some accredited group. And that being the case it is possible that not every person who has become an engineer will be fortunate enough to be bestowed.

That being said I do believe that the title of Engineer is heavily over used and is diminished by its improper use.

burnin

Re:Engineer?

[iamwahoo2]

EIT is only for only gets you recognized by the Nationaly Society of Professional Engineers. It is meaningless in the actual practice of engineering. The NSPE would love to make their professional training program a requirement to practice engineering, but most engineers would prefer to be members of organizations/societies that are more specific to their field.

Re:Engineer?

[Anonymous Coward]

And just because you can type doesn't mean you have any social graces.

I really wish people would stop bashing the MCSE. For what it's worth, any qualification that someone works for can be completed by ANYONE. You just have to be smarter than the test.

I personally think that most people lash out about the MCSE because they think they are more 'leet since they know how to use Linux.

I'm not the smartest cookie in the jar, and I manage a call center's back end infrastructure by day. But just because I use Windows at home for some things doesn't make me an idiot either.

Slashdot sucks anymore.

Re:Engineer?

[l3v1]

I thought "Engineer" was a term applied to people with degrees in actual engineering not something to be passed around like a gold watch or a fancy pen.

I can only agree with that, and deeply despise all the jerks that talked up the dead speaking rubbish as a reply to the parent post.

One should absolutely never be eligible and let to use the term Engineer in any way if one does not have the proper education in the field. I strongly believe that, although I very well know how many people are in many industries without such degrees, and make billions of cash.

Thing is, experience is not everything. Believe it or not. Knowing the proper techniques, methods, ways of thinking and tools to use is an asset which most good Engineers posess, and which is very very hard work to gather only by experience, and also taking much time.

I don't say one can't gather the knowledge without papers, because it's not true. I just say, nobody, nowhere, never should depreciate properly educated Engineers, with Engineering degrees.

I take such people as morally and psychically underdeveloped grudging pricks.

Repeatedly: I can very well tolerate and highly appreciate gathered engineering knowledge, but the behaviour mentioned: absolutely not.

Also, when people start again and again over the topic: university is no good, experience is... let's just say I'm quite hard to steam up, but this is a good starter.

Re:Engineer?

[Anonymous Coward]

Aww, sounds like somebody wasted a load of time and money on a fancy EIT certification! How cute. I work among hundred of software and hardware engineers, and I've never met anyone who cared about EIT. But by all means, toot your own horn :)

Re:Engineer?

[CSG_SurferDude]

Really?

I guess all the "Software Engineers" who write ASP pages must agree with you.

All the rest of us Engineers take offense at your comment, and assume you must be in HR.

Re:Engineer?

[Anonymous Coward]

People with a Phd can be called doctor too.

Ahem, people with a Phd are doctors.

Re:Engineer?

[kayak334]

Who do you work for? I'm an EE grad looking for a job in chip design............

heh... ::only half joking::

Re:Engineer?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, actually it is an MCSE not an MSCE.

There are plenty of the MCSEs who really know their stuff. So while I agree with you that just having the certification doesn't make you an engineer but getiing the knowledge that you get while preparing for the MCSE will put you on that path.

You just have to use you own judgement and see what in your certification is propaganda and mindless remembering of random stuff and what and how it is useful in the real world.

People with poor judgement ends up as the paper MCSEs while others become engineers. The same holds true for any occupation.

Re:Engineer?

[Anonymous Coward]

> the only occupation you can't impersonate is a police officer.

Actually, any government official. Impersonating a Law Enforcement Officer (that includes everyone from the FBI to Fish and Wildlife officers) is just a more severe penalty.

Re:Engineer?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep. Medical doctors in the UK typically have Masters degrees. That's why consultants medics in the UK call themselves "Mister" - it's a sort of inverse snobbery where consultants only call themselves "Doctor" again if they get a real PhD.

The rest of the academic community is only being nice allowing medics and dentists to call themselves "doctor". A sort of we'll-give-you-props-because-we-don't-want-you-to- hawk-a-grolly-into-our-chest-during-open-heart-sur gery-just-because-we're-unconscious-and-wouldn't-k now niceness.

Re:Engineer?

[Anonymous Coward]

Go build stuff that earns $1E+9 and drives the PC industry for twenty years, and then come back and tell us all about what it takes to be an "Engineer(tm)".

Moron...

Re:Engineer?

[EulerX07]

Solve problems and call yourself an engineer in Canada without proper education if you want. Just don't ask to borrow the money for the 10k fine for your first offence and the 25k for each subsequent offence.

Re:Engineer?

[anthony_dipierro]

Degree's don't mean crap.

'Nuff said.

Re:Engineer?

[seminumerical]

yep. In Quebec people who have an engineering degree often put "engineer" on their business cards. They actually aren't supposed to unless and until they have completed a rather elaborate program of work (recorded in notebooks) under the supervision of a P.E. (professional engineer). Sort of like a lawyer has to finish law school and then pass the bar. The ones who go to work in corporations without passing the bar aren't really lawyers.

Re:Engineer?

[CaptainCarrot]

The rest of the academic community is only being nice allowing medics and dentists to call themselves "doctor".

Nope, sorry.

Physicians in the US don't have PhDs, they have MDs. It's a different kind of degree requiring an different training regimen -- but the word "doctor" still appears in it and it's more advanced than a Master's.

In the US it's also correct for medical pracitioners alone to use "Dr." socially, and not for PhD holders, kind of the inverse of the UK situation. This is partly because in academia if you have a PhD but no other academic title you're at the bottom of the professional ladder. To call a Professor "Dr." is a positive insult, and the touchier types will really go off on you. They'd rather hear "Mr." than "Dr." but "Professor" is better than either.

One occasionally encounters "Dr." in either ecclesiastical or corporate environments. Most Protestant ministers don't hold doctorates so it's a mark of distinction in an otherwise non-hierarchical environment. They therefore cling to it. (Their "preaching robes" are actually academic gowns, and DDs or PhDs get the velvet stripes on the sleeves.)

In a corporate environment a PhD will often use "Dr." to get across to the PHBs that he really does know what he's talking about, and it tends to intimidate them. They generally don't expect it from their co-workers, and certainly wouldn't use it if they were to venture onto a college campus.

Re:Engineer?

[mebob]

But people with a PhD have recieved a doctorate, thus are usually considered to be Doctor of there chosen field. So they can rightfully choose to call them selves one.

Re:Engineer?

[tomstdenis]

I never said PhDs were godsends. My point is as someone who DOES takes the field seriously [and doesn't have a degree btw] I find the "self-proclaimed" professionals that take short-term courses, have no side interest in the field, etc who call themselves "professional" really annoying.

I mean I've been writing software since I was 13 [10 years ago] and only recently [say from 2003 on] have I considered myself a "professional" developer. I say this because I've held numerous consulting gigs [successfully completed] and have gained respect from peers in the field.

I guess what I'm saying is that if you weren't already a skilled developer before entering short term colleges [e.g. MCSE] then these won't make you into professional developers...

Just like attending a "home depot" seminar won't make you a master carpenter

Tom

Re:Engineer?

[optimus2861]

I was wondering if there were any other Canadian engineers reading this sub-thread (I am a P.Eng., for the record, electrical, and the improper use of the word does grate on me).

And for all you MCSE's out there, be aware that if you use the term "Engineer" north of the border, the provincial engineering associations can pursue you for breaking the law regulating the practice of engineering and use of the term "Engineer" according to the relevant statutes. In fact, the Canadian Council of Professional Engineers pursued the issue directly with Microsoft in 2001 and got an agreement that Microsoft would advise Canadian MCSE's not to use the term, but MS reversed itself a year later. Quebec's engineering regulatory body then went to court to force the issue, and won a symbolic fine against Microsoft ($1000) for misuse of the term. I can't find anything more recent than that.

Longer report on the ongoing issues w.r.t. software "engineering", authored by Ontario's engineering association, here.

Re:Engineer?

[tomstdenis]

I don't think I'm leet because I use linux I think I'm leet because I CHOOSE to use linux.

Being a serf sucks.

My biggest problem with MCSE types [and other 2wk college types] is they take something non-trivial [e.g. computer science] and basically dumb it down and flood the industry.

As a result we have so many people in the workforce as "developers" who don't have the first clue how to design/implement software nor write robust software?

I've seen retired HP engineers use strcat() and casting void* to various types ... [chances are he started as an E.E. and moved to software...]

Tom

hrm.

[Anonymous Coward]

What's with BeOS?

Re:hrm.

[eomnimedia]

It's dead. Sad, but true.
be.com

Re:hrm.

[BaseLineNL]

Some folks are recreating BeOS as open source. It's called the Haiku project

Fallacy of the Never Happened

[Speare]

There's a fallacy in imagining a world where a particular person never completed a particular invention. In short, it skips the notion that someone else would have invented it instead.

If Ungh Blungh didn't invent the wheel, some other proto-Sapiens halfwit would have invented it in the following year. It's not like there was a shortage of halfwits in the golden crescent.

If Henry Ford didn't invent the assembly-line production model, someone else would have invented it in the following decade. It's not like there was a shortage of development in the industrial arena.

If this developer at Microsoft didn't fix "enhanced mode" Windows, then some other developer at Microsoft would have. It's not like Microsoft was aching for cash to hire smart developers to tinker with 80386 instruction sets.

The size and complexity of an invention AND its environment are also key: If Linus never wrote a whole and usable kernel and published it, chances are that no other homebrew kernel would have grown with the same fervor. The complexity of the task, and the complexity of the eco-political forces at work, helped to spur the adoption in a unique way.

Re:Fallacy of the Never Happened

[mrm677]

I agree. If you haven't already read "Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies", I highly recommend it. Everything happens for a reason and because the chips were in place...

Re:Fallacy of the Never Happened

[ghoti]

Good point, but you ignore the importance of timing here. If protected mode stuff running on Windows would have been done half a year later, Microsoft may already have made a decision to go with OS/2 - and enhanced Windows would have just been another nice demo.

Re:Fallacy of the Never Happened

[Zarhan]

There's a fallacy in imagining a world where a particular person never completed a particular invention. In short, it skips the notion that someone else would have invented it instead.

Wheel and rest of your examples are valid. However, I think that there *are* certain things that wouldn't have been invented by someone else.

Consider Einstein. In 1905, he published his special relativity theory. Now, for this, all the pieces were pretty much there - somebody else would have come up with that sooner or later.

However, general relativity, in 1915, is something that probably would have not been realized even by today if it were not for Albert. Even if we had gravity probe B I think scientists would be pretty dumbfounded by results - there is not really any "reasonable" explanation. You need to think outside the box - and I think that even though Newton's "standing on the shoulder of giants" applies to lots of things, there were no shoulders to stand upon regarding general relativity.

Of course, this point is rather irrelevant because we are talking about developing an OS..

Re:Fallacy of the Never Happened

[KiltedKnight]

If this developer at Microsoft didn't fix "enhanced mode" Windows, then some other developer at Microsoft would have. It's not like Microsoft was aching for cash to hire smart developers to tinker with 80386 instruction sets.

It's also possible that some developer at IBM, Apple, or SomeOtherSoftwareCompany might have gotten it to work, in which case Microsoft itself would've only been a licensee of the technology, not the copyright holder. Microsoft wouldn't necessarily be the dominant desktop player it is, unless it decided to devote all of its energy into other kinds of software, like MS Office.

If we're playing the "What if?" game, we could also ask the question, "What if Steve Jobs didn't hold that lawsuit threat over everyone else when it came to building something with the 'look and feel' of a Mac?" Would Mac be the dominant desktop now? Would OS/2? Would Windows? I know for certain that Jobs is probably kicking himself in the butt over this one all the time.

Re:Fallacy of the Never Happened

[NutscrapeSucks]

Right, it wasn't the "invention" of Windows386, it was the business decision to push this over OS/2. Similar to how IBM had all the resources to write OS/2 version 1 as 32-bit native, but chose create a 16-bit OS instead.

History hinges on the fact that IBM chose not to buy out Microsoft and/or Windows when they had a chance. The proper applicaiton of $$$$ would have made Windows disappear, and eventualy users would have come around to dumping DOS for OS/2.

As for how this would affect Linux -- probably not that much. The main market driver for Linux was people who wanted UNIX on Intel, cheap. OS/2 was less applicable than Windows.

Re:Fallacy of the Never Happened

[Dun Malg]

There's a fallacy in imagining a world where a particular person never completed a particular invention. In short, it skips the notion that someone else would have invented it instead.

Yeah, that's why I quit watching "Sliders". After they end up in a universe where all else is exactly the same as ours, except medecine has not been discovered/invented! I think more people need to read "Connections" by James Burke (or at least watch the TV show!) before they start imagining "a world without [X]". Nothing exists on its own. What I think is humorous is that these people are usually also capable of imagining the "Simpsons butterfly effect" as well. So how does that work? Killing a prehistoric butterfly changes EVERYTHING, yet removing Windows from the face of history only makes changes in the immediate vicinity of OS adoption? Pah!

Re:Fallacy of the Never Happened

[mytec]

There's a fallacy in imagining a world where a particular person never completed a particular invention. In short, it skips the notion that someone else would have invented it instead.

Sure, but could someone else could have made the same discovery in a time frame that mattered? That is the part you are ignoring in your fallacy statement.

Re:Fallacy of the Never Happened

[oftheapes]

I know for certain that Jobs is probably kicking himself in the butt over this one all the time.
so you really know nothing at all then? did anyone on slashdot take high school english?

Re:Fallacy of the Never Happened

[Evangelion]

That's actually the "Bradbury Butterfly Effect".

It's showing up again (I seem to remember that story of his being turned into an Outer Limits episode), but it's being remade as A Sound of Thunder

Re:Fallacy of the Never Happened

[Dun Malg]

That's actually the "Bradbury Butterfly Effect".

Heh. Yeah, but those people have seen the time travelling toaster episode of the simpsons and know it as that, rather than the proper dinosaur hunting story it's supposed to be.

Re:Fallacy of the Never Happened

[Titanium Angel]

Exactly, straight from Larry's comment:

You're missing the skunkworks aspect of the project - Nobody in the systems division (except for David and the rest of the Win3 team) wanted to get windows applications working in protected mode - it would directly compete with Windows and Microsoft's strategic direction was 100% focused on OS/2. Windows was a distraction.

If David hadn't done it, then nobody would have - that's why I described it as a tipping point. If David hadn't been working on that project at that time, Windows 3 wouldn't have happened and history would have changed.

Re:Fallacy of the Never Happened

[T-Keith]

"If Henry Ford didn't invent the assembly-line production model, someone else would have invented it in the following decade."

Henry Ford didn't invent the assembly line, it was around long before his time. He was the first to apply the concept to the entire production of the automobile.

Otherwise I agree with your point.

Re:Fallacy of the Never Happened

[swv3752]

If there was no Linux and Linux, then there would have been the Hurd.

Re:Fallacy of the Never Happened

[gothzilla]

Your arguement requires the "what if" to be actually possible. It's not supposed to be anywhere near accurate because that's not the point. The point is to stretch the imagination and invent a story based on pure speculation. To take into account the possibility that someone else would have just done it ruins the exercize and makes the whole thing a dumb waste of time. It's just fun man. Don't ruin the fun.

What if slashdotters all had girlfriends? Don't wreck the fantasy man...

Re:Fallacy of the Never Happened

[Anonymous Coward]

That's it! You're going to Re-Ned-ucation!

Re:Fallacy of the Never Happened

[squiggleslash]

Not even that. Ransom Olds was the first person to apply the concept to the production of the automobile.

Henry Ford's contribution, believe it or not, was to add conveyor belts. Not a lot of people know that.

Re:Fallacy of the Never Happened

[Speare]

If there was no Linux and Linux, then there would have been the Hurd.

So you're saying that Hurd is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike Linux?

Re:Fallacy of the Never Happened

[halltk1983]

Apparently not since even critics of writing style don't write properly. Here in the US, at least, we like to capitalize our letters... Typically it doesn't bug me, but when you are correcting someone else, try to write perfectly, so you don't seem a hypocrite...
---
Oh, I think I'm gonna get flamed on this, and sorry for it being off topic, just hypocrites annoy me.

Re:Fallacy of the Never Happened

[Detritus]

IBM had promised OS/2 support to their PC/AT customers. They couldn't ignore the 80286.

The 16-bit version of OS/2 wasn't a bad system. It was used in ATMs for many years. IBM had a bit of bad luck in that memory prices had spiked at about the same time as OS/2 was released. OS/2 was considered a memory hog for using 4MB of RAM.

Re:Fallacy of the Never Happened

[Anonymous Coward]

I dunno, that Ungh Blungh was a smart one.

Re:Fallacy of the Never Happened

[alleycat0]

My grandmother used to emphasize the absurdity of po siting alternative histories by noting, "If the Queen had balls, she would have been the King!"

Re:Fallacy of the Never Happened

[hawk]

Either that, or we'd hear folks shrieking, "No, it's 'GNUE/FreeBSD.'"

hawk, who prefers the BSD utilities to the BSD/GNU ones

Re:Fallacy of the Never Happened

[gregjmartin]

This is a good point. Most don't understand that many ideas are ideas in and of themselves and are ready to come into being at a given point in time. Many discoveries are nearly simultaneous events. I can think fo two examples. Evolution (Darwin and another guy who was a friend of his but half a world away) and the telephone. I'm sure there are others.

\\Greg
(sig awaiting invention)

Re:Fallacy of the Never Happened

[dutky]

Speare wrote:

There's a fallacy in imagining a world where a particular person never completed a particular invention. In short, it skips the notion that someone else would have invented it instead.

...

The size and complexity of an invention AND its environment are also key: If Linus never wrote a whole and usable kernel and published it, chances are that no other homebrew kernel would have grown with the same fervor. The complexity of the task, and the complexity of the eco-political forces at work, helped to spur the adoption in a unique way.

I agree with most what you wrote, except for this last bit. Back in the early ninties, when Linus released the early versions of Linux, there were plenty of competitors for the Linux kernel: NetBSD, Mark Williams' Coherent, Doug Comer's Xinu, Linux's close cousin MINIX, and (dare I say it) the GNU HURD. While Linus' political skill was helpfull, but the real impetus to the rise of Linux was the easy availability of home computers with full memory management hardware. Once we had 386 and 486 based PCs, it was inevitable that a full version of unix would find its way into the mainstream. If Linux had not been, something else would have taken its place.

<NITPICK> I have one other problem with what your wrote:

If Ungh Blungh didn't invent the wheel, some other proto-Sapiens halfwit would have invented it in the following year. It's not like there was a shortage of halfwits in the golden crescent.

In fact, the wheel was invented in the golden crescent in historical times not in ancient pre-history as you imply. The invention of the wheel must have happend some time around 3000 B.C., which ensures that whoever did invent it was fully human and part of a complex society (a society whose name is, probably, still known today) </NITPICK>

Re:Fallacy of the Never Happened

[mattyrobinson69]

But i think linux wouln't have had as much momentum.

Before i tried linux, the reason i wanted to get rid of windows is because its crap.

Once i got used to linux i realised its not just about stability and security and now i wouldn't use windows on my desktop if it had 100% uptime and no security holes (i know 100% uptime and no security holes is imposible, before anybody points that out).

What im trying to say is, if Windows hadn't have existed the mainstream operating system(s) would have probably been better than windows is, and people like me (i assume people like me make up a lot of numbers) would never have known linux is what they wanted.

Also, i think its safe to assume that people like me* also develop software for linux which otherwise would have been time spent developing for a different platform.

*not me, i cant code hardly anything, but people who switched for the same reasons as me

Re:Fallacy of the Never Happened

[Anonymous Coward]

Though the world would still turn out totally different.

For example, if Bill Blungh invented the wheel and unlike Ungh (who released it into the public domain), Bill patented it; we might *still* not be alowed to use wheels without paying MicroWheel a royalty.

Re:Fallacy of the Never Happened

[san]

To bring this thread further off topic:

Actually, Hilbert published his paper on general relativity at the same time as Einstein. (Einsteins paper was submitted 5 days later than Hilbert's).

The concept of 'curvature of space' (in the sense of differential geometry) had been worked on since Riemann in the 19th century and with Einstein's general relativity it had become clear that the universe doesn't have a Euclidian metric.

From that realization it was only a matter of time before somebody presented a metric which includes gravitational and electromagnetic effects, which is general relativity.

Re:Fallacy of the Never Happened

[fr2asbury]

And if the King had balls the French Revolution might not have happened. Or was that brains? or perhaps just a willingness to compromise like their English cousins. ;-)

Re:Fallacy of the Never Happened

[geekoid]

"From that realization it was only a matter of time before somebody presented a metric which includes gravitational and electromagnetic effects, which is general relativity."

smells like a pun.

Re:Fallacy of the Never Happened

[Anonymous Coward]

That's actually the "Bradbury Butterfly Effect".

I always called it "Clumpy causality", the pheonomena seen in Back to the Future and Sliders. In the real world (or in any reasonable simulation of almost anything), changes to one thing propagate out in an ever expanding circle as time goes by.

But popular entertainment visions of time-travel imply that the scope fo changes are bounded to little clumps, only effecting things very directly impacted. It's as if we're in the matrix, and the program gives people freedom on a small scale, but won't allowed the planned course of history to diverge from the script. (Note that 3 movies which don't make this mistake are Wondeful Life, 12 Monkeys, and Johnny Loves Mangos)

Re:Fallacy of the Never Happened

[san]

LOL!

You're right.

I was in a hurry (at work) when I wrote it.

Re:Fallacy of the Never Happened

[dbIII]

If Henry Ford didn't invent the assembly-line production model

The Romans produced nails in production lines.

Back to the topic - I started using linux for what seems like an unusual reason - windows 3.11 would not support my modem properly. While linux could run the modem at a screaming 14.4kbps windows was software limited to 9.6kbs. If you wanted to get a computer on the net at the time windows was pointless - the net ran *nix.

People with amd64 chips probably have similar feelings about microsoft right now - it isn't just linux that has driver problems.

As for the IBM connection - linux had been around for quite a while before their involvement. I think the only difference would be that things wouldn't quite be as advanced at this point.

Re:Fallacy of the Never Happened

[NutscrapeSucks]

> (i assume people like me make up a lot of numbers)

The "unhappy with Windows" crowd may be the loudmouths, but I believe that it's a minority of Linux's userbase. Most Linux use is on the SERVER for Unix-type applications.

Besides, if OS/2 was the 90% marketshare OS, y'all would just find some reason to hate OS/2 (and as I said in another post, there was plenty to hate on a nuts-n-bolts level).

Re:Fallacy of the Never Happened

[NutscrapeSucks]

Sure, but if OS/2 was 386 from Day 1, that would have removed most of MS's technical incentive for developing Windows 386 or Windows NT.

Remember in those days, MS was IBM's bitch, but the decisions IBM enforced on OS/2 became one of the big reasons MS wanted to break away.

Re:Fallacy of the Never Happened

[juuri]

In fact, the wheel was invented in the golden crescent in historical times not in ancient pre-history as you imply. The invention of the wheel must have happend some time around 3000 B.C., which ensures that whoever did invent it was fully human and part of a complex society (a society whose name is, probably, still known today

That can't possibly be correct as pottery wheels were in use in Mesopotamia as far back as 3500B.C. Mesopotamians also had chariots before 3k B.C.

Re:Fallacy of the Never Happened

[dutky]

Responding to my claim:

The invention of the wheel must have happend some time around 3000 B.C.

juuri wrote:

That can't possibly be correct as pottery wheels were in use in Mesopotamia as far back as 3500B.C. Mesopotamians also had chariots before 3k B.C.

I stand corrected (and I deserve it, for nit-picking). A quick google search comes up with several results that support an invention date between 3500 B.C. and 3200 B.C. I could try to claim that the 3000 B.C. figure was a typo, or that 3500 B.C. is, technically, around 3000 B.C. (what's half a millennium between friends?), but it was really just a sloppy reading of the same google results.

Still, my main point stands: the wheel was not invented in pre-historic times, nor was it invented by pre- or proto-humans: the wheel was invented by people essentially identical to ourselves well after the inventions of agriculture and writing.

Per? Were!

[Malc]

If "ifs" and "ands" *were* pots and pans then tinkers would be rich men.

Wow

[tdemark]

Rube Goldberg would have been proud of that article.

- Tony

Obvious

[tubbtubb]

Clearly, in this scenario,
over time OpenVMS would become the defacto standard
on all macs, and BSD would still be dead, of course.

bs

[essreenim]

Nothing much would be that different. Everyone would hate IBM because they are where MS are (in the real world ; ) ever here of it?). Some othere big corp would have funded early Linux work...

Instead of using Slackware Linux I'd be using FreeBSD or even OpenSolaris or something, big deeeeeeeeeeeeeel....

Move along now, get back to reality...

Re:bs

[Anonymous Coward]

"ever here of it?"

No, but I have heard of it.

The tyranny of a great idea

[ajnsue]

Genius is a dangerous thing you have to be very careful where you point it. When somebody does something great we so desperately want to apply it. That we forget to think about where it should be applied.

Would this have been so bad?

[Gr8Apes]

While the PM interface did have some shortcomings, the OS was rock stable by 94. Heck, the PM shortcomings were minor compared to those of any other OS of the time. Multi-threaded applications, flat memory model, inherently non-fragging file system, the concept of shadows (closest weak analogies are symbolic links or shortcuts) that dissappeared when the root file was deleted, and the addition of extended file attributes that let a file name be anything and still tied to a particular application. A truly great OS with features yet unmatched by any other system, including, dare I say it, Mac OS X. (FYI: I'm about to purchase a Mac, so put the flame throwers away;)

If anyone wants to flame the 2MB cache cache limitation of the file system, do realize that the HPFS386 file system used in the server did not have that restraint. Also recall the time period that this OS came out in. 2MB was a significant portion of 16 or 32 MB of RAM. (Yeah, that's right, OS/2 would run just fine in 32 MB of RAM. Heck, it'd run on 4MB machines if you wanted it to, with the smallest system I recall hearing about was a 2MB system minus the PM.)

I still recall being able to run C&C in a window with sound while running Word 6, and several OS/2 apps with nary a problem. (Pentium Pro in 97).

A trip down Nostalgia Lane once more. Would I run it again? Sure, if it had the applications needed today.

Re:Would this have been so bad?

[Anonymous Coward]

OS/2 would run just fine in 32 MB of RAM. Heck, it'd run on 4MB

As I recall, with 4MB it was more like "walk" than run, and installation was extremely stressful.

2MB? Only for posing, no earthly use (the system would "run", but no apps could be loaded).

Re:Would this have been so bad?

[Gr8Apes]

I agree - the full system would "walk", but you could pare it down quite easily just by removing the PM interface.

Btw, as for <2MB systems, what do you think all your ATMs used until at least 96 or so? I'd call them quite useful.

Re:Would this have been so bad?

[ashSlash]

I loved the OS/2 WPS & PM. Drag & drop colours or fonts to any OS/2 windowed app and they are remembered by the app. Maybe too O-O for some ppl but I liked it a lot myself - I found it quite consistent.

Pity 2.0 didn't ship with a TCP/IP stack, nor multi-user capability (or even logins/passwords for that matter)!

But I still miss the WPS... know it exists on Linux tho.

Re:Would this have been so bad?

[NutscrapeSucks]

Funny how you fail to mention Windows NT, which was superior to OS/2 in every way execept the graphical shell.

The fact is that OS/2 was "gimped" in certain ways -- no integrated networking, no file permissions, no multiple users, various 16-bit legacy limitations in the kernel. This was done on purpose because IBM had no intention of letting Intel-based OSes intrude on it's midrange AS/400 and RS/6000 server business.

When NT hit the market, it immediately started taking over server applicaitons. Something that OS/2 never would or could do. At least for servers, NT has always been the hardware driver, pushing the x86 platform upwards, and Linux has benefited hugely from that.

If Windows never existed, the entire proprietary server market (DEC, SGI, HP, Sun, and IBM) would be very much richer and happier today.

Re:Would this have been so bad?

[chiph]

The thing that freaked me out when starting Win 3.0 development was that the coordinate system origin was in the upper-left of the screen. Which meant that all your drawing was done in quadrant IV -- technically, all "Y" coordinates in Windows should be negative!

Presentation Manager, of course, did it correctly, with the coordinate origin at the bottom-left of the screen, so you were always in quadrant I, and all your coordinate numbers were positive.

Chip H.

Re:Would this have been so bad?

[Gr8Apes]

Ugh. I think I might still have the 23 odd floppies that the TCPIP stack shipped with. (Or they went out with the last clean up) 2.1 was a major improvement.

As for the OO nature of the desktop, I think it was much more intuitive than the current POS's we're forced to endure. I like mail to have these colors. Here's the color cube, select a color, drag it over, voila. Next time I start the app - hey - it's still there. How long would that really have taken to get used to by the masses?

Re:Would this have been so bad?

[Gr8Apes]

Nice Troll. Let's see,

• NT 3.1 - stable OS, absolutely useless. Nothing worked with it. It was an expensive file server, nothing more.
• NT 3.5x. Still somewhat stable if you didn't run anything on it, horribly fragging file system, crap GUI interface, lots of BSODs running MS's own apps.
• NT 4.x. Lots of problems, although many got ironed out by 98 or so.
• Win2K. BSODs reduced, still frags your disk system to hell and back. Usability still sucks rocks, but it's far better than previous versions.
• Win XP. Further reduction of BSODs. Nice eye candy makes a P4 3.4GHz machine (not invented at the time) run like the current Pentium Pro 200 with NT 4.x.

OS/2 workstation was intended as a single user workstation. The multi-user server version was dumbed down for single user use. When OS/2 first came out, the internet, such as it was, was comprised of a few thousand people on line. My first download of USENET on my OS/2 box comprised a mere 1200 newsgroups. IOW, network connectivity was far from the ubiquitous requirement it is today.

I personally don't recall too many 16 bit legacy limitations. The 512MB VM limitation was not related to OS/2's 2GB memory limit. (I don't recall if OS/2 supported the 4GB limit, I guess I could pull my OS/2 server docs out, but they're packed away).

When NT came out, just about NO ONE bought it. MS reduced the price several times and, IIRC, had to use their vendor contract muscle to get NT preloaded on certain classes of machines when those machines shipped. NT was on the road to complete failure until that point. Actuall, thanks to IBM's win32 module being able to run Word 6, NT seemed doomed to certain failure until MS pulled that Office 97 reverse incompatibility trick.

OS/2 not a server? Do you have the slightest idea what you're talking about? The main reason people loved OS/2 in corporate environments was the ability to setup any server software you needed on your OS/2 box. SMTP server because your corporate SMTP server was down 50% of the time? No problem. FTP Server? No problem. SMB share? Again, no problem.

Your last assertion is unsupported. OS/2 server sold for about the same price as an equivalently licensed NT server OS. (NT Workstation came about with NT 4.0, again MS following someone else;) So, to make the assertion that without NT, the market would be richer than today, I say no. OS/2's major cost component, whether you wish to believe it or not, was the file system royaltly of $86 for every copy of OS/2 sold. That royalty went to MS, btw. It ended around 2000. Given the last price of OS/2 that I'm aware of in 1996, that would have dropped the price of OS/2 to $50.

Re:Would this have been so bad?

[Anonymous Coward]

Strangely enough, that was the natural way to do things. CRT monitor refresh goes from top to bottom, left to right.

Re:Would this have been so bad?

[CableModemSniper]

That coordinate system (origin in upper left corner) is pretty much par for the course in most APIs AFAIK.

Re:Would this have been so bad?

[Anonymous Coward]

> The thing that freaked me out when starting Win 3.0 development was that the coordinate system origin was in the upper-left of the screen.

Yes, and it increased to the right and down. This is how graphical terminals typically behaved at least a decade before Windows (there was never a standard, but it was a convention). Probably because it's how text terminals addressed character cells, so pixels simply scaled it up.

Besides, GDI let you set a graphic context's origin anywhere you want and to whatever scale you want. Don't think it let you change the axis directions tho.

Re:Would this have been so bad?

[Gonzoman]

from "OS/2 Programmer's Guide" (forward by Bill Gates): "I believe OS/2 is destined to be the most important operating system, and possibly program, of all time. As the successor to DOS, which has over 10,000,000 systems in use, it creates incredible opportunities for everyone involved with PCs."

I loved OS/2. I ran Warp on a 486 with 8M memory and it ran just fine. It also ran windows apps much better than windows did.

Re:Would this have been so bad?

[Locutus]

not sure why a CRT refreshing from top to bottom means much with regard to the API cord system but FWIW, a 1970's lineprinter output that way and IMO, it's what Microsoft followed. Oh wait, wasn't the FAT filesystem based on 1970's floppy disk filesystems too. How long did Microsoft milk that ancient tech for? Where's the "innovation"? Sounds like copying to me. ;-)

LoB

Re:Would this have been so bad?

[Anonymous Coward]

....and so will we... well, maybe not richer but much happier...

Re:Would this have been so bad?

[NutscrapeSucks]

> When NT came out, just about NO ONE bought it
> OS/2 not a server?

Meanwhile back in reality, NT Server was outselling OS/2 Server 100:1 after a year. IBM was not serious about the x86 server market, for obvious reasons.

> Do you have the slightest idea what you're talking about?

I worked with OS/2 as server, BTW. TCP/IP cost a boatload extra, the software selection was generally poor, and it wasn't particularly stable (less so than NT, but I think that was primarily drivers). We had various problems that were related to 16MB limits and so on, indicating 16-bit code.

Anyway, the point wasn't that OS/2 was so horrible. Only that it wasn't designed to be a server, nor was it seriously positioned in that market.

Re:Would this have been so bad?

[Gr8Apes]

NT Server didn't start outselling OS/2 until somewhere around 97. That's about 6 years after OS/2 2.0 debuted.

OS/2 Server 2.3 comes with TCPIP included. (I have the retail box at home) Software selection is determined by your needs. It is rock stable, with run times in the year(s) range. NT was weekly reboots if you did anything more than look at it. (Note NT 4.0 had a memory paging overflow bug that guaranteed corrupted memory after the 20 bit internal page counter rolled over - I'd link it but am too lazy to go digging for references to a problem that existed in 96/97.)

You had 16MB limits? I don't know with what. If you had problems with 16 bit code, it most likely was that you weren't using approved drivers. The only thing I recall being subject to 16 bit limitations was the HPFS file system shipped with "workstation" OS/2, not the server package.

The situation you describe is as it existed in 1990/91, when NT wasn't even in the picture and networking wasn't a true requirement yet for most of the world.

I will agree that OS/2 was not marketed as a server platform, because IBM really wanted that market for their big iron machines. They missed the boat on that one, and who knows what could have happened had the infighting at IBM not essentially helped kill off OS/2. I would still hold that the commodization of server quality hardware would have pretty continued on its uninterrupted path, as Intel would want to take ever bigger chunks out of the other machines lucrative markets. Of course, we'd all be looking at $3000 Itaniums now....

Re:Would this have been so bad?

[Anonymous Coward]

You are talking about NT right? The operating system that had no clear cut goals for the first year and a half it was being written....? And showed it's lack of direction IMHO to all end users via BSOD's, and admin headaches out the wazoo

Re:Would this have been so bad?

[Vitriol Angst]

OS/2 warp was "gimped" because Microsoft was its developer. It was a very stupid move by IBM to even allow MS on the premises. They should have just hired away the promising talent the way the smart companies do.

NT was developed with research that was paid for by IBM.

DEC, SGI, HP, Sun, and IBM would have course been more successful in their proprietary OSes, but none would have been as good at monopoly control. These companies are more developers than software pirates. Microsoft has been relentless in destroying rivals and marginalizing or stealing promising IP.

Linux would be in about the same position as now. OS2 would still be around. Apple would be gone, but all the developers would have ended up working at NeXT, which would have become the #2 operating system with a market share of 35%.

We would have full 3d computing environments and no "clippy". Networking wouldn't suck.

Re:Would this have been so bad?

[Minna Kirai]

not sure why a CRT refreshing from top to bottom means much with regard to the API cord system but FWIW,

Simple. The first pixel to be refreshed is in the upper-left, so that's naturally pixel 0, so that's where (0,0) is. If you write graphics code at a low-level, it's more concise to have 0,0 in the upper left. Otherwise, you're continually subtracting or adding buffer_height to every y component.

Re:Would this have been so bad?

[Vitriol Angst]

Our office has OS/2 Warp still running the air conditioning system. That is pretty dependable.

I reinstall the OS on my Windows box and laptop about every 2 years.

The main issue with OS/2 is that the newer Word and Excel files couldn't open in the old Word and Excel, and that most vendors couldn't sell Windows preloaded if they also distributed OS/2. This bundling was the same issue brought up in a lawsuit that went nowhere years later.

Go back and research it... the issue was that vendors COULD NOT DISTRIBUTE OS/2, or they would be smashed by MS. Go back and see if Dell, Compaq or HP sold OS/2.

OK, I could be imaging a false past, but that's what I remember. So the original point about No Microsoft is the same thing that killed OS/2. Bundling.

Re:Would this have been so bad?

[Billly Gates]

What?

OS/2 runs fine on 484sx computers with 4-8 megs of ram. Can NT ran on that?

Multimedia apps? Video's were always smooth on OS/2 and choppy on the same hardware with NT 3.51.

Reliability? NT 4 had graphics run on ring0 and a device driver could take down the whole system.

OS/2 had Rexx support and if you decompile the code and look at the assembly instructions, you will see optimizations which look almost hand written instead of through a compiler.

NT is a dog in comparison.

Re:Would this have been so bad?

[dbIII]

Funny how you fail to mention Windows NT, which was superior to OS/2 in every way execept the graphical shell.

If you play the game of comparing NT5 (win2k) against an early OS/2 you will always get NT to win thanks to an extra decade of work. Early versions of NT were dismal, and although it was actually multiuser it was very hard to get it to do things that way until 3.51.

When NT hit the market, it immediately started taking over server applicaitons. Something that OS/2 never would or could do.

I suggest you compare that statement with reality - which is that both ran on cheap servers and IBM never looked committed to OS/2 - which made people nervous. NT was also dirt cheap for a quick and nasty single purpose little server on cheap hardware. Anyone who ran multiple major services on an NT box didn't do it for long - so we ended up with rooms full of servers for PDCs, BDCs, mail, comms, comms, comms, comms (NT is crap with more than 4 modems - software limitation) , database backend, database frontend, even database midend in one place. This big collection of struggling beige boxes and the people to service them still cost less than a sun that could do the lot with ease. Thus NT took off, becuse despite it's limitations it did the job, was cheap, ran on cheap hardware, and was advertised in glossy business magazines. OS/2 missed the wave to a degree, but I still see it every time I go to my local airport or railway station - the servers running the screens that give arrival times etc run OS/2 on pc hardware.

At least for servers, NT has always been the hardware driver, pushing the x86 platform upwards

Be serious - you would rarely get hardware drivers for NT at the same time as the Win9* series - the Win9* series and 3D games is what really pushed the hardware of the PC platform. Only now that all new realeases are on a breed of NT can we be sure that the hardware is going to work with a server OS without reading the fine print.

Re:Would this have been so bad?

[Locutus]

what I ment was that I've never had to worry about when the video device driver, or device itself, refreshed a pixel on the screen. Turning pixels on in the GDI is one thing but controlling the hardware directly is something full featured OS's have done for years. So it really doesn't matter which way the display is refreshed so long as it's refreshed quicker than it's updated in the code.

LoB

Re:Would this have been so bad?

[Minna Kirai]

what I ment was that I've never had to worry about when the video device driver, or device itself, refreshed a pixel on the screen.

True, and since you're too young to have experienced that history, we're explaining it to you.

(0,0) is in the upper-left technically because that's where most languages start writing from, and computer graphics systems are descended from line printer/tty output.

Because English is written from the upper-left, printers started from the upper left of a page, and then text output displays started from the upper-left too. Then when the buffer of characters was replaced with a buffer of pixels, they started from the same position- upper left. Then when people wrote programs addressing that video, it was simpler (and faster executing) to use the same coordinate system as the hardware- in the olden days, a useless subtraction opcode before writing each pixel was a measurable waste of time.

Whether positive Y is up or down is just a matter of conventions. There was no natural breaking point where it was appropriate to say "Yeah, today we'll flip to the reverse meaning of everything we've been using before"; it'd be a little like asking electricians today to swap the meaning of + and - terminals.

Re:Would this have been so bad?

[Locutus]

sorry, I didn't know you were going back THAT far to justify why today, the system is 0,0 in the upper left. I know all about line printers and text terminals. What I was getting at was that once we left the text based UI, that system did not have to exist but then again, unless you're doing graphing, top left is where everything starts... In English anyways( as you mentioned ).

Personally, I liked how OS/2 had 0,0 in the lower left. It just felt right. Probably because of all the schooling I've had used the same system. But hey, were still using the freak'n QWERTY keyboard too....

It is exactly like asking electricians to swap + and - but since OS/2 isn't around much, we're stuck doing just that. Time to move on. Have a good one.

LoB

Re:Would this have been so bad?

[Anonymous Coward]

Which ring did OS/2 graphic drivers run in, pray tell?

Nice way to show that you had no point other than to recycle some 10 year old FUD (yes, your act is that old).

Re:Would this have been so bad?

[NutscrapeSucks]

Sure, NT owned the "cheap and nasty" segment, but IBM didn't even bother to make a serious effort, even tho they co-owned all the PDC/BDC/Whatever stuff. (And to argue that IBM didn't have the resources or technology is silly.)

> 3D games is what really pushed the hardware

Did you totally forget that we're talking about servers? 3D games didn't create 4-Proc Pentium Pro boxes, PCI RAID cards, or rackmount x86 boxes. NT did that.

Re:Would this have been so bad?

[dbIII]

3D games didn't create 4-Proc Pentium Pro boxes, PCI RAID cards, or rackmount x86 boxes. NT did that.

Remember Novell, SCO unix and SGI has been running on intel for a while - but without the games pushing up the processor speed of the mass market the cheap servers would not be cheap and the raid cards would not be built for slow machines. NT had an impact, but giving it sole credit is contary to what has happened - all this has happened over many years and NT has only really had a big market share over the last six years - proir to that you did see raid cards in pcs.

Remember Back To The Future 2?

[Xpilot]

Where Old Biff steals the DeLorean and gives the Sports Almanac to young Biff? Then Doc and Marty come back to a hellish timeline where Biff is a billionaire.

I think something like that happened, where old Bill goes back in time and gives young Bill some tips on how to get lucky in the IT world, plus some source code for Windows 3.0. And we're living in the nightmarish timeline that was created.

Only Doc and Marty can save us now. Or Linux. Whichever does it first :)

Re:Remember Back To The Future 2?

[Otter]

I love a few Microsoft apps (Excel, Entourage) and grudgingly cope with being forced to use XP and IE at work.

But there is absolutely no freaking way I'd be getting in a Microsoft time machine. (Or a Linux one, for that matter.)

Re:Remember Back To The Future 2?

[Dun Malg]

But there is absolutely no freaking way I'd be getting in a Microsoft time machine. (Or a Linux one, for that matter.)

Hey, if you don't trust the Linux Time Machine project, why don't you download the source and fix it rather than complaining about it! :)

Re:Remember Back To The Future 2?

[kingj02]

Where Old Biff steals the DeLorean and gives the Sports Almanac to young Biff? Then Doc and Marty come back to a hellish timeline where Biff is a billionaire.

Why was Old Biff able to go back to 1956 and then return to the normal future, but Doc and Marty couldn't?

Re:Remember Back To The Future 2?

[jsprigg]

ah...

When Doc and Marty were in 1955 - they managed to take back the Almanac. Near the end of #2, Doc was floating above Marty when the DeLorean got hit by lightening and sent him back to the old west. The electronics were fried... and Doc had no way of getting back to the future. Then #3 came along....

Re:Remember Back To The Future 2?

[Anonymous Coward]

Heh...I had a similar, albeit different reaction to this article...something along the lines of:

I think we've figured out who the first cyborg killing machine sent back from the future will target.

Re:Remember Back To The Future 2?

[istewart]

As soon as Old Biff returns to 2015 (from 1955, natch), we see him stumbling out of the DeLorean and collapsing behind a dumpster after he breaks his cane. A cutscene shows Old Biff fading away, as in the altered timeline he is killed sometime before 2015 due to his corruption. So the timeline changes around him as he returns, and Doc and Marty aren't affected as they weren't part of the change. Kind of a convoluted way of doing things, and somewhat contradictory to the first movie, thus leading to confusion if you don't pay close attention.

Umm, no

[kuwan]

I don't believe that Microsoft ever intended to push OS/2 even if apps couldn't run in protected mode. Microsoft was going to push Windows no matter how crappie or inferior it was to OS/2. Their flirtation with OS/2 (telling people that it was the future and that they should support it) only made other large developers of the time, namely Wordperfect, spend their time on creating OS/2 versions of their software instead of Windows versions.

When Microsoft put their full push into Windows they were able to put MS Word (along with their other apps) out ahead of everyone else and drive Wordperfect into obscurity. That's not to say that Wordperfect didn't expect this. I used to work with a former Wordperfect executive and they knew full well what Microsoft was up to but they thought that the combination of Wordperfect and IBM would be able to beat Microsoft and so they put pretty much everything into OS/2. By the time they realized that OS/2 wasn't going to catch on it was too late, and the rest is history.

--
It works.
Free Flat Screens | Free Mini Macs

Re:Umm, no

[Anonymous Coward]

I strip sigs for a few reasons. One of these reasons is so I don't have to see all of those freewhatever.com links.

Just a polite request, please don't copy/paste your ads into each message like that. Just put it in your sig. Thanks.

Re:Umm, no

[Anonymous Coward]

Meanwhile back in reality, WordPerfact was one of the first major ISVs to dump OS/2, right after v2.1 shipped. Furthermore, WPPM, when it existed, was a pile of shit.

Conclusion: there was no WP/IBM alliance, at least not one that produced anything.

Re:Umm, no

[drnlm]

If you look at the history of the office suite contenders, it was only with Win95, and the simulatenous release of MS Office 95, with 32bit features wel ahead of the competition, that MS was really able to kickstart its monopoly.

Win95 only happened, however, because, Windows 3 had a reasonable market share. The article argues, that, without protected mode support coming when it did, Microsoft would have abadoned that line and gone with OS/2.

Re:Umm, no

[Anonymous Coward]

Heh I was wondering how he had such a large sig.. I don't block sigs but you answered it for me.. Its not a real sig

Anyway, a slashdot sig wouldn't fit that so he pasted it

They are annoying.. But I have one myself (in my sig, not pasted).. I got my free ipod back in sept and now im trying for a mini mac

Re:Umm, no

[NullProg]

I don't believe that Microsoft ever intended to push OS/2 even if apps couldn't run in protected mode. Microsoft was going to push Windows no matter how crappie or inferior it was to OS/2.

Thats not what my offical Microsoft OS/2 Box says. Seriously, Windows 3.0 ran on low end machines in real mode (I ran it on a PC Transporter installed in my Apple IIgs). OS/2 needed at least a 286 with 1 Meg of Ram (easily a $5000 system back in the day). When Microsoft saw that they could sell more copies of Windows 3.0, they chose to make a buck rather than to make a good product. Something Microsoft still chooses to do even today.

Enjoy,

Re:Umm, no

[jbolden]

They didn't put everything they had into OS/2. They barely tried to move it at all.
-- They didn't ship OS/2 with IBM systems and on most it wasn't even offered
-- They didn't make OS/2 inexpensive for other OEMs (or alternately free)
-- They didn't make OS/2 "killer apps" that IBM owned free or low cost
-- The PS/2 division wanted OS/2 to be Microchannel only.
-- The OS/2 division never decided to simply include licenses of Windows with OS/2 and instead for an API approach without dedicated anywhere near the resources required to reverse engineer a very complex and rapidly changing OS.

etc...

OS/2 lost because of IBM.

As for Wordperfect there were wordprocessors for OS/2 which took advantage of OS/2 specific features like DeScribe did. Wordperfect for OS/2 never had anything which was difficult/impossible to do under windows or DOS (for example built in type 1 fonts, making the app fully multithreaded....)

Re:Umm, no

[Locutus]

They didn't put everything they had into OS/2. They barely tried to move it at all.
-- They didn't ship OS/2 with IBM systems and on most it wasn't even offered
-- They didn't make OS/2 inexpensive for other OEMs (or alternately free)

Well, they had to pay Microsoft big licensing fees for stuff in OS/2. Someone mentioned $80/unit sold. Why do you think Ferenge was shipped? It used the Windows code/license you already had on your hard disk. So they really couldn't give it away or sell it cheaply. Great news for Microsoft and bad for IBM. Heck, Microsoft would know exactly how well OS/2 was selling too. Do you think the 3 year long Chicago/Windows 95 extravagence would have existed if OS/2 was not selling millions of copies per month AT RETAIL?

-- They didn't make OS/2 "killer apps" that IBM owned free or low cost

they did some but left it up to the market to fill in the blanks. When they saw something they liked, they purchased the product or the company and made it available in or with OS/2

-- The PS/2 division wanted OS/2 to be Microchannel only.
-- The OS/2 division never decided to simply include licenses of Windows with OS/2 and instead for an API approach without dedicated anywhere near the resources required to reverse engineer a very complex and rapidly changing OS.

What do you think the WinOS2 subsystem was? It WAS WINDOWS and WAS LICENSED from Microsoft. IBM fixed it so it was faster and more stable than DOS/Windows but it was Windows. What they had to reverse engineer was what Microsoft was doing UNDER Windows to make it not run on OS/2. IBM had OS/2 running Win95 apps until Microsoft found out. Then Microsoft modified the system so a very small portion of the resourses for each app would load up at the 1GB address. OS/2 only supported 512MB of virtual memory and therefore could nolonger run Win95 applications.

It looks like you fell for too much of MS FUD.

Lob

Re:Umm, no

[Locutus]

agreed, WordPerfect/2 was a WinAPI application which used a new API in OS/2 called MIRROR or MERGE or something like that. MIRROR allowed much of the WinAPI source code to be compiled and run on OS/2. It was kind like WINE is today on Linux, but it required recompiling the WinAPI apps IIRC. It was not really a native OS/2 application but did have some specific native OS/2 capabilities like WPS integration and some threading of file loading and saving.

LoB

Re:Umm, no

[jbolden]

Ferenge I guess refers to 2.1 which did use your existing license so they wouldn't have had to pay Microsoft anything.

As for the killer apps I can't think of a single example where IBM bought and gave it away. Can you name some?

Finally the x86 processor (in 2/386 mode) had pages. There is no "above and below" those are 8086 concepts. Memory wasn't flat on Windows 95.

Re:Umm, no

[Locutus]

Even without Microsofts Windows code, IBM still paid Microsoft for other license code in OS/2. The only way I know this is from hearing IBMers saying this when asked about open sourcing OS/2.

I don't know about "killer" apps but a quick example which comes to mind is FootPrint Works. It became IBM Works. There was some Lotus stuff too but I don't think that really counts. :-/

whatever, again, IBMers said that they had beta versions of Win95OS2 running until Microsoft changed the resource compiler to put a small portion of the resources above the 512MB address space and therefore Win95OS2 stopped working. Microsoft built Win95 with 1GB of virtual address space and they knew OS/2 supported up to 512MB of virtual address space.

LoB

I have to say...

[angst7]

OS/2 Warp was goodness in the extreme. (Bugs aside). I ran it for a while trying to stay away from Windows and knowing that someting would drag me away from DOS eventually. The interface and capabilities of OS/2 made me a bit giddy I recall. I still have rather bizarre memories of decentered happieness while running it. Weird.

Of course my memories from around that same time of running early slackware linux are even better. It was on a 386 linux box with 5MB memory that I first saw the (then new) WWW in Mosaic on X. Windows couldn't grant me that pleasure at that time. (Trumpet winsock my ass)

Re:I have to say...

[Gr8Apes]

2.3 and 2.4 were pretty darn nice. I don't really recall too many issues with bugs. At least not in comparison to MS's bugs. I recall rebooting my machine 3 times in a year. I'd often hear colleagues scream in frustration as hours of work dissappeared in the all too familiar BSOD. (Well, familiar to them... ;)

Had IBM capitulated to MS Office's underhanded call for memory @ 2GB when starting, even though it'd never use it, we might still be running OS/2.
That manuever made Office95 incompatible with OS/2, and along with the then incompatible default file formats, the beginning of the end was near for OS/2.

Re:I have to say...

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux was more of a hacker system. And it had Mosaic. But OS/2 basic GUI was tremendously better (and in many things still is today)

Re:I have to say...

[squiggleslash]

Of course, if you live in this parallel universe, you have to ask if OS/2 Warp would have been as decent as it was, had Windows 3.0 not happened.

When OS/2 2.0 came out, IBM had made impressive steps at improving the operating system to a point that people could actually like it (1.x, even with Presentation Manager, was widely considered to be awful.) Even then though, it was released after the IBM/Microsoft split, and much of it appeared to be an attempt to play catch-up with Windows. By 3.0 (Warp), IBM was marketing it as the solution to all Windows problems.

Unquestionably, it was a better operating system by that point, but it was several years of development in competition with Windows that lead to that point. Back in 1990, it sucked. And, with no competitor, I wonder if it'd have improved as fast as it did. OS/2 2.0 might have continued to be an 80286 compatable operating system, development would have remained slower than intended, with warring and not exactly harmonous groups developing different parts working for the bickering "allies" (IBM and Microsoft) that made the OS/2 alliance.

My prediction

[Anonymous Coward]

What do you mean biblical?

Fire and brimstone raining down from the sky...

40 days of darkness...

Earthquakes,floods...

Cats and dogs living together, mass hysteria!

OS/2

[Anonymous Coward]

they should rip the os/2 interface instead

10 years ago it was better than either is now (at least in usability)

If it wasn't for IBM, Linux would be dead...

[OwlWhacker]

Sometimes, it's fun to play the "what if" game

Sometimes it's FUD to play the "what if" game.

IBM would never have put weight behind Linux because it had its own operating system to push.

That's like saying Linux is only where it is today because of IBM. Yes, IBM has put a lot into Linux, but I don't think that IBM alone has made Linux a major player.

And what about Sun (a lover of IP like Microsoft)? Sun has its own version of Linux, and has its own OS. Sun has given to the Open Source community too.

Re:If it wasn't for IBM, Linux would be dead...

[Anonymous Coward]

IBM and Apple are the ones that are IP lovers... They're the ones who use pattents to take money from other companies... shut them down... There is a reason why Apple is said to be a company of lawyers.

Re:If it wasn't for IBM, Linux would be dead...

[swv3752]

OS/2 was not buggy. If there was no win95, then there would be much less impetus to move to Linux. The ripples of having no Windows is huge. Expand you imagination and look beyond the simple things of IBM not pushing Linux, and see how Linux would not be at a stage for IBM to desire it.

I'm a big Linux supporter, but I am honest enough to admit that if OS/2 was around instead of Win98, I would not have been using Linux.

Re:If Windows had never existed on the home deskto

[datadriven]

Then Linux types would have had to shamelessly rip off the MacOS interface instead of the Windows one.

Maybe they'd call it Gnome, or something like that.

or maybe

[b17bmbr]

maybe microsoft would have adopted linux, maybe we'd have to come up with clever icons for ibm, and be talking about the big blue screen of death. microsoft's control lay ints api's and doc formats. without that control, eventually, they'd have to split from ibm.

Re:Natalie Portman Day?

[b1t r0t]

That's because your slashdot user ID is > 250000.

Linux would still be here. Here's the logic:

[pandrijeczko]

1. Linus Torvalds released the Linux kernel in 1991 because "he was unsatisfied with the operating systems of the time" (as I think the quote goes from "Just For Fun").

2. He wrote the Linux kernel on a 386 PC - yeah, i guess he could have been using SCO UNIX on it but I seem to recall he was using MS-DOS a bit also.

3. Richard Stallman started GNU during the 1980s, emacs, gcc, etc were already in widespread usage and being handed out as free source code.

Therefore, the catalyst that sparked off Linux doesn't appear to have been Windows 3.0 anyway.

Sure, with more OS/2 users, there may not have been so many people developing for Linux but it would still be here.

Re:Linux would still be here. Here's the logic:

[swv3752]

There is a reason so many Linux users are fervent MS haters. They were former MS users and had bad expeirences. If Win95 had the stability of OS/2 or Win2k, there would not be that many Linux users.

Re:Linux would still be here. Here's the logic:

[Locutus]

who knows what would have happened if Linux had tried MicroPort UNIX or even Concensus UNIX. I had MicroPort UNIX for 286 in the mid/late 80's and then Consensus 386 in the late 80's. Multi-user too but only Consensus had the new XWindow system. It was pretty cool having 3 people using one 286 or 386 but it was not cheap. WordPerfect for Unix was $500 while the DOS versin was $250. Almost everything was 2x more expensive for the UNIX version compared to the DOS version but I think that was mostly because UNIX was the business/workstation OS and they could get that kind of money.

Had Linus and the GNU people been about 3-5 years sooner with their product, Microsoft may have ended with DOS and Windows never seen daylight. Microsoft Zenix would be their product today and they would be 10th the size they are today.

LoB

Re:Linux would still be here. Here's the logic:

[NutscrapeSucks]

Linus has said in interviews that is main imputuses for writing Linus was:

A) MS & IBM fucking up with the i386 transition (He was/is a pretty big fan.)
B) The cost of proprietary Unix OSes.

If this had happened a year later, Linus probably would have just bought OS/2 2.0 or WinNT and ported some Unix tools to it.

Re:Linux would still be here. Here's the logic:

[yuri benjamin]

Sure, with more OS/2 users, there may not have been so many people developing for Linux but it would still be here.

I'm not a developer, but I do fit this demographic. I turned to linux only after IBM stopped developing OS/2 Warp.

Re:Linux would still be here. Here's the logic:

[Locutus]

could very well be. You know, it was pretty sweet running XFree86OS2 on OS/2. I used to develop apps in that environment and then copy the code down the the HPUX systems in the Labs and test them on the real hardware. Heck, I even ran X Client apps on OS/2 and exported the display to UNIX workstations when needed since some of the hardware I/O was only on the OS/2 systems.

Holger did an incredible job on that and it was pretty darn fast. Tests showed it only took a 10% hit from a full Linux/XFree86 env but on OS/2, it ran with the OS/2 apps, DOS, and Windows apps. OS/2 was a pretty nice system in that you could pick the platform you needed/wanted to develop and run in, and do it all on OS/2 and all at the same time. Loved having the Korne shell and vim on OS/2 also. :-)

LoB

Microsoft & Skin Cancer

[Prince Vegeta SSJ4]

Why Global Warming may be the first question you ask, but think about it. Many of us know that the shorter the wavelength of light, the higher the energy. We also know that blue and ultraviolet light has a shorter wavelength than red and yellow.

Therefore, due to the increased number of blue radiation given off by windows machines, there has been an exponential increase in short wavelength, high energy electromagnetic radiation - which of course has been linked to skin cancer.

Re:Microsoft & Skin Cancer

[iggymanz]

you don't understand, a Windows machine only bluescreens when it crashes. But in OS/2, blue is THE DEFAULT SCREEN COLOR! If IBM had won the os wars with Microsft, our skins and our world would be bathed in higher frequency light. Thanks and praise to Bill Gates, who saved us from the blue of Big Blue.

-4 for me please, for offtopic, silly, and stupid

Ford didn't develop it

[madaxe42]

Colt developed the first production line model, for making their famous 6 shooters, 30 years before Ford applied the model to car manufacture.

Re:Ford didn't develop it

[SeaFox]

Colt developed the first production line model, for making their famous 6 shooters,

Not sure about that. I think you are thinking of interchangable parts. That was a development by Colt and made the repair of firearms much easier for everyone. Although this site states the idea was developed long before then.

What if...

[Anonymous Coward]

Bill Gate had never been born? Am I the only one who constantly fantasizes about this little gem? :)

Re:What if...

[Anonymous Coward]

A month in the lab saves an hour in the library every time...

Re:What if...

[Cro Magnon]

Linus knew all about BSD. He knew that it was debatable whether it WAS freely available. The legalities hadn't been resolved at that time. THAT is why he didn't use it, rather than any lack of knowledge about it.

I would expect this from a microsiftite

[bahamat]

IBM would never have put weight behind Linux because it had its own operating system to push.

FUD FUD FUD. IBM does have it's own operating system to push. It's called AIX, which IBM is swiftly moving away from and pushing Linux so much in favor over. I don't recall IBM making any suggestions that anyone should (or even could) run Linux as a desktop alternative. Even after proclaiming Linux "ready for the desktop" not a single IBM PC was ever sold with Linux as an option, let alone the default or only OS.

No, IBM is only interested in Linux as a replacemnt for AIX. If Windows 3.0 never existed IBM still would have found Linux and they still would have put it on their servers. The only difference is that OS/2 or NeXT would be the dominant desktop OS, and the world wouldn't be overrun with spyware, virii and other malware.

Re:I would expect this from a microsiftite

[erikharrison]

What the hell are you talking about?

There is not FUD. Fear? Uncertainty? Doubt? He didn't say a damn thing against Linux, and even argues that the business model which pushed IBM to invest in Linux (and which was partially caused by Linux) would still exist. They'd just open up OS/2 instead of porting OS/2 code (and AIX code, since those code bases have intermingled) to Linux.

It's not unreasonable. OS/2 already has a strong presense in enterprise workstations, and that's a strong consulting market. A stronger OS/2 very possibly might have kept IBM (and only IBM mind you) out of the Linux game.

Stop yelling just because someone said something you didn't understand.

Re:I would expect this from a microsiftite

[sgtrock]

I don't recall IBM making any suggestions that anyone should (or even could) run Linux as a desktop alternative.

Well, they are selling thin clients as POS terminals. Does that count as a desktop? :)

Re:I would expect this from a microsiftite

[PurpleXanathar]

The world would be overrun with spyware, virii and other malware for OS/2, or for NeXT or for any other OS. Noone in the world is able to release an OS without bugs and the only thing which may change is the latency between bug discovery and the needed patch. Average users would still run their OS as administrator/root/whatever because it's easier. And they would not update anyway because.. hey it's boring! And they will use an empty password because it's simpler! I use mainly Windows, both at home and at work. 0 virii, no spyware, no malware. In those things the responsibility of the OS is 2%, the responsibility of the (un)conscious and/or (un)educated user is 98%.

Re:I would expect this from a microsiftite

[bahamat]

Sorry, instead of saying FUD, what I really meant to say was "bullshit". FUD is more polite though.

I understand what he said. I think he's full of shit.

Re:I would expect this from a microsiftite

[swv3752]

IBM has sold Thinkpads in the past with Linxu preinstalled. http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,17117,00 .asp

Apparently from a quick search at IBM's site they no longer do so.

Re:I would expect this from a microsiftite

[snorklewacker]

> FUD FUD FUD.

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Anyway, If IBM had gained dominance on the desktop, it's likely they would have leveraged the positions of one market (desktop) to the advantage of the other (server) the same way Microsoft did and does now. There wouldn't be a lot of room for Linux in there.

Also, if my aunt had balls, she'd be my uncle. Maybe Sun would have picked up Linux.

Re:I would expect this from a microsiftite

[Billly Gates]

Aix is not for consumers or pc hardware. Its a specialized OS.

My guess is IBM would prefer AIX for servers because they could soke in more revenue vs cheap os/2-intel hardware.

IBM probably would find a way of crippling OS/2 if it canabalized their mainframe and AIX sales somehow.

Keep in mind IBM loves Linux because
a.) it hurts Microsoft
b.) Puts a damper on proprietary win32 coding
c.) They can cut costs by trashing AIX since Linux hernel hackers work for free.
d.) Programers are familiar with it because they run it at home which makes it easy for porting.

IBM already sells its own version of Linux if you purchase their powerpc/power based blade servers. they are hoping to dump AIX on that platform and as Linux matures they will sell Linux for their rs6000 boxes.

Re:I would expect this from a microsiftite

[raftpeople]

There IS a difference between the stability and level of security of different operating systems. Some are very secure due to their design (e.g. AS400, and others I'm sure) Some are not, due to their design/roots (e.g. DOS/Windows) Why is the responsibility placed on the user? Why require the user to perform activities that could easily (and has been many times in the history of computing) be built into the OS? While you are correct that a very secure system can be administered poorly, why not start with a stable and secure OS to begin with?

Re:I would expect this from a microsiftite

[raftpeople]

FYI: IBM has offered Linux for the RS6000 and AS400 for quite some time now.

Sales Engineer!

[Anonymous Coward]

I was a "Sales Engineer" at Computer City back in '97. Straight out of High School! I upgraded/repaired computers and sold crap to the clueless masses. So, the only degree you need to be an engineer, is a HS Diploma! :)

Re:Sales Engineer!

[Anonymous Coward]

If you put that on your resume, you can be charged with fraud.

Re:Sales Engineer!

[Anonymous Coward]

No he can't! He really was a "sales engineer". Of course, everyone knows "sales engineer" is a meaningless marketroid term.

Start as you mean to go on

[ioliver]

>When David got in the next day (at around 8AM), >he saw that his machine had crashed, so he knew >that Steve had come by and seen it. Golly, the world's first ever UAE (what GPFs were called when Windows was young and people didn't even dare to dream of BSODs) and Steve got to see it personally. I hope he gets to personally see all the results from me hitting "Send Error Report" half a dozen times a day. Ian

If This Were Marvel Comics' "What If"

[vjmurphy]

Then this would beget violent OS Wars, in which many many secondary heroes, like Ant Man, Scarlet Witch, Iron Man and Bruce Perens would be annihilated by enemies unknown.

In the end, only Captain America, Wolverine, Spider-Man and Dr. Strange would survive, only to discover their true enemy: a parallel universe Bill Gates, bringing with him Ultra Dimensional Windows Mega Super XP Hyperforce Go 5.4 with him.

Mwahahahahaha!

Re:If This Were Marvel Comics' "What If"

[Anonymous Coward]

Iron Man? Secondary? I say thee nay! Iron Man is top tier!

Re:If This Were Marvel Comics' "What If"

[Lachrymite]

Well it's a good thing you're sticking up for him, Thor.

Linux never would have existed

[mungtor]

In a way Linux owes it's entire existence to Microsoft, and not just because of the anti-monopoly/anti-corporation backlash.

In reality, it has been the demands of Microsoft operating systems that have pushed the x86 architecture so hard that it is now possible to actually do some decent work with them. Solaris on Sparc, AIX on RISC, etc., all of them would still be the faster machines, and if you needed to run x86 BSD would have been fine.

Not to say that there wouldn't have been processor improvement, of course. But the whole industry was driven by the MS/Intel machine.

Re:Linux never would have existed

[starfishsystems]

But Linux isn't particularly designed for Intel processors. In fact, it's probably the most multiplatform operating system in existence.

So if Intel had faltered, it seems very likely that Linux development would simply have continued on whatever processor(s) happened to be cheap and available.

Your point about Microsoft stimulating Intel development is valid, though, and the combined displacement effect on the industry has been massive. Without that displacement, we'd be looking at a very different ecosystem. Perhaps it would be dominated by some other architecture, or perhaps it would have produced diverse players, more cooperation on interoperability, and more competition on engineering merit. Perhaps every little gadget today would be based on multicore RISC, who knows?

Re:Linux never would have existed

[mungtor]

But Linux isn't particularly designed for Intel processors. In fact, it's probably the most multiplatform operating system in existence.

True. My thought, and probably not expressed too clearly, was that it is the power of commodity x86 hardware that makes Linux possible.

Linux on Sparc or Risc would only have be of academic interest since there were already other capable OSes available for those platforms. And in those cases (Sparc stations, RS6000) the cost of the OS was negligible compared to the hardware you were running it on. (Although, in an amazing way, that is still true with Linux.)

Impossible to say, impact of NT

[Anonymous Coward]

There were other factors besides Windows 3.0/95 that caused the "divorce" between OS/2 and MS-Windows NT.

Even if David Weise did not complete his work then, someone would have within a year or two, unless OS/2 and/or NT took off so fast as to make it a moot point.

What would have happened if a protected-mode MS-sponsored GUI environment from DOS didn't ship until say, 1992?

Apple would've had 2 more years of dominance in certain markets.

Applications developers would've used their own GUIS and developed their own protected-mode interfaces, or used a third-party protected mode solution.

Microsoft might've shipped a non-protected-mode Windows anyways. Don't forget, MS-Windows 286 and 386 preceeded 3.0. The folks behind QEMM386 and similar products would've made a lot more money.

OS/2 and NT might've stayed together for awhile longer, but not much longer.

People would be using DOS on desktops for a couple more years.

The ill-fated OS/2 for PowerPC may never have happened.

15 years later though, the ripple effects of such a scenario would be far less visible than they would've been in the mid-1990s.

Been thanking the wrong guy!

[Mr. BS]

And I've been thanking Linus Torvalds for all of these years???

Dave Weise... You 'da man!!!

Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

Then where is that DB/2 port for Linux on Power5?

IBM cares about Linux as a cheap route for x86, and low end RISC. They are never giving up AIX on heavy hardware, as long as their flagship DB product does not run on it, and there are no indications that IBM is porting DB/2 to Power5, or even Oracle porting to Power5.

There's nothing like Speculative Fiction

[cbelt3]

Even when the article has been /.tted.
Gee- how about the old 'age of steam', if transistors and tubes didn't work. Fabs would be gear hobbing factories. You could tell hardcore programmers from the missing tips of their fingers and the gear lube on their clothes. Gamers would have found a way to visualize graphics by a changing sea of itty bitty colored wheels (or some sort of Rubik's cube thingmajig).

An evein bigger "what-if"

[b1t r0t]

What if the BSD lawsuit (from AT&T/USL) had never happened? That slowed down development of BSD for long enough to give Linux a chance to exist. If it weren't for the lawsuit, not only would Linux likely not have gone anywhere beyond printing "A" and "B" on a console, but the main open source license would be BSD, not GPL. And HURD would still not even be a blip on the radar until 2005.

/and BSD would probably still be dying

Re:An evein bigger "what-if"

[NotoriousQ]

Then someone would have forked BSD with a GPL license.

Butterflies flapping their wings...

[spiritraveller]

If he hadn't finished his work, it would have caused a rip in the space time continuum... birds would fly upside down and cars would move vertically instead of horizontally.

And everyone would think Macs were lame.

That would suck

[generalleoff]

Windows 3.x kicked ass and i still have a box that has it installed just for the hell of it. I would hate to see a world that never had it. Though I guess I never would have known the diffrence if I never had it so oh well.... :)

MS would still exist

[Anonymous Coward]

It's been a while since I used a Mac, but I always found that Office for the Mac was far superior to Office on Windows.

If Office for the Mac is any indication, Office for OS/2 would have been good enough to keep MS quite profitable.

Nothing would have changed

[Anonymous Coward]

What if David Weise hadn't gotten programs to run under protected mode in Win 3.0? Easy. Somebody else would have, slightly later.

It's hardly a brilliant invention. It was a problem MS was slogging its way through and had lots of programmers working the problem.

Just because Henry Ford invented the assembly line first doesn't mean somebody else wouldn't have done it a little later.

Re:Nothing would have changed

[erikharrison]

Well, there is some question about that. My impression has always been that the forces of MS programmers were focused on OS/2 the most profitable enterprise in their relationship with IBM, a relationship that had been key to all of MS's previous successes.

If a some talent coder working his butt off for something he found interesting hadn't come along, things would be different, how different we can argue.

I find the "Someone else would have" arguments irritating - what if Linus hadn't hacked out Linux. Would someone else have written a Unix like OS. Duh, the BSD's were already around, Minix was prevelant, and the GNU project was already on their way to writing a kernel. Does that mean the world would have been the same? Duh again

Let's build a time machine..

[nietsch]

And send a austrian human-like robot to search and destroy this evil programmer guy.

Easy to answer

[Mr_Silver]

Everything that people bitch about Microsoft being and doing, would now be directed at IBM.

Remember, a long time ago IBM was considered "evil". The only reason they're considered "good" now is because they support Linux - but in reality they're only doing it because they see a way to make money out of it.

If that way ever disappears, then IBM will drop their support faster than you can possibly imagine.

David Weise

[callipygian-showsyst]

Interesting story and it shattered some "myths" -- like Microsoft dumped OS/2 for purely strategic business reasons, not because Windows 3.0 was better.

It's also interesting to note that WAY BACK in 1989 Microsoft was running applications in protected virtual memory spaces on a consumer desktop OS. It wasn't until 2001 that Apple (after at least two failed attempts--Copland, Taligent) was able to do that (by appropriating code from CMU and Berkeley). It was truly a feat to get those early processors (286) to work well.

People sometimes underestimate the true innovation that goes on (and continues to happen) at Microsoft!

Re:David Weise

[cnettel]

On the other hand, they hade to go to some lengths to keep the basic spirit of a real-mode, no memory protection API into a very different mode. They broke a few apps that really ill-behaved, but also kept large chunks of shared memory space that was critical to both the system and other applications.

If they hadn't been able to introduce virtual memory à la 3.x in 3.x, the mirror-equivalent of OS/2 Warp, which would have replaced Windows 95, would have been stable! Maybe...

Larry is often quite sensible in his blog, but his ramblings about IBM and Linux support here are quite unfounded. I think that MS would have lost and the x86 platform would have lost on it. As Linux was and is based on x86, it would also have been affected, but not as much by the lack of IBM "support". I agree more with the theory that this scenario would have been more beneficial for Apple and Sun, to name two. But, really, if we want to create fun alternate-histories, even within the area of software development, I can think of quite a few more interesting ones. There are also quite a few more interesting blog notes in Larry's blog than the one linked to here.

Re:David Weise

[accessdeniednsp]

Microsoft doesn't innovate. They assimilate. (SQL server -- sybase. IE -- spyglass. .NET -- colusia.)

Perhaps BASIC was the real innovation...no wait, that was available for the old Sinclair/Timex systems.

No, Microsoft does not innovate.

Re:David Weise

[elder-geat]

What a crock! The 286 was designed for protected mode. Several unix systems used it. The only reason that it was a big deal at M$ was that all their coding up to that time was 8086 code for backward compatibility.

WOSWESU?

[gelfling]

Which OS would evil Spock use?

MOS/2 - Moustache OS/2, of course.

Re:WOSWESU?

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't you mean goatee?

Admit it, that joke was a complete failure.

What if...

[wayward_son]

What if Linus Torvalds had known BSD existed?

Linus admits that he basically re-invented the wheel with linux, BSD had what he wanted, but he didn't know about it or that it was freely available.

Re:If Windows had never existed on the home deskto

[b1t r0t]

Well, if there's one thing I remember about OS/2 (3.0, IIRC), it's how when an app froze up, the entire OS/2 GUI froze up for like two minutes before it realized "duh, something's not right here". I've never seen that in Windows... when an app freezes, only its own windows get stuck.

OS/2 for PS/2

[rjstanford]

"OS/2 for PS/2 - Half an operating system for half a computer."

Am I the only one who had one of those buttons?

Re:OS/2 for PS/2

[nothingtodo]

Actually, OS/2 on an IBM PS/2 was a perfect combination. Installing on my old 9595A server was so easy and didnt need any driver disks or anything. Pretty snappy even on a P60 and 128meg.

VxD Hell.....2 Doors down form DLL Hell...

[Colin E. McDonald]

or "The World That Should Have Never Happened" All I know is the mere mention of the term VxD wants to make me scream. "He then ran me around the rest of the group, and they showed me the other stuff they were working on. Ralph had written a new driver architecture called VxD. Aaron had done something astonishing (I'm not sure what). They had display drivers that could display 256 color bitmaps on the screen (the best OS/2 could do at the time was 16 colors)." 3.0/3.1 was allright but you could kill it when it was hosed and just be back at DOS...but then came... The Ultimate POS When we used to have to reinstall Windows 95 (which was quite often) in the early days of the OS and you forgot to remove the USB Supplement you would be screwed. DOS screen after reboot: "Windows could not combine VxDs into a monolithic file before starting. Windows may not start or run properly. If Windows fails to start, run SETUP again. Press Any Key to Continue" I can't even fathom the number of hours that my compadres andI in the IT world spent wasting our lives supporting the Windows 95 and 98 POS. NT was a nice change but it still sucked, 2000 pretty good and stable but support for games and many 98 apps. Windows XP was finally what they should have had back when they veered off the OS/2 path (in terms of stability and time to resolve tech support issues). 15 frickin years later!!!111 IMHO the ESR book has one of the best analysis of Windows, OS/2, Unix, and others that I have seen. http://catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/ch03s02.h tml And to think that I could have been spending my early days in IT doing something productive rather than baby-sitting a crappy OS makes me.....well...just a little angry.

Re:Natalie Portman Day?

[Anonymous Coward]

don't be a fuckwad, tell the person why it's significant. it's elitists like you "250000" that keep more people away from slashdot.

Re:If Windows had never existed on the home deskto

[Anonymous Coward]

Win95 and WPS might have looked slightly different, but they were based on the same UI research ("CUA") done by MS & IBM in the 80s.

WPS was much heavier on right-clicks and drag-n-drop, stuff that made it harder to use for GUI noobs.

If Gnome was ripping off OS/2 instead of Windows, you'd hardly see the difference today.

OT: Re:"What if?" can be fun

[Kjella]

Yeah, "What if?" can be fun, especially when you apply it to wars. What if Hitler had never invaded Russia? What if he had invaded Britian earlier in the war? Fun, if you're in that mind set.

Actually, if Hitler had the sense to "finish off" Europe by taking Britain before going east, it's overall not fun. Extremely creepy is more like it. He probably could, had he not sent all his troops east to fight the Soviets and wasted his missiles on civilian targets. What would happen is anyone's guess, but there'd be no US build-up in the UK, no D-day. Remember that the only thing that finally stopped Hitler was both the future superpowers of the world as well as resistance movements in half of Europe put together. Don't blame it all on the French ;)

Kjella

Re:OT: Re:"What if?" can be fun

[Anonymous Coward]

The fact that he had no air nor naval superiority had nothing to do with it? How was he going to get his troops to the British mainland? Do you not remember that the Germans were beaten in N. Africa by the British (an existing superpower, who incidentally was also fighting the Japanese at the time too) and British Commonwealth forces before the Americans joined in significantly?

Re:OT: Re:"What if?" can be fun

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, clearly you're forgetting that "if it wasn't for [the Americans], [the British] would all be speaking German right now ya bunch of limey pansies" or what ever it is that movies told me

Re:OT: Re:"What if?" can be fun

[Anonymous Coward]

Early in the war the air and naval superiority of the allied forces was not that great. Hitler could definitely have made the jump to britain, if he had been willing to make sacrifices for it. However, he gambled that the german subs would be able to stop supplies from going into britain, and britain would surrender without needing a big battle to make it happen as food, fuel and weapons scarcity moved beyond a breaking point. Ofcourse, the allied forces started using radar on their planes to easily detect german subs, which had to surface regularly to recharge batteries, thereby destroying any capability of the german navy to block supplies.

Re:OT: Re:"What if?" can be fun

[ThousandStars]

Well said.

Without having to worry about Britain and the rest of western Europe, Hitler may well have been able to anniliate the Sovet Union. The American push for war would only have been able to come from Africa -- which lacked, among other things, sufficient industrialized and geographic proximity to the fight, to make it an effective place for America to base its entire effort. Although I don't think Hitler would have ultimately won, it could have been a much longer and more painful process.

Still, even during 1941, Hitler lacked a sufficiently large number of troop transports to even consider an invasion of Britain, so even without the amazingly stupid invasion of the Soviet Union, it's unclear how soon Germany would have been able to invade. With lend-lease, for all we know, Britain could have held out as late as 1944 or longer.

That's the point of alternative histories I suppose: to make it easy to nitpick at other alternate histories.

Re:OT: Re:"What if?" can be fun

[el-spectre]

Well, the US _was_ supplying a whole bunch of material and equipment... and later troops. This in no way diminishes the incredible strength of britain in holding out so long, but w/o lend/lease and the eventual american reinforcements, things likely would turn out very differently.

Re:OT: Re:"What if?" can be fun

[mangu]

if Hitler had the sense to "finish off" Europe by taking Britain before going east

Or if he had done the exact opposite, going east beore finishing Europe. In 1941 he wasted a few critical divisions and a few critical weeks by invading Yugoslavia before attacking the USSR. If he had left Yugoslavia alone and invaded the USSR one month earlier, maybe he wouldn't have been stalled on the outskirts of Moscow in december 1941. Or if he had concentrated on one soviet target at a time, instead of dividing his armies trying to take Moscow, Leningrad, and Stalingrad at the same time.

Re:OT: Re:"What if?" can be fun

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes and if Germany had turned its full attention to Britian earlier, the US would most likely have gotten involved earlier. It would have been much more difficult to wage the war without England, and Roosevelt knew that. He was also smart enough to realize that going to war with nazi Germany would become a necessity.

Re:OT: Re:"What if?" can be fun

[JavaLord]

Without having to worry about Britain and the rest of western Europe, Hitler may well have been able to anniliate the Sovet Union.

Or at least Hitler would have fought Stalin to a bloody stalemate, leaving both sides drained of resources, and would have left America as the lone superpower (or at least the cold war wouldn't have started when it did, if at all).

The lesson is, don't go abroad searching for monsters to slay. It just comes back to haunt you later on.

Re:OT: Re:"What if?" can be fun

[chris_mahan]

Actually the scary part is that if Hitler has stopped in spring 1941 and sued for peace with England, before invading Russia, and before Japan attacked the US, the US government would probably not have declared war on them, communism would not have turned into the post-war soviet union, the US would not have become a superpower, and Nazi germany would today be the largest economy in the world, with basically Europe minus UK, and nuclear weapons, and 400 million people speaking German.

From the outside, the Nazi parti was a politcal party that gained democratic power through a general election, warred with nearby states to regain honor and land lost in the humiliating terms of WWI armistice, and restored Germany on the path to prosperity.
Many people in the US would have been perfectly OK with that. And that's the really scary part about this whole mental genuflexion.

And who's to say that the Grand Dream of the Third Reich is not being realized little by little in Europe today? It was an appealing idea in 1933, it's an appealing idea in 2005. (Which is why I don't live in Europe even though I can).

Answer by Stuart Ballard

[Spy der Mann]

(from comments posted after TFA: )

re: Tipping Points 2/3/2005 1:00 PM Stuart Ballard

I guess I put it the other way around: the corporate interest in Linux was fueled *by* its undeniable technical and grassroots-level adoption success.

Remember that in the real world IBM picked up Linux despite having its own Unix brand. Linux beat out IBM's best efforts (AIX and the stillborn Project Monterey) on *merit*, so convincingly that IBM themselves decided to scrap their own work in favor of it. I have a hard time thinking of any corporate involvement (on the scale you're contemplating) before that point that could be said to explain IBM's decision to adopt it. So I'm forced to conclude that if not IBM, one of the other hardware/Unix vendors would have done what they did. The other hardware/Unix vendors, in the no-Windows scenario, would be in the same place that IBM was in today's world, with the same options available.

I'd definitely add one to your list of things that fueled Linux's success, although it doesn't affect the "what if" because neither of our future-histories modify it: the widespread availability of the Internet. Linux is an (IMHO inevitable) product of the fact that suddenly anyone with programming talent can easily get the latest version, submit a code patch, and see it integrated into new versions within days, if not *hours*. Linux couldn't have happened if the developers had to mail around 3.5" floppies :) My guess is that the absence of the Internet is pretty much the only thing that really *would* have erased Linux out of history.
--------
(end of comments)

Frankly I think this is much more plausible. Thank God for the "reply" button in the blogs! :)

Re:Answer by Stuart Ballard

[sab39]

Thanks for the endorsement ;)

When I saw that this had made /. I wondered if anyone would have bothered to read my comments, and what the feedback would be. Glad to see that somebody did :)

Re:Answer by Stuart Ballard

[llywrch]

> So I'm forced to conclude that
> if not IBM, one of the other hardware/Unix vendors would have done what they did. The other hardware/Unix
> vendors, in the no-Windows scenario, would be in the same place that IBM was in today's world, with the same
> options available.

How soon we forget. There were other Unix vendors who decided to throw their lot in with Linux, before IBM made their announcement. DEC loaned an Alpha workstation to Linus to encourage him to develop for their RISC processor over the PPC back in 1995. If Microsoft & IBM had continued together with OS/2, I doubt DEC would have tried to partner with them (as it did with Microsoft to promote NT on the Alpha), & may have decided to start supporting Linux a year or two before IBM did -- & succeeded in turning the company around. DEC may have ended up swallowing Compaq instead of the other way around.

Then there was SGI, who made their announcement that they were supporting Linux a few months before IBM. (I remember this well because I attended their road show when it came to Portland. They provided free microbrews to the attendees.) Had IBM not stolen their thunder, & had they not been previously distracted with their unsuccessful foray supporting NT on x86 (remember, in our alternative universe OS/2 is now the standard), I suspect SGI would likely have become the big Linux name & would be doing far better now than they are. (Perhaps graphic artists would be using SGI Linux workstations as their platofrm of choice instead of Macs.)

It was a big boost to Linux that IBM endorsed it,
but by that point it was only a metter of time before some corporation took the jump. In this alternate universe where Windows 3.0 never happened, we'd probably be in much the same situation -- only the names of the players would be different.

Geoff

Re:Per? Were!

[teamhasnoi]

If 'ifs' and 'buts' were candy and nuts, we'd all have a Merry Christmas!

If 'buts' and 'ors' were filthy whores...I'm still working on this one.

He forgot a bit...

[dduck]

Very much in character for a Microsoftie...:

From Microsoft's perspective, the big change would be that instead of Microsoft driving the industry, IBM (as Microsoft's largest OEM, and development partner in OS/2) would be the driving force (at least as far as consumers were concerned). UI decisions would be made by IBM's engineers, not Microsoft's.

In my mind, the biggest effect of such a change would be on Linux. Deprived of the sponsorship of a major enterprise vendor (the other enterprise players followed IBMs lead and went with OS/2), Linux remained as primarily an 'interesting' alternative to Solaris, AIX, and the other *nix based operating systems sold by hardware vendors. Instead, AIX and Solaris became the major players in the *nix OS space, and flourished as an alternative.

...he never mentions the users, who - in a 16-bit-windows-free world - would have avoided litterally millions of man-hours wasted on tens of millions of BSODs.

What if...

[Anonymous Coward]

What if this stupid story was never posted?

People would stop asking what-if questions

BeOS

[Anonymous Coward]

If Windows never happens, BeOS takes over the world!

I can dream, can't I?

Reality is even funnier/scarrier

[Moulinneuf]

"What if Hitler had never invaded Russia?"

He still as a hold of Europe , and Canada still come up with its 3rd generation tank and airplane which the US of A stole when they joined and they are still cut of there fuel supply ... Russia winter is cold but without heating supply its suicidal.

"What if he had invaded Britian earlier in the war?"

The stromtroop where still from Canada , the tank still from Canada , the fighter and bomber plane still from Canada ...

The Reality is that in both world war to have won the axis would have add to crush entirely Canada ... This means no A bomb , no tank , no airplane , no storm troop.

Microsoft is a monopoly not because of superior technology , but because 1) they broke every law in the books and 2) they add intelligent exclusive deals ( IBM and then other company ) ( dont get me started on "exclusive" stupid deals with the entire industry ... and they gave away DOS for free , by distributing it to manufacturer , which helped to install there OS on top of it on hard drive and there best tactic yet is that they are still installed as default
on almost all computer shipped by ODM. ( ODM stand for Original design manufacturer , they are the one building the computer for the OEM like IBM , Dell , HP , Gateway , etc ... )

The technology is a minimal factor in Microsoft monopoly.

Microsoft AND IBM; questions about Unix, Novell

[davidwr]

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I think NT 1.0 and OS/2 1.0, which shared much of the same code, ran protected mode on '386s in the late 1980s. OK, it wasn't a 286 but it was the '80s.

Anyone remember if the Intel-based Unixes or Novell's Netware ran in protected mode, and if so, which one was first and did either run on a 286?

Re:Microsoft AND IBM; questions about Unix, Novell

[Anonymous Coward]

Doubtful. NT 1.0 never ran on a real chip. The first release version was 2.0, or "Windows Advanced Server".

Re:Per? Were!

[AyeRoxor!]

How about this:

If 'ifs' and 'buts' were candy and nuts, we'd all have a Merry Christmas!

If 'butts' and 'oars' were filthy whores, the Navy would be listless!

/really must be going

And BSD....

[nurb432]

Would still have existed.. Unix pre-dated Microsoft, and while they did intermingle over the years, Unix's existence was not tied to anyone elses products failure or successes. So all of the main Unix derivatives would still be here in one form or another regardless.

And who knows who else would have come along.. Just because windows did not exist, it would not have made people complacent with their choices.. There are more reasons for alternative other then the fact that Windows is garbage.

I think where are today it has to do more with poor marketing on companies like the Apple, Atari and Commodore. Their failures are what have created this beast we have to deal with today. They were first, and better, but they had no clue how to grow .. and get into the business world. Into a world where 'better' is not the key word.. Its all about 'good enough' and marketing..

Somethign taht Mr Gates understood all too well.

Re:And BSD....

[petrus4]

>Would still have existed.. Unix pre-dated
>Microsoft, and while they did intermingle over >the years, Unix's existence was not tied to
>anyone elses products failure or successes.
>So all of the main Unix derivatives would still
>be here in one form or another regardless.

Yes, UNIX still would have existed, but it wouldn't be anywhere near as popular as it is now. UNIX's traditional userbase was a group of autistic elitists who saw themselves as the last bastion of human intelligence (the BSD crowd do still think like that, even though they're probably right ;)) but who before Linux, also didn't want to let anyone else play with their toys. 90% of the evangelical work for Linux/the BSDs that I've seen has been done by converted Windows refugees...People who've always used UNIX derivatives don't WANT new users themselves, because they tend to see the rest of the planet as a lot less intelligent.

It is also true however that Gates and Ballmer's total amorality is the primary secret of their success. In the American corporate world, giving in to the Dark Side and surrendering to your hate are probably the main prerequisites for getting anywhere.

Re:Per? Were!

[Anonymous Coward]

If 'buts' and 'ors' were filthy whores...
br We'd all have gonorrhea?

Fun article, but...

[march]

And interestingly enough, when IBM came to the realization that they could make more money selling consulting services than selling hardware, instead of moving to Linux, they stuck with OS/2 - they had a significant ownership stake in the platform, and they'd be pushing it as hard as they can.

IBM always understood that money came from service and software. This is what built their company.

IBM and Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

I think IBM would have embraced Linux even if OS/2 had been successful. They would have done the same thing they are doing now with AIX technologies (their Unix distro) and pushed them down into Linux. IBM is a smart company and would have reacted the same way to Linux with or without OS/2. They would give the customers what they wanted, a stable, secure, configurable OS with all the services they have come to expect from IBM.

In every way? Methinks not...

[Richard Steiner]

"Funny how you fail to mention Windows NT, which was superior to OS/2 in every way execept the graphical shell."

Since you mention the graphical shell, I'll assume you're talking about OS/2 2.0 or later with the WPS and not earlier 1.x incarnations.

What about the fact that OS/2 came bundled with Rexx while NT had nothing at all similar?

That OS/2's MVDM was significantly better than NT's VDM at running DOS programs?

That OS/2's GUI could be decoupled and replaced with a smaller shell (TSHELL or similar) for use on older hardware for small servers?

That OS/2 consistently beat NT in various performance tests over the years, and even did a cleanup when a single-CPU Warp Server box was put up against a 4-CPU NT Server box on file and print sharing benchmarks sponsored by PC Week?

While NT and its successors certainly have definite advantages, mainly due to market position, I think you vastly overstate its relative position in terms of technology.

Later versions of OS/2 from Warp 3 Connect on had a decent networking stack based on BSD, and most of the 16-bit portions of the kernel are gone at this point in time, so those limitations are no longer current.

Re:If Windows had never existed on the home deskto

[Tobias Luetke]

Funny aside, you haven't used osX... ever :)

And in other news...

[godlikenerddotcom]

If my grandmother had a penis, she'd be my grandfather.

I still surf the net using Windows 3.0

[Anonymous Coward]

... you insensitive clods!

Re:If Windows had never existed on the home deskto

[chiph]

That was because the message loop ran in a single thread within the OS. If one app stopped working while reading messages, all the other apps would freeze. The delay in restarting was from a watchdog thread that would kick the message pump back into life.

The rule of thumb for PM apps was 1/10th of a second. That's how long you had to do something before you needed to call a message function. As a result, most OS/2 apps were significantly multi-threaded out of necessity. Compare that with your typical Win32 app which is almost always single-threaded. :-(

Chip H.

Microsoft, Microsoft, Microsoft, bloody Microsoft

[ayjay29]

Microsoft this, Microsoft that, life without Microsoft. Microsoft vs Linus, Microsoft vs Google, Microsoft vs the world, Microsoft ate my dog.

There's more Microsoft stories here than anything else, about 20 in the past week. Isn't anything better to post about??

The world would still use Windows...

[dtjohnson]

IBM still has OS/2 to push, but Microsoft pushed Windows 3.0 for $$ reasons rather than technical ones. If there had been no protected mode applications on Windows 3.0, Microsoft probably would have just trumpeted that as a feature. The US DOJ vs Microsoft antitrust trial "Findings of Fact", based on some very compelling testimony by IBM executive, revealed for all time that the only reason that IBM backed away from OS/2 was due to pressure from Microsoft. Here are some relevant quotes:

These are from the section on IBM under 'The Similar Experiences of Other Firms in Dealing with Microsoft.' Here's some quotes:

"Of course, accepting the terms would have required IBM, as a practical matter, to abandon its own operating system, OS/2."

"The message was clear: IBM could resolve the impasse ostensibly blocking the issuance of a Windows 95 license -- the royalties audit -- by de-emphasizing those products of its own that competed with Microsoft and instead promoting Microsoft's products."

"In sum, from 1994 to 1997 Microsoft consistently pressured IBM to reduce its support for software products that competed with Microsoft's offerings, and it used its monopoly power in the market for Intel-compatible PC operating systems to punish IBM for its refusal to cooperate."

These were not opinions but were the conclusions of the court that were reached after all of the evidence was evaluated at trial. There were also findings on the application barrier to entry that prevented a non-Windows OS from gaining significant market share.

The result of the M$ vs IBM battle over OS/2 was probably a secret agreement that was likely similar in its effects on competition to the agreement that Sun recently reached with Microsoft. You can even hear Lou Gerstner, IBM's CEO at the time, describing his decision to stop fighting with Micosoft over OS/2 back in the mid-90s in this zipped up mp3.

Re:Per? Were!

[jaklein]

"If 'buts' and 'or' were filthy whores, we'd all be covered in chanker sores."

Whatever

[Anonymous Coward]

This story is a complete waste of time/space/bandwidth/etc. Jeez - /. is really going downhill...

Microsoft Doors?

[Anonymous Coward]

What if I would have had the forsight to trademark the word Windows, or XML? If I had the word Windows in a valid trademark, then you would have never heard of Windows. Maybe it would be called Microsoft Doors?

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/60156_lin do ws28.shtml
http://bink.nu/?ArticleID=958
http:// www.americanmusicscene.com/site/9116-doors- windows.html

Lucky streaks and closed minds

[A nonymous Coward]

Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and every other dictatorship suffer from the same malady, what the Japanese called Victory Disease. A successful madman, like Hitler, overwhelms anyone who disagrees, whether explicitly by murder or implicitly by the shadow of his popularity. You can see the same thing happening in the Bush administration. The leader has a closed mind by definition of being a genius madman, the followers have closed minds by virtue of being followers, and those who do not follow are sidelined.

Hitler's successes in the beginning of the war were half due to his madman attitude taking the French, British, and Soviets by surprise. They had expected at least rational war plans, as had his own general staff, only to be overruled by his ego. Not only did this element of surprise gradually diminish as his enemies learned what to expect, the gods of random chance eventually turned his lucky streak into disastrous failure, as is the fate of all lucky streaks. Either they are so short that no one notices them and they are never labeled lucky, or they are successful at first, people begin to depend on that, and when they fail, so much more is riding on continued success that the riders are utterly devastated by the failure, and have no Plan B to fall back on, because they have gambled all on continued success.

Hitler could not have invaded Britain. He did not have the shipping to land an invasion force or sustain an occupying force, or the air power and sea power to protect the invasion. His fighters had barely enough fuel to sustain 15 minutes of combat over the nearest parts of Britain, let alone anywhere else for the duration needed.

It's the same fallacy with regards to the Japanese invading Hawaii. They did not have the shipping to support even an invasion force that far away, the fuel and munitions and plain old food that would have been necessary, let alone an occupying army or the civilian populace. Hawaii was a food importer then, probably still is. Japan would have had to take up the slack in feeding the locals, just as Hitler would have had to take up the slack of the lost imports from the US.

Re:Lucky streaks and closed minds

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't seem to understand why hitler conquered so many territory so quickly. It wasn't foolishness or ego (though he had a lot of both), it was blitzkrieg, a brand new military strategy that the allied forces early in the game had no response to, because it fell beyond what they knew war to be like.

As blitzkrieg started failing because of enemy preparedness to the tactic, it became a classic war of attrition, which the germans lost because of increasingly fewer resources compounded by spreading their force to thin by opening multiple fronts.

Re:Lucky streaks and closed minds

[operagost]

You can see the same thing happening in the Bush administration.

No I don't. For one, GWB hasn't abolished the Republic, committed genocide, or taken control of the media. And there is plenty of open dissent in the legislative branch, with Boxer and Kennedy ranting quite freely.

Re:Lucky streaks and closed minds

[Anonymous Coward]

Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and every other dictatorship suffer from the same malady, what the Japanese called Victory Disease. A successful madman, like Hitler, overwhelms anyone who disagrees, whether explicitly by murder or implicitly by the shadow of his popularity. You can see the same thing happening in the Bush administration. The leader has a closed mind by definition of being a genius madman, the followers have closed minds by virtue of being followers, and those who do not follow are sidelined

interesting. It also parallels richard stallman and the free software movement.

Re:Lucky streaks and closed minds

[Anonymous Coward]

what if the USA had sat on it's ass and sold the UK stuff to fight the war and din't join in.

Would they of made a pact with hitler?

Re:Lucky streaks and closed minds

[kz45]

Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and every other dictatorship suffer from the same malady, what the Japanese called Victory Disease. A successful madman, like Hitler, overwhelms anyone who disagrees, whether explicitly by murder or implicitly by the shadow of his popularity. You can see the same thing happening in the Bush administration. The leader has a closed mind by definition of being a genius madman, the followers have closed minds by virtue of being followers, and those who do not follow are sidelined.

Comparing the bush administration to hitler is a joke. Saddam Huessein was a murderous dictator who killed thousands of innocent people. The only people that believe he should have stayed in power are as crazy as he is.

After all, 9/11 is Clinton's fault. He had a chance to take out osama bin-laden..but he was too busy "not having sexual relations" in the whitehouse.

Re:Lucky streaks and closed minds

[Anonymous Coward]

Quit trying to blame 9/11 on Clinton. If he was wasting time doing anything it was in dealing with partisan congressional witch hunts (which cost the taxpayers a fortune and accomplished nothing other than waste time). After the Oklahoma City bombing Clinton made domestic terrorism a top priority and an anti-terrorism plan was to be a cornerstone of an Al Gore presidency. Bush tossed all this aside as too expensive in his rush to cut taxes. Law enforcement agencies under Bush had ample opportunity to prevent the attacks from occuring and whether through incompetence or more sinister reasons failed to do so.

Re:Lucky streaks and closed minds

[Anonymous Coward]

After all, 9/11 is Clinton's fault. He had a chance to take out osama bin-laden..but he was too busy "not having sexual relations" in the whitehouse.

President Bush had 9 months before 9/11 to catch OBL, what was he doing ? I suggest you read the 9/11 report, it is very informative about this issue and not at all flatering to the President. Prior to 9/11, President Bush received briefings from the outgoing Clinton admistration clearly stating OBL specificly and terrorism in general would be one the most important issues facing his administration in the coming months. In the months leading upto 9/11 he recieved many briefings from the CIA and the FBI indicating something was happening, as Tenent said "The system was blinking red." and a memo which specifically sited who, how and where. President Bush did nothing.

Re:Lucky streaks and closed minds

[zootm]

After all, 9/11 is Clinton's fault. He had a chance to take out osama bin-laden..but he was too busy "not having sexual relations" in the whitehouse.

Please tell me that was a joke. His sexual indiscretions had no effect on his actual effectiveness as a leader. Unless you're talking about the media circus surrounding it, in which case I agree - blowing up a huge fuss over something which did not effect his leadership was, in effect, undermining has ability to run the United States.

If he failed to capture Bin Laden because of a decision he made, it has precisely nothing to do with the Lewinsky affair. And if he actually ordered people not to capture Bin Laden, I suspect that the issues surrounding the situation were a great deal more complex than you're letting on.

I'm not trying to directly defend Clinton here, being a foreign national I don't really care. But by blaming something with the magnitude of 9/11 on a BS reason like that is just foolish.

Re:Lucky streaks and closed minds

[Anonymous Coward]

The US did sell the UK stuff. That's part of the reason the UK was so heavily in debt at the end of the war. The US insisted on repayment with interest. Fortunately for Poland, Britain and France went to war in the name of freedom, not profit.

Re:Lucky streaks and closed minds

[Anonymous Coward]

"Comparing the bush administration to hitler is a joke. Saddam Huessein was a murderous dictator who killed thousands of innocent people. The only people that believe he should have stayed in power are as crazy as he is."

Are you trying to compare Hussein to Hitler? A tin pot dictator of a third world country with a big stockpile of oil compared to the dictator of a superpower bent on enslaving the world and creating a thousand year Reich?

"After all, 9/11 is Clinton's fault. He had a chance to take out osama bin-laden..but he was too busy "not having sexual relations" in the whitehouse."

Don't be so disingenious. Clinton was too busy "not having sexual relations" because a bunch of dickheads (mostly GOP) were hellbent on trying to make an issue out of nothing and bring the presidency down. Clinton was just defending himself.

Re:Lucky streaks and closed minds

[Lemmy Caution]

I think comparisons with Nazi Germany are fatuous. GWB is not Hitler, on dozens of levels. He's not even that important - the political movement of which he is a part is not his vision, is not really dependent on him in anyway, and would survive his disappearance without batting an eye.

Also, GWB has not engaged in the activities you've described.

However, I do think that the rise of the Japanese militarist regime is a far more productive metaphor. Replace state Shinto with Christianity, and the parallels really start to fit. The slow erosion of civil liberties, the pressure to put media in the service of state goals, the increasing authority given to law enforcement, the hostility to dissent, the use of rhetorics of victimization to justify intervention (Japan used the fact of European colonialism to legitimize its own empire).

The "slow boil" effect is the key parallel, I think. In 1933, the Nazis took over a fairly democratic society, and the flags went up. Nazi ideology was explicitly racist, with an agenda for racial domination. There was no such moment in Japan. Yamato suprematism was never part of official doctrine, and was often repudiated by members of the military who wanted to encourage the cooperation of the co-prosperity sphere members (while the same sort of "boys will be boys" apologetics you would hear for Abu Ghraib and other abuses would be used to minimize or deny responsibility for events like the Rape of Nanking.)

As in Fascist Italy, there was room for some (limited, monitored) dissent - Communists were able to operate throughout conflict, though many leaders were imprisoned.

The parallels aren't perfect, but I don't think the last chapter in the US' rightward drift has been written yet, either. The attitudes that are looming are worrisome.

Re:Lucky streaks and closed minds

[Minna Kirai]

Hitler could not have invaded Britain. He did not have the shipping to land an invasion force or sustain an occupying force, or the air power and sea power to protect the invasion.

True, there was no way Nazi Germany could've pushed through an invasion of Britain in the style of Operation Sealion.

However, they might've been able to win the Battle of Britian and achieve air superiority over England (particularly if their bombing runs had focused on actual airfields and industry, instead of civilian terror-targets). That would've been all they needed to prevent an American landing in Europe in something like D-Day.

D-Day was difficult enough when they only had to cross the English Channel. If the Luftwaffe was free to bomb English ports at will, any amphibious assault would be destroyed by aircraft before getting close to the French coast. (Yes, the Americans could counterattack with carrier-launched planes, but that would divert carriers from the Pacific, leaving the Japanese victorious at Midway and free to move on Australia and Hawaii, etc...)

His fighters had barely enough fuel to sustain 15 minutes of combat over the nearest parts of Britain,

True, but if the Nazis had been smarter, that wouldn't have mattered. Better choice of bombing targets could've destroyed the RAF on the ground (or prevented them from taking off), and then 2 years later the Luftwaffe would gain the Me-262, which could fly anywhere and defeat any plane of the era.

I'm not saying that correcting the blatant stragetic mistakes would've been enough to turn the tide- but it would've given the Luftwaffe a fighting chance of victory, instead of wasting their best pilots in a fool's errand.

Re:Lucky streaks and closed minds

[Anonymous Coward]

No I don't. For one, GWB hasn't abolished the Republic, committed genocide, or taken control of the media.

Another difference is that Hitler was the mastermind behind his own plan, while GWB is a puppet in the hands of various representatives of different economic and religious interests. Perhaps marginally less evil than Hitler though, apart from ??AA and MSFT symphatization.

Re:Lucky streaks and closed minds

[Minna Kirai]

Please tell me that was a joke. His sexual indiscretions had no effect on his actual effectiveness as a leader.

No, his wandering penis really did hurt his attentiveness to fighting terrorism.

On the evening of the impeachment hearing, Clinton ordered an airstrike to kill Osama Bin Laden. It missed (and killed 10 or so innocent people), but at least he was trying. The Republican-controlled Congress saw this as an attempt to distract the public from their sexual inquisition.

One could put the blame either way- "If the Republicans hadn't been so obessed with using Clinton's sexuality to bring him down, they wouldn't have taken national focus away from antiterrorism". But the fact is, a more restrained man would've been at least marginally more aggressive in defeating Bin Laden.

(By comparison, G.W. Bush wasn't interested in fighting Al Quaeda at all, and actively reversed sanctions Clinton had imposed on the Taliban)

Re:Lucky streaks and closed minds

[Minna Kirai]

Japan would have had to take up the slack in feeding the locals,

Nope. Compare against the Japanese behavior when they invaded China and the Phillipines- survival of the local residents was not one of their priorities.

In fact, the easiest way for them to invade Hawaii would've been to navally interdict food shipments for a few months, and then stroll ashore when everyone's collapsed from hunger. (Had they won at Midway and Coral Sea, which could've easily happened if they had just one smart, influential mathmatician, then that assault would've been open)

Re:Lucky streaks and closed minds

[A nonymous Coward]

That's my point. There were any number of things Hitler could have done to make life much worse for Britain, like build more U-boats sooner, not divert the Battle of Britain attacks from airfields to London, not interfere with the jet programs, not invade the USSR ... but the same madness that made him act in those ways was also what made him act in the "positive" ways, like choosing a different plan for invading France.

If he had not been a mad "genius", he would not have been successful at the beginning and would never have been more than a beer half putsch footnote in history. But mad genius dictators have no feedback and end up losing eventually, usually spectacularly, all by their own doings.

Re:Lucky streaks and closed minds

[kz45]

Don't be so disingenious. Clinton was too busy "not having sexual relations" because a bunch of dickheads (mostly GOP) were hellbent on trying to make an issue out of nothing and bring the presidency down. Clinton was just defending himself

you mean disingenuous?

Im only being as disingenuous as:

1) focusing on the exact time that Bush waited in an elementary school when he received the news that the the U.S had been attacked.
2) "blood for oil"
3) comparing Bush to Hitler

Re:Lucky streaks and closed minds

[SilverspurG]

GWB is not Hitler, on dozens of levels

Does everyone do this on purpose out of some misguided doe-eyed love for Bush?

Bush is Hitler who has graduated from politically correct school. There are some things you just cannot do anymore which were, more or less, acceptable and tolerated 70 years ago. That doesn't mean that GWB's mindset is any less iron-fisted, heavy-handed, dictatorial, and complete blashpemy against the concept of a Constitutional Republic.

Dig Hitler up. Send him to politically correct school. Make him understand,"No. You just can't do it that way. If you want to rule the entire nation according to your own delerious whims you'll just have to figure out a different way to get to the goal." You'll end up with our current Federal Gov't.

Re:Lucky streaks and closed minds

[JavaLord]

Please tell me that was a joke. His sexual indiscretions had no effect on his actual effectiveness as a leader.

Clinton was afraid to go after Osama after the first missle strike failed to kill him. The Republicans cried "Wag the Dog" and Clinton wasn't gutsy enough to do the right thing. Even James Carville admitted that after the first strike was unsuccessful that the public viewed it as a trick to distract them from Clintons domestic problems and Clinton was too worried about his popularity and legacy to press onward.

So his sexual indiscrestions did effect his ability to lead, as did his vanity.

Re:Lucky streaks and closed minds

[zootm]

I think I alluded to that in the original post, but yeah. It just seemed the poster was trying to use 9/11 as a flimsy excuse to follow up a political agenda, which is just not on.

Re:Lucky streaks and closed minds

[Lemmy Caution]

See, this is why I'm embarassed to call myself a progressive sometimes, despite the fact that the policy I want to promote probably resembles yours. You completely missed the point of my post. GWB is not Hitler. Hitler created Nazism. GWB isn't bright or driven enough to create the new conservative movement. GWB is not motivated by hatred; AH clearly had hatred built into his program. GWB's mindset is less iron-fisted, heavy-handed, etc. than AH's. My opposition to Bush does not require him to be a comic-book villain - it's a sad intellectual deficiency on your part that yours does.

GWB is just a trope. The conservatives have been behaving the way he's behaved every time they've got into power since Nixon. Your abuse of synedoche is out of control.

If Fred Phelps was running the Republicans - and he most certainly is not - then you might begin to have a case. As long as your hyperbole and hysteria dominates the strong-left critique of the new right, then the right has absolutely nothing to worry about.

Re:Lucky streaks and closed minds

[dickko]

GWB hasn't abolished the Republic, committed genocide, or taken control of the media.

You mean this isn't an attempt to control the media?

I know, not quite the same thing, but still kinda scary to me...

Re:Lucky streaks and closed minds

[SilverspurG]

GWB is not motivated by hatred

That's the very first thing they taught him in politically correct school.

GWB's mindset is less iron-fisted, heavy-handed, etc. than AH's

Most of politically correct school is learning to be patient. Don't be so intense. Tone it down a little.

Your abuse of synedoche is out of control

It helps to see the little big in the big picture, the big picture as part of a larger picture, and to understand how it all affects any person at any level.

As long as your hyperbole and hysteria

I'm being pebbled by a sixth grade wannabe inventor of scrabble.

Obligatory quote

[Skiron]

"Davids job was to move the graphics drivers in windows into protected mode on 286 and better processors (to free up precious memory below 640K for Windows applications). He (and Chuck) had already figured out how to get normal Windows applications to use expanded memory for their code and data, but now he was tackling a harder problem - the protected mode environment is subtler than expanded memory - if you touched memory that wasn't yours, you'd crash.>/i>"

I wonder what ever happened then? Did they ignore him?...

Re:If Windows had never existed on the home deskto

[Locutus]

Following CUA just means that copy works with Ctl-C keys, etc and has nothing to do with the design of the system. On the otherhand, the WPS was/is based on the OO( object oriented ) design/spec called CORBA( industry standard ). It was/is OO all the way through and therefore those little icons you see are consistent in how they work since they are all based on a few basic objects. The Win95 interface was based on HP NewWave and was/is a shallow GUI interface with special bits of code for some parts and other parts use the same bits.

There is really a world of difference between what Microsoft wants for its system and what IBM wants. IBM( and most C++ developers in the tech sector ) wanted and used a full hierachical object model( z inherits from y which inherits from x ) while Microsoft had tried to stay away from that kind of thing because it "hides" the underlying structure( the Windows APIs ). Back in the early 90's, there were alot of application frameworks out there for devopers to use and most would allow the applications to be compiled on OS/2 or Windows and many times UNIX too. That was bad for Microsoft and they did a great job at making sure OO frameworks went away.

Even computer language history would have changed without Microsoft or Windows 3.0. Without Microsoft hold of the desktop, JAVA would not exist and SmallTalk would have probably be much more popular. In the late 80's and early 90's, IBM was trying to find a language/system to use across all of it's operating systems. SOM and Smalltalk were popular until JAVA came along. But this is speculation and will always be so opinions will vary.

I will say that the stuff from IBM typically looked more like it was designed to solve customers and developers problems, instead of being designed to protect a monopoly( ala Microsoft ). IMO.

LoB

Blah blah blah - wouldda couldda shouldda

[Anonymous Coward]

C'mon - stop it. Again, Linux Jedi's can't cope with the fact that despite all of its holes, Windows is a superior operating system to Linux any day of the week, in any situation.

Saying "what if x didn't exist" or "x would advance if y never existed" is like saying if the United States never existed France, Germany, Italy and the rest of the world would have been in control of Hitler.

Thank God for the US

Thank God for Microsoft.

Brooklyn.

Re:Blah blah blah - wouldda couldda shouldda

[Hymer]

when did you have a BSOD ?
Windows ? SUPERIOR ??
Get Lost...

the biggest change would be

[scharkalvin]

In Bill Gate's bank account. He would NOT be worth the BILLONS he is today. Neither would Paul
Alan, and think of all the projects that would not have been funded. For one Rutan would NOT have had a sponser for the X prize.

Remember the BBC series 'connections'? Well in this case one thing changes EVERYTHING.

And...

[Anonymous Coward]

Linus never would have had the desire to write his own operating system so he wouldnt have to become a slave of the evil corporation (possibly :) ).

Forgot two things

[ToasterTester]

He forgot to factor in Apple and Novell. Novell has over 80% of the NOS market and Ray Norda was a bigger bullie than MS has ever been. Also Apple with no Windows Macintosh would of attracted a lot of the people who ended up Windows users. Novell would of gained the NT market and Apple the desktop market.

I write and support OS/2 products from its beginning until the around 94. In fact where I work now (banking) they still use OS/2 for some applications. I can't stand it, its SSA? GUI, it architecture was flawed, it was amazing for the late 80's, but after MS pull away from it, IBM just never put enough into it. So no tears from me that OS/2 faded into the sunset.

Without Windows, and a world with Novell, Apple, and OS/2 Linux would probably still be a fun side project for geeks.

Re:If Windows had never existed on the home deskto

[b1t r0t]

So in other words, OS/2, with it's "true pre-emptive multitasking" had a major flaw in common with the classic MacOS? The whole point of pre-emptive multitasking is that one process can't wedge the whole system. While background tasks would still work, the user perception was no better than with a cooperative multi-tasking system, because the GUI was not pre-emptive.

There's a little something I learned while getting my CS degree, it's called "queues". There's no reason to block and wait for an app to respond a GUI event when you can stick it on an input queue.

Actually its the other way around...

[OldBaldGuy]

The orignial "doctors" were teachers (that's what the latin word means) when medicine was either a barber/surgeon or herbs from your local herbalist. The M.D. was developed much later and is essentially an undergraduate degree, which doesn't require any research or teaching (although it pays really well!).
See wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_of_Philosophy ) for more info.

Re:If Windows had never existed on the home deskto

[nothingtodo]

Yea, I remember having an application stop responding and the system would become essentially unresponsive. Sometimes control+escape would do it if you hit it 100 times. I was told the problem was the single input queue which must mean something important. In any event, the other apps would run just fine, it's just that you couldn't do anything to fix the apparent lockup! The BEST way to get around this was to install WATCHCAT. If the WPS was unrepsonsive, you could hit a hotkey and get a chance to kill the hung application. Saved me plenty of times! Only problem was that running through a KVM caused problems though.

One Acronym

[halltk1983]

BSOD

Microsoft would have a say in what happened

[Anonymous Coward]

In an alternate reality where M$ doesn't dominate the os, they may have striven for hardware dominance and reinvented themselves. Maybe they would have supported Linux to break the IBM monopoly. Maybe right now we would be listening to mp3s on our shiny new Linux-based Microsoft mPods.

Re:If Windows had never existed on the home deskto

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny aside, you haven't used osX... ever :)

He said Mac OS, not Mac OS X. If you take a look at gnome, the Mac OS 9 "inspiration" is everywhere.

Eli Whitney invented the assembly line

[huckamania]

He also invented replaceable parts. His factory was destroyed in a fire and since he had been screwed out of his profits for the cotton gin he was a bit paranoid about sharing ideas.

True genius, he was. Ford was more of a capatalist.

Re:If Windows had never existed on the home deskto

[bonch]

Amusing, then, that Windows 95 is what KDE/GNOME "borrow from" the most. Start menus in the bottom-left? Taskbars?

Upper Left = text terminal "home position".

[Richard Steiner]

I dunno about the IBM mainframe world, but in the Unisys mainframe world, the "home position" is in the upper left. All screen character positioning is done based on 0,0 being home, and a programmer tends to count down for lines and to the right for columns.

similarly . . .

[edward.virtually@pob]

one wonders what the computing world would be like if dec hadn't stupidly fired david cutler, who then went to work for microsoft and turned nt's internals into a vms clone. or what things would be like if bush hadn't stolen the election in 2000 and the doj given microsoft another white-wash of a settlement. pity we live in this pessimal world instead. burn in hell, cutler.

what does linux owe ibm? - ABSOLUTELY NOTHING

[Anonymous Coward]

what does linux owe ibm? - ABSOLUTELY NOTHING!! in fact. linux would be better off withouth ibm. in a few years ibm will claim possession of linux and lead a dirty mio $ legal war agains linux. linux does not need companies like ibm.

the odd thing about it all

[hawk]

is that Japan was farther along in developing itself than anyone realized until after the war.

hawk

Re:the odd thing about it all

[jackbird]

Got a reference for that? I was under the impression the Japanese military industrial complex was pretty much a shambles across the board after Midway.

Re:the odd thing about it all

[hawk]

I used to have one. But it would have been to one of those white crinkly things with black ink that got delivered in the morning.

It was a larger-sized piece for newspaper, describing some of the post-war occupation, and described the surprise of our forces when they stumbled across it. I believe it said that Gen. Eisen personally supervised the destruction of the large magnets.

Anyway, the gist of it was that while we were worried about a program that wasn't going anywhere in germany, the japanese that we weren't worried about were much further along. I wish I could remember how close they were, or whether the program was still receiving resources at the end, but I can't :(

hawk

Re:the odd thing about it all

[Agrippa]

In the closing months of our war with Germany, the Germans packed up tons of their research/secret weapons and shipped them to Japan. So, it wouldn't suprise me much if the Japanese had a much further along nuclear program than we suspected, mostly because the German research was transferred there.

I wrote a paper in college on the war for German scientists between the US and USSR in the days leading up to full Allied occupation - on the American side, it was called Operation Paperclip, and helped import much of the talent that founded and ran NASA.

.agrippa.

Re:the odd thing about it all

[Dogtanian]

In the closing months of our war with Germany, the Germans packed up tons of their research/secret weapons and shipped them to Japan. So, it wouldn't suprise me much if the Japanese had a much further along nuclear program than we suspected, mostly because the German research was transferred there.

Wasn't that supposed to be a 'dirty' bomb?- i.e. when I said 'true' atomic weapon, I didn't mean one that would just do the job by polluting.

And even if they'd had some idea of how to build an atomic bomb by the end of the war, was Japan in any position by that stage to actually develop the thing in practice? My understanding is that the Japanese military machine was in a very poor state by that time (as indeed was Japanese industry IIRC; wasn't one of the major reasons Japan did so well after the war that their industry destroyed in WWII, was totally rebuilt from scratch, leading to an efficient modern system?)

Everything Larry Says...

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Is plausable - except for the dominance of MCA as an architecture. PS/2 was already a market loser, without OS support.

Compaq and friends succesfully pushed EISA, while AST was moderately confusing things with "Cupid32". Others were doing the same.

The standards and the market were ripe for Intel to capitalize on a bus standard. This was part of a big strategy to unify the market, towards the aim of capturing a significant section of OEM chipsets and motherboards.

And it worked.

Re:Everything Larry Says...

[Zeinfeld]

Is plausable - except for the dominance of MCA as an architecture. PS/2 was already a market loser, without OS support. Compaq and friends succesfully pushed EISA, while AST was moderately confusing things with "Cupid32". Others were doing the same.

Which is why OS/2 was doomed from the start. There was absolutely no way that Compaq and the rest of the industry was going to let IBM control diddly. They were going to go for a non IBM O/S regardless.

The importance of protected mode on the 286 is somewhat overstated. The problem was that Intel botched the 286, it was not usable. That is why Microsoft wanted IBM to develop OS/2 for the 386. But that could not happen because IBM had promised that the PC AT would be upgradeable.

Compaq and co did not care much about that, the cost difference between a 286 and a 386 was minor compared to the cost of allowing IBM to stick their ass in a vice and turn the screw. If windows had not run on the 286 then the whole market would have been delayed somewhat, but IBM would never have become the dominant player.

Compaq and the rest crowned Microsoft because they were not IBM and they did not compete in the hardware area.

OS/2 on an IntelliStation is better. :-)

[Richard Steiner]

That's what I used as my secondary machine for a while. Very nice, and jet black before that color became such a trendy thing. :-)

MCSE DeVry grad reviews Mac mini

[bonch]

Since Slashdot rejected my submission, enjoy: http://www.divisiontwo.com/articles/MacMini2.html

Re:MCSE DeVry grad reviews Mac mini

[wed128]

For the love of christ tell me this is a joke. For all that is sacred.

Re:MCSE DeVry grad reviews Mac mini

[drwtsn32]

ROFL...that's farking hilarious!

You are allowed to do that only on Wednesdays

[KZigurs]

Yes, and it's not even Wednesday today.

GEOS

[computechnica]

Maybe PC/GEOS would have had a Chance!!

No nevermind, I was on crack for a second there. 8^0~

Linkage

Re:Per? Were!

[Anonymous Coward]

That made me laugh out loud, thank you. I wish I had some mod points.

DOS Isn't done until Lotus won't run

[alw53]

So which engineer at Microsoft figured out how to break their API so that Lotus Notes wouldn't run but Microsoft products would? Someone should write the history of that also.

blinders

[micromuncher]

Life isn't complete without introspection, and this blog shows the blinders with which Microsoft and ex-pats view the world.

One thing interesting [to me anyway] is the difference between Microsoft and IBM in their strategies. IBM was very formal in its development effort. Things typically didn't happen without a plan. IBM prided itself on being professional about everything - including software development.

But in Microsoft, you have a bunch of guys doing skunk works type projects that had the ear of Steve and Bill. Some might go so far as to say Microsoft lacked discipline, letting 'hackers' and 'tinkers' do their magic.

In the end, it wasn't this innovative hacking that really changed the world. Apple was winning points in the GUI and flat memory model 68k style. But evolution is as much driven by negative adaptations as positive. Jobs held to the ridiculous price points, and in the world were everyone in business was buying a 286 to run their DOS apps faster, the hack made the POS intel architecture live just a little bit longer.

Is it really a good thing that this event contributed to the longevity of the intel based platform? That hacking is considered genius? Or the mistakes of other companies don't contribute amazingly to Microsoft success?

How many times do you see the word Microsoft on an XP splash screen? I think the inferiority complex is well deserved.

Laaa Lah la-la-la Lah...

[digital.prion]

-Poof-

William sat straight up..


Screaming

Re:If Windows had never existed on the home deskto

[Locutus]

From what I've heard, the input queue on OS/2s GUI( not the OS but the GUI ) was synchronous because Microsoft fought IBM to make it that way. Did they do this BEFORE they internally decided to go with Window instead of OS/2 or after? ie, was it sabotage or not? Either way, it's how OS/2 ended up and it was a big thorn in it's side. But it was not an operating system flaw, it was a flaw in the GUI. Like GNU/Linux, OS/2 is a very robust OS with a GUI on top. The OS needs less than 4MB of RAM to run with the GUI( WPS ) needed 4-6MB( for Warp 3 GUI ). Pretty incredible and it's why OS/2 was/is 2-4 times faster than WinNT tech. But it also has some portions of the OS/kernel written in assembly( optimized ).

Another thing to remember is that unlike the MacOS and Windows 3.x, the synchronous queue issue only came up when there was a problem. All other times, it was multi-threaded and preemtive and the way it ran showed this. ie, very responsive 99% of the time.

LoB

Like they say...

[arkanoid]

In a free world you don't need windows and gates...

Re:If Windows had never existed on the home deskto

[mingot]

Not quite. Background tasks did still work. Just the UI message queue was locked.

Butterfly Effect

[catdevnull]

If OS/2 had the marketshare that Windows enjoys, perhaps there might not have been such interest in an OS "Messiah" like Linux which would not have led it's growth. But, maybe the user community might have resented OS/2 and sought MS as an alternative? Wouldn't that be ironic?

But, things are as they are. It's difficult to speculate how things would have been different. It's kinda fun having MS as the bad guy. They're so easy to loathe. Penguins are so cute, though. La la la. :)

As professor Pangloss would say:

[Bingo Foo]

This truly is the best of all possible worlds.

Re:As professor Pangloss would say:

[KoolyM]

Kudos for the Candide reference!

but... but...

[Anonymous Coward]

by the Godwin law, he has lost!

Please...

[Heretik]

Linux is not Windows or OS/2. This article implies the reason Linux is a contender (in the server market at least) is because IBM is putting "weight" behind it.. please!

How long has IBM really been putting weight behind Linux? A couple years? How much actual progresss has been made as a direct result of IBM's Linux support? Not that damn much.

These industry types just can't understand something like Linux at all. The "weight" behind Linux has nothing to do with big corporations or money. Linux is killing AIX etc. because it's Free, and it's better, and IBM has nothing to do with that at all.

Millions of hackers worldwide have everything to do with that. They are the weight behind Linux. Corporations spewing PR don't actually get any work done. Coders do.

Re:Natalie Portman Day?

[CA_Jim]

So the first 250,000 sheep are somehow smarter than the next million?

Mod Parent UP!

[BurritoJ]

Karma burn or no... Mod it up!!!

If Steve Jobs had only licensed Mac OS to clones

[monkeyboy87]

There was a memo that was published in Wired serveral years ago where Bill tried to get Steve to license Mac OS to clone vendors and such - this was waaay before window 3 ever happened. if all the machines were running some variant of mac os pre OSX what the world would have been like?

at one time Bill said that he full expected more than half of the revenue of microsoft to come from Mac

Re:In every way? Methinks not...

[Locutus]

well put but may I add that OS/2 v2.0 did have a TCP/IP stack. You had to purchase it seperately but it was available. There was PMX and Netware support in that kit too.

I had 486 systems running with 10MB of memory running X apps on Sparc stations via PMX over TCP/IP while running a Windows application and linking a few Netware shares into the system.

As you said, OS/2 ran circles around NT. And typically, you had to throw 2x the hardware at NT to even get close to OS/2. OS/2 and Netware owned the PC network server market until Microsoft finally shipped Windows 95. Then, they took $100's of millions they'd spend on marketing Win95 and started marketing WinNT. Even though OS/2 was a strong 2nd to Netware, only ONE review ever compared OS/2 with NT and Netware. As mentioned, OS/2 blew them away and we never saw another review which included OS/2.

And another thing, NT shipped( v3.1 ) with the OS/2 subsystem because without it, it would have had no networking. Microsoft Lan Manager for OS/2 bundled with/into NT to give NT the networking( albeit 16bit ) subsystem to compete with OS/2 and Netware. It wasn't until v3.51( 1996 ) when they finally got around to porting all that stuff to native NT and even then, there was hardly any multi-threading used.

People need to remember that Microsoft owned the press back then and when lies were printed, it took 3+ months to get a correction printed. And even then, the correction was buried on page 72 and not in the headlines like the original store. They were found guilty of anti-competitive practices in computer OPERATING SYSTEMS. It's not so easy for them to lie these days with the internet/WWW and all.

OS/2 rocked for the most part but the press were paid to push Microsoft.... IMHO.

LoB

Re:In every way? Methinks not...

[FauresRequiem]

I think it's safe to say that os/2 is dead, so why even dispute it's great features 8 years ago? Don't get me wrong, i use to run os/2 until nt 4 came out. the thing that killed os/2 was that no one made applications for it.

now by applications i don't mean it was completely lacking; i still have the 20+ follies for borland c++ and delphi for os/2. the key problem was that ibm failed to properly back it up. by the time `98 came out most of the software you would spot in stores was for windows. the rest we all know, windows became window$ and os/2 was religated to c64esc community, with people holding on to their dear os/2.

os/2 is no longer current.

If Windows 3.0 never happened....

[boarder8925]

If Windows 3.0 never happened, we wouldn't have funny Flash animations like this:

http://tinyurl.com/44te2

SAIC bi-weekly reboot of Windows email servers

[Locutus]

From: SAICnet, Email-Services
Sent: Tuesday, February 01, 2005 11:01 AM
To: SAICnet, Email-Services
Subject: Reminder: Bi-weekly Reboot of Exchange Servers

To: All US-Campus Point and US-McLean Exchange Users
From: SAICnet Email Services
Subject: Reminder: Bi-weekly Reboot of Exchange Servers

Your Exchange Mailbox server will be rebooted every two weeks to prevent memory utilization issues from affecting performance. This maintenance will occur between 11 PM and 12 AM Local time every other Friday starting on
Friday 2/04/2005 . The server will be unavailable for 20 minutes while it reboots. Any mail destined for mailboxes on the servers will be queued during the outage and delivered once the server is back online.

Please contact the SAIC Help Desk if this downtime will cause a critical problem for you by logging a service request at:
https://issaic.saic.com/helpdesk
or by calling (858) 826-2511 option 5.

Thank you.

SAICnet E-mail Services

Re:SAIC bi-weekly reboot of Windows email servers

[Gr8Apes]

Dang, they're still having that problem? We managed to only reboot every month. We didn't have to, we did it as a precautionary measure. This was in 97 when Bill Gates said you should reboot every week. (Exchange 5.5).

MOD UP

[Anonymous Coward]

A highly insightful and accurate assessment (but no doubt highly unpopular on Slashdot).

Stallman is basically a Nazi in his outlook.

Re:MOD UP

[Peter La Casse]

A highly insightful and accurate assessment (but no doubt highly unpopular on Slashdot).

Stallman is basically a Nazi in his outlook.

Or was it the Nazis who were Stallman-esque in their outlook?

The new Soviet Russia...

[mogwai7]

So in an alternate future (parallel dimension?), Microsoft is pushing Linux and IBM is evil?

Re:The new Soviet Russia...

[Hymer]

I hope NOT ! Who am I hating in that parallel dimension ?

But but but...

[Peldor]

What about Amiga!?!

Re:In every way? Methinks not...

[olman]

There's one huge benefit to NT as opposed to OS/2.

You simply never could kill an app reliably which crashed in OS/2. Yes, I did try all the fancy device driver add ons that were supposed to fix the issue.. And had pretty much zero results.

Simply, if the app couldn't process it's exit list, you were stuck with it. Never had such problem with NT or any varieties.

Re:In every way? Methinks not...

[NutscrapeSucks]

Well, the performance tests I saw generally put OS/2 only slightly ahead of NT (which is understandable due to the leaner featureset).

Again, the point was not that OS/2 was horribly defective, but that IBM had no intention of putting a serious, fullfledged OS on x86 and marketing it to the same extent as MS. That's why NT was an undeniable success on the server and OS/2 never got anywhere.

Microsoft, Microsoft, Microsoft, bloody Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

There's more Microsoft stories here than anything else, about 20 in the past week. Isn't anything better to post about??

You mean, some SCO & $$AA stories instead?

SCNR ... ;-)

Only the names would change.

[karlandtanya]

From the Linux point of view, you have 3 things happening:

Number One:

A de-facto standard operating system that is easy enough for any idiot to install. Which leads to...

The general public now able to be convinced to buy one of these "computer" thingies. Which leads to...

A large consumer market for general-purpose computers, and the economies of scale resulting from a large consumer market.

Number Two:
A group of hard-core enthusiasts who develop their own OS as many more-or-less related projects:

The GNU project

The Linux kernel

A multitude of other projects, which I will not list here (if you're offended, go sit in the corner & cry).

And number three--the result:

The first item makes hardware available to the general public. The second item makes software and development tools available to the general public. At this point, the free software movement has an environment in which it can be self-propogating.

It can be argued that the first condition is inevitable due to the natural greed of corporations and their tendency to want to control everything and sell it to everyone.

The second condition can only be viewed as fate if you believe in the natural creativity, diligence, and genius of a significant number of people in every generation. History appears to bear this belief as true.

It is reasonable to conclude then, that had Microsoft not completed Windows 3.1, absolutely nothing would have changed. Well, the names, but that's it.

Re:In every way? Methinks not...

[Gr8Apes]

so why even dispute it's great features 8 years ago

Because its features are still current, and the point is that current OSes still don't match the features available 11 years ago in OS/2. That's a sad statement.

As for applications, there were quite a few, including some new paradigms that I expect to see repeated probably in another 2-5 years. I still fondly remember a certain word processor that totally redefined WYSIWYG document creation on a computer.

Oh, and /. isn't about where the lemmings are going....

In short...

[jav1231]

In short, the world would be a better place! (grin>

Re:In short...

[Hymer]

That's not funny... that's tragical...
...and I'm having nightmares where I'm trying to kill BG...
...and bombing Redmond from the surface of earth...

Re:In every way? Methinks not...

[Gr8Apes]

Should have run the kill command for an app. (Don't recall anymore if this was an add-on or shipped with the system) I never had an issue killing any app.

Now, I do know there was an issue with killing certain threads running in Ring 0, which nothing was supposed to do other than the kernel and most if not all video drivers. Now, if some app was somehow improperly coded and ran in Ring 0 in one fashion or another, then you had major issues. The solution was to dump that app or get the vendor to fix their sloppy coding.

Novell Netware

[Anonymous Coward]

If Windows had failed we all will be running on Netware servers...

You maybe remember that M$ first managed to get rid of Netware when they introduced NT4... OS/2 was not a popular server platform except in the financial sector.

Revisionist History

[Gr8Apes]

You seriously need to go back and take a look at exactly when NT "took off". Take a look at the paltry 9.7% market share in 1997. Then take a look at OS/2's 15.2% market share in 1996

Hopefully this little trip down memory lane will correct your misconceptions.

Re:Revisionist History

[NutscrapeSucks]

According to the following link, IDC said NT was #2 in 1996:
178,100 OS/2 servers
vs
973,000 Novell servers
vs
~700,000 NT servers

Obviously the 97 numbers you are a different baseline and not comparable.

http://www.novell.com/news/press/archive/1997/02 /p r97017.html

Re:Revisionist History

[Gr8Apes]

Listing for 1996 numbers. That's 178,100 new and upgraded OS/2 Server licenses for the first half of 1996. Not installed base. And yes, those are IDC numbers.

Re:Revisionist History

[NutscrapeSucks]

The Novell numbers are also new shipments, but they are seat numbers, not server. But you'll see that Novell (#1) is in a pissing match with Microsoft (#2) and can't be arsed to even mention IBM (who was probably considered on the way out by 96).

Re:Revisionist History

[Gr8Apes]

Actually, IBM was strong in the financial sector, so strong that no one touched them for a long time. Novell was in a pissing match with MS, and probably didn't want to distract anyone with numbers in a sector that they'd both written off at the time.

Digital Equipment Corporation & Alpha

[Anonymous Coward]

...wouldn't be dead

'cause Compaq never would have the cash to "merge" with them...

What about the DOJ?

[AndyChrist]

He mentions it in the article. I think IBM would have faced stronger opposition than Microsoft EVER would. They'd have MUCH stronger control over a wider variety of aspects of computer markets due to having gained software dominance at a time when they were still dominant in hardware.

Re:What about the DOJ?

[easter1916]

Best sig *EVER*... cracked me up, thanks for the laugh.

should be Xenix, not Zenix ( no msg )

[Locutus]

hey, I said no message. ;-)

Silicon Graphics...

[Anonymous Coward]

...would still be *the* greatest manufacturer of Graphical Workstations...

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA-- no.

[Raptor CK]

By 2001, most PC class machines would have OS/2 running on them (probably OS/2 2.5) with multimedia support. NT OS/2 would also be available for business and office class machines. With IBMs guidance, instead of the PCI bus becoming dominant, the MCA was the dominant bus form factor. The nickname for the PC architecture wasn't "Wintel", instead it was "Intos" (OS2tel was just too awkwards to say). IBM, Microsoft and Intel all worked to drive the hardware platform, and, since IBM was the biggest vendor of PC class hardware, they had a lot to say in the decisions.

Windows has nothing to do with the failure of MCA. In fact, Windows supported most Microchannel devices just fine. I've got a 486 which used to run Windows 95 with an XGA-2 video adapter and a 3com MCA Ethernet card (later moved to a Linux server) without a hitch. In fact, it was *easier* to set up than anything else I'd ever used.

However, IBM wanted *back royalties* on the ISA bus for any third party manufacturer who wanted to add MCA capabilities. Compaq and others decided that this was a braindead move, and released systems with EISA, instead.

Mind you, MCA could've been clock-boosted to compete with PCI. IRQ sharing was in place, MCA's been successfully pumped up to 80MHz (from 20, which was amazing back in the day) without problems, and cards were dead-simple to install. Add hardware, boot, present driver disk when IML detected the new card, then provide OS drivers when that loads up. It not only wasn't hard, it was dead simple.

The PS/2 design philosophy was incredibly solid. Here we had systems which you could strip down to the mainboard in under 5 minutes, using nothing more than your bare hands, with a bus which was damned near idiotproof, and IBM blew it all on the marketing.

OS/2 or not, MCA was dead in the water.

Re:HAHAHAHAHAHAHA-- no.

[Anonymous Coward]

OS/2 Warp3 and 4 were much better platforms than W9x and NT3.5 and NT4...

Re:HAHAHAHAHAHAHA-- no.

[Raptor CK]

That wasn't the point. OS/2 rocked on toast. I knew that much. I'd been exposed to it back in the day, and the only thing that ever bugged me about it was that Wing Commander II occasionally crashed due to an EMS error. That's it.

I'm not arguing anything about OS/2 being good or bad, since it's irrelevant. OS/2 simply wouldn't be good enough to carry the weight of Microchannel. As long as clones were out there, as long as MS needed everyone to run Word, and as long as software companies care about marketshare, EISA, VLB, and PCI support would have been made necessary in any release of OS/2.

IBM wouldn't have liked it, but Microsoft would've demanded it.

Please don't start writing your message in the sub

[Anonymous Coward]

ject line. It's annoying.

If were IBM still evil Microsoft would be?

[Anonymous Coward]

- Windows loses to OS/2 - Microsoft the Redmond Linux distro?

Re:If Windows had never existed on the home deskto

[chiph]

Sure, it was cooperatively multi-tasked, but for the GUI only. It still was a step up from anything else (including MacOS) because you had the ability to launch long-running tasks in another thread or process, and your GUI stayed responsive.

PMMail, for example, would gray-out certain actions while downloading new mail. You could still do other tasks while this was going on in the background. Can't do that in Outlook.

As a result of my learning how to (more or less correctly ;-)) write multi-threaded code, I found myself at a significant advantage to all the Win 3.1 developers when WinNT came out. They were all freaking out over semaphores & mutexes (ie. not using them where they should have), when OS/2 developers were saying "So what? You *have* to use them in this situation."

Chip H.

More interesting

[geekoid]

would MS have picked up Linux?

Re:More interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

...they would probably have tried... but, assuming that the license was as it is, they would have serious problems in making real big bucks out of it...

You are overlooking

[geekoid]

that IBM and MS hate each other.
In a lot of respects IBM picking up Linux was the corporate equivalent of sticks a shiv in MS's back.

Also, if IBM had the OS power, MS may have picked up Linux to back.

Re:Per? Were!

[Anonymous Coward]

If 'buts' and 'ors' were filthy whores...

We'd have a jolly good time and be poor?

then explain

[geekoid]

the xBox.

I just remember the sound-bite

[pommiekiwifruit]

OS/2 for PS/2

Half an operating system for half a computer!

Not that comparison

[A nonymous Coward]

I am not comparing Shrub to Hitler. I am saying that this administration has a closed mind, just like dictatorships. It refuses to confuse itself with facts or tolerate any internal dissent or listen to any outside opinion. Bush has bragged about not reading newspapers and only getting what info Karl Rove feeds him. That is a sure recipe for losing touch with reality and eventually failing, and my guess is that this admin will crash and burn spectacularly.

Bush, Hitler, and idiots who jump to conclusions

[A nonymous Coward]

I posted another comment explaining that I was NOT comparing Hitler to Bush. What amazes me time after time, in spite of having been caught by the same effect time after time, is how people are so eager to jump to conclusions. I nowhere said Bush was another Hitler, I said Bush has the same closed mind as the Nazis and other dictatorships.

What is it with people who jump so fast and so often? Is it the same jumpers each time, or is it the same random effect that leads us to believe that so many drivers are idiots, when we see just one or two during the morning commute, out of the tens of thousands of cars we pass? Is it because only the bozos stand out, and everyone is a bozo once in a while, or is it just a few bozos who jump over and over again?

Whatever it is, it is sure interesting reading comments from the rabid ones who think Bush is a saint and assumed I was comparing him to Hitler. They must have be extremely arrogant to think Bush is anywhere near that important, and extremely insecure to read that comparison into what I wrote.

And yes, this post is off-topic. Guess how much I care.

Re:In every way? Methinks not...

[MicrosoftLinux]

You need to check out the facts on that head-to-head comparison of NTie and OS/2. Here is the link: http://www.microsith.com/jedix-myths.php3

I Smell a Teamer!

[Greyfox]

No one gets that rabid about OS/2 except folks that used to be on TeamOS2 heh heh.

In the '95 Atlanta Comdex one of the displays we set up was a huge dual processor (I forget if it was high speed 486 or pentium. Top of the line) Compaq with a whopping 32MB of RAM! Our intention was to run 3 or 4 AVIs side by side next to the NT machine that was happily spewing polys with their poly screensaver.

This was too slow from disk, so we made a 6 or 7 MB ramdisk and stuck our AVIs there. It was pretty smooth from the ramdisk so we locked it up and left.

I still have a thank you letter from an IBM director, thanking me for helping out at that COMDEX. Ahh those were the days...

It wouldn't have taken much to make OS/2 more competitive with Windows. The number one problem the customers always complained about was the Single System Input Queue. They added some hackish workarounds for that thing, but were unwilling to redesign the OS to actually fix it. That would have broken all those apps that the Navy was running (probably still does) on OS/2 1.3.

Hell of it was, even IBM wouldn't properly design their apps to not lock the queue. Several of their apps were direct ports of Windows 3.0 programs. Since they didn't process their messages in threads, whenever anything took a long time (Like indexing files across the network) the entire OS would lock up. It was actually better to run the windows versions of those apps, since that would at least let the OS continue to run.

Windows still displays signs of this problem to this day, since window frames are handled by the application itself. If you lock an app up, you can't minimize or move its window. The X model is much more sensible about this. In OS/2 you couldn't do anything with ANY of the applications on the screen at that point, but they fixed THAT in a fairly early Windows NT.

They did NOT have the shipping

[A nonymous Coward]

Japan, before Pearl Harbor, had just enough shipping for their own civilian economy. Their invasions in southeast asia drafted so much civilan shipping as to cripple their own economy. They did not have enough shipping to get an amphibious force to Hawaii, and they did not have anywhere near the naval forces necessary to maintain a blackade at such distance from the homeland. They had no possibility of starving Hawaii into submission. They didn't even have enough naval forces to blockade closer smaller islands, they had long since lost touch with the reality of fighting a logistics based war to start with, heck, they didn't even start convoys of their own until far too late, and submarines were for attacking military targets, not merchant shipping, which was not glorious enough for any decent military officer.

If Japan had tried to invade Hawaii, they would have lost the war sooner, not just from all the men, supplies, and ships lost in the debacle, but also in the lost opportunities elsewhere. They were stretched to the limit right from the outset.

As for winning at Midway or Coral Sea, they had the very problem I described, of losing touch with reality. Dissent was stifled; during the war games for Midway, their American side sank several Japanese carriers. The referee said that was unfair and refloated them. They had lost touch with reality, and if they had gotten lucky once or twice more, it would simply have magnified their victory disease, and the subsequent bad luck would have been more disastrous and ended the war sooner.

It's like damming a river. The bigger the dam, the more spectacular the failure. You can block reality for a while, but the more effort you put into it, the bigger the bite when it wins, and reality always wins.

It makes no difference that they would willingly have starved the civilians. They did not have the shipping to invade unless they had dropped every other military campaign, and even that would have been barely enough to just get troops to Hawaii, let alone protect the invasion force and supply the them from such a distance.

Re:They did NOT have the shipping

[Minna Kirai]

and they did not have anywhere near the naval forces necessary to maintain a blackade at such distance from the homeland.

As I obviously stipulated, this was all conditional on their naval forces not already having been destroyed, which could've been the result of many plausible scenarios.

It makes no difference that they would willingly have starved the civilians. They did not have the shipping to invade unless they had dropped every other military campaign,

No. If, as you claim, Hawaii couldn't survive without outside food sources, then defeating it would've required only 1 ship, assuming the rest of the Pacific war went well.

It's Time for MICROSOFT LINUX

[MicrosoftLinux]

Why the heck not? MS Office sales are down, the Microsoft OS's have become stagnant. Innovation is practically non-existent unless you count security patches as "innovations". BillyGates should step out on the lawn in Redmond with his first distro CD and begin the "embrace and extend" of Linux. Redmond could spend the next five years Microsofting existing *nix-compatible apps while touting them as wonderful innovations. The dev teams could catch up on their skiing. (Blackcomb is great this time of year, they say.)

Who is going to stop Microsoft Linux? Torvalds? Oh, please. The DOJ? Right!

"Linus, join me and together we can rule the Galaxy as Father and Son. You don't know the power of the Dark Side "

Re:If Windows had never existed on the home deskto

[doinky]

"CORBA" wasn't fully baked at the time and to my knowledge wasn't really part of the WPS architecture. Certainly the SOM guys were trying very hard to interoperate with and over CORBA but at that point it was just marketingspeak. (I worked on the WPS one summer before 2.0)

There was no way Hitler could've invaded Britain

[DABANSHEE]

Even if the US & Russia had not entered the fray

Re:Microsoft, Microsoft, Microsoft, bloody Microso

[Anonymous Coward]

How about some REAL Linux/F/OSS stories? Or is Linux and OS that stagnent that there aren't 10 things you can write about it in a day?

Re:In every way? Methinks not...

[Vitriol Angst]

OS2 and Amiga still have features that are ahead of things in use today. Of course, let's not even mention BeOS.

Operating Systems can be improved. NT was not the best and still isn't. And "Trusted Computing" which is really user hostile, will ensure that Windows will not be the best no matter how good the technology is.

Technology is not as much the issue as addressing what the user needs. BeOS was the most advanced operating system (so far, initially developed by Bell Labs), but it didn't address the market well enough. It also didn't penetrate the market enough to gain critical mind share. Pity. I still have version 3.5 on a CD i paid for and I have not installed it yet. What does that say?

Re:In every way? Methinks not...

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it's safe to say that os/2 is dead, so why even dispute it's great features 8 years ago?

Maybe you missed the title of this page, but it's talking about Windows 3.0. So if you don't think ancient software is worth discussing, you shouldn't be here.

While Interesting to speculate

[denissmith]

Linux would succeed against OS/2 just as it will against Windows because in the long term it is a better model for computer operating systems. It was making its presence felt before IBM put its weight behind it, and would probably have developed almost as quickly without IBM. The open source development model is at a short range disadvantage, but a long range advantage in that early adopters get less stability, but over time users get more stability and a better understood product.

Here's a web site to read

[A nonymous Coward]

The mechanics of a Pearl Harbor invasion

Do some research mate

[DABANSHEE]

Try reading Kershaw, etc.

Traditionally it was thought that Yugoslavia & Greece stalled the Germans by a month, but we now know that Barbarossa was going to end up occuring when it did regardless of Yugoslavia & Greece. Yes there were other factors that would've stalled the Germans by the same degree regardless of the Balkan campaign

In fact the Greek campaign cost the British Singapore. But for the Greek campaign, all Axis forces would've been evicted from North Africa at least 6 months before US entry into the war. (untill Churchill destracted the 8th Army with Greece they were running the Italians out of Africa piss easily)

Remember a significant percentage of the huge resources lost in Greece & Crete & the resources that went to continued war in North Africa were destined for Malaya or would've beeen destined for Malaya. It's a fact that but for Greece the British would've had air superiority in Malaya (the reason the Brits used Baffalos in Malaya was because the fighters destined for Malaya ended up in Greece, Crete & the Med (literally)) & local naval superiority (for example 2 of those 3 carriers & their escorts that were used to escort supply convoys to Alexandria would have been sent to the East Indies if the North African War had been won in the summer of 41)

BTW you know Singapore was a lot closer than what many people think - when Percival surrendered, Yamashita's forces were so spent that he had already planned to fall back off the island & regroup if the British had held out just another day longer. Also contrary to belief Singapore's guns could turn arround & fire over the city onto the Penisula. It's just that virtually all the ammo was AP, not much good against bicycles & trucks unless direct hits.

Also in a pre-war Staff excercise Perceval had predicted almost perfectly (except one tiny detail) how the Japs would invade Singapore down the Malay Penisula. Percival was a brillient staff officer but he just wasn't assertive enough as a field commander. When he knew the Japs were going to land on the Thai side of the border, instead of just hitting them on the beach regardless he asked the Foreign Office for permission, knowing full well they'd of course say no. Also the Governor would not let him build defensive fortifications, because the Governor saw such preperations as negative in which the British would lose face in front of the natives. The Governor wanted the natives (& Chinese) to think the British were 100% confident a Jap invasion simply wasn't possible & even if they did invade Malaya they'd be thrown back into the sea, leaving Singapore to party. If Percival was a better Field Officer he would have just ignored the Governor & the Colonial Office, by making sure any communications from them were lost in transit by his staff, etc ("what that? Ah the phone's cutting out, I can't hear you")

Re:Per? Were!

[SumpyGump]

How about If 'ifs' and 'buts' were candy and nuts, we'd all have Christmas trees! If 'buts' and 'ors' were filthy whores, we'd all have STDs!

Stalin never wanted Finland or Sweden

[DABANSHEE]

He just wanted buffers to protect St Petersburg's flanks

Re:Stalin never wanted Finland or Sweden

[danila]

That is true. But since Finland refused to succumb to reasonable requests, Soviet Union had to invade it. And I see no reason why it would leave if it wasn't attacked by Hitler. So by the end of the WW2 Linus's grandparents would live in a FSSR.

Just how does OS-X do on realtime?

[Latent Heat]

BeOS had a reputation for not only being fast, but being very realtime and very low latency, and well suited for multi-media.

Windows has always been a dog in the latency department, and the *nix's never had a great reputation there either. The argument "this is a desktop operating system and they are trying to maximize throughput on the kind of tasks users do rather than realtime", but the time slices given especially to disk reads seem kind of high. The only thing that has made Windows a contender in any kind of multi-media/video game/flicker-free video is Moores law -- computers run so fast that the unswitchable tasks complete that much faster.

What is the take on OS-X? What are the latencies? Are there any in the tens of milliseconds or more like Windows? I know none of these systems are hard realtime, but if you have typical latencies in the small numbers of ms, there is less interference with screen updates at video rates.

What is it like for the application developer? What kind of screen refresh rates are possible? Can you synch screen writes with vertical retrace? Is there acceleration for 2-D scrolling?

Still crashing after all these years

[vanbargw]

That night, David was up until 5AM working on the code, he got it working, and he'd left it running on his machine. He left a note on SteveB's office door saying that he should stop by David's office. When David got in the next day (at around 8AM), he saw that his machine had crashed, so he knew that Steve had come by and seen it.

Wow, some things NEVER change!

Actually, I never was.

[Richard Steiner]

I've used OS/2 since right after the 2.0 release and I still use my Warp 4 box for most things, but I didn't really see a point to joining a fan club.

It's more fun to be an independent fan. :-)

FWIW, I'm quite a fan of Linux and BeOS as well; I just don't use those platforms as much.

While it's dead in the market...

[Richard Steiner]

...and apparently quite dead in the eyes of the alternative OS community (which pushes Linux for reasons I completely understand, but which still seems to push BeOS for reasons I frankly don't comprehend at all), its perceived death is not a good reason to allow blatant misinformation to be posted on Slashdot, at least without rebuttal. :-)

Besides, OS/2 is still perfectly capable of running modern applications as long as they aren't heavily into multimedia.

I still use Warp 4 as my main desktop OS at home, for example, and it's still humming along on my SCSI-based 192MB PPro/200 box. It runs Firefox, Visio, Quicken, Embellish, and a pile of other programs as well as any other platform could.

What isn't "current" about it besides mindshare?

Re:While it's dead in the market...

[Anonymous Coward]

Did they ever fix that 512MB app limit in OS/2? If not, it's dead.

What if Mac OS had won?

[crovira]

Given that we have stories of Bill Gates screaming in 1985 "Make it more like the Mac!"; what if they hadn't been able to do it?

What if Microsoft was just nibbled away at on their DOS prompt desktop until they'd died a slow and agonizing death?

What if?

Re:What if Mac OS had won?

[Hymer]

Then I'll be sitting in front of a ThinkPad with OS/2 or a PowerBook instead of sitting in front of a PC running SuSE...

Not sure I'd call it huge...

[Richard Steiner]

...though I remember it being a real irritant once.

It isn't a very common occurrence these days, at least on my box, and I've had pretty good luck using either top or watchcat to blow things away when a program decides to go astray.

I agree that a real kill -9 equivalent would be a good thing, though. When it's needed.

Microsoft sucks.

[rice_burners_suck]

Linux would have happened without IBM putting its weight behind it. OS/2 would have grown and become increasingly complicated.

At the time of the Windows 95 vs. OS/2 Warp, I chose OS/2. First I bought the Red version, or was it the Blue version? I don't remember. One was an "upgrade" to DOS, as I recall, and the other was a "complete" OS. Both were quite slow, big, bulky, and bloated. Not that OS/2 was a bad OS. It was cool. You could run programs made for DOS, OS/2, Presentation Manager (OS/2's GUI), and Windows 3.0/3.1. Windows applications could run in "rootless" mode in the Presentation Manager or in a separate Windows instance. The whole thing was quite fascinating. Since there weren't many Windows 95 programs available at the time anyway, OS/2 fulfilled pretty much all my needs. And to make things fun and interesting, it was a big messy OS and there were lots of places to dig into it and make it do weird things. I only wish it could run UNIX programs too, because that would have made it the ultimate OS of the time. It was relatively unheard of (in the PC realm) for one OS to run another OS's programs back in those days.

I used OS/2 for a long time, even after most people started using Windows 95. I didn't care; all the programs I needed worked on OS/2. By the time Windows 98 came out, I was also using BeOS and playing with other, weirder OSes. BeOS, running on my PC, a 133 MHz Pentium, felt like totally opening up the throttle on a hot rod on the open road, compared to OS/2, which was composed of KSLOCs upon KSLOCs of cruft, beautiful as it was in its own strange way, was slow and felt heavy.

It was right around that time that I started using Linux. I realized the potential, but saw that a lot of work remains to be done. Who cares, I thought... I've been using weird fringe OSes for a long time, let's use this for a while.

Now let's suppose that Windows never ran protected mode programs and that Microsoft didn't kick IBM's ass at the time. OS/2 probably would have remained too damn complicated for the mortal man to use. DOS would have continued in its popularity. Don't even think of Linux. I suppose that Mosaic would have been a DOS based GUI browser, the way that other programs like AutoCAD and who knows what were. It would have taken probably five years longer for people to get used to the GUI concept... right around 2000. I think that by then, there would have been such a variety of console-based interactive programs for Linux, and I don't suppose that so much effort would have gone into making programs for X. If such an effort had taken place, then by 2000, Linux would have been ahead of the pack in terms of GUI usability. But I doubt that would have happened. The computer user community would definitely be a lot smaller than it is today, and most of its members would be powerusers and programmers. There wouldn't need to be such an emphasis on making things "friendly", so more effort and concentration would go into making things "just work." The important things would get done with less emphasis on crap and talking paperclips.

Looking at these predictions for an alternate reality over the past 10 years, I come to the conclusion that Microsoft is largely responsible for the fact that software and computers in general are considered unreliable and this is considered normal. If it weren't for Microsoft, people would not pay for software that does not work properly.

Microsoft. Where do you want to go today?

Re:Microsoft sucks.

[andreyw]

Considering Mosaic was originally developed for some random UNIX + X11, I severely doubt it would have ever been ported to DOS, of all things.

Win32s hurt it badly.

[Richard Steiner]

"It also ran windows apps much better than windows did."

Yes, it did, at least until Microsoft "innovated" and started the Win32s.dll release-of-the-month club.

It's a lot harder to support a non-native API which is in a state of constant flux.

The PC market might have gone too.

[LWATCDR]

The Amiga and maybe the Atari ST.
Think about it. IBM had no interest in the "Home" market. The Mac was too expensive and the hardware was not any better than the Atari ST or and way behind the Amiga. If Commodore ever learned how to market and no Windows 3 or 95 you might have seen the Amiga and ST thrive. Or if Apple had developed a low cost Mac it would have filled the void.
There is a good chance that x86 would have died out and Alpha, 68k, maybe the 88k would be the chips of choice.

You got it.

[Richard Steiner]

Early versions worked fine, later versions used a sound library that broke sound support in an OS/2 VDM.

I remember an e-mail conversation with ID Software about it, and one of the guys was a real prick, but American McGee was pretty cool about it (while also saying that it was really a DOS game after all and support under OS/2 wasn't a priority).

Thankfully, Doom Legacy works just fine in a VDM. :-)

Why you cant see!

[Anonymous Coward]

If you stopped typing one-handed every night to teh ghey pr0n then you would not be blind now!

Microsft, the victim

[ndogg]

I can understand why people only use Windows, because they don't know any better.

However, I don't understand why people aren't screaming at Microsoft for all of Windows' shortcomings.

I believe that Microsoft has done a supreme job at convincing everyone that they are the victims of security problems, and its users are simply casualties of war.

To me, that's akin to a home security company claiming to be the victim, and its customers are simply collateral damage.

Re:Microsft, the victim

[Hymer]

We aren't screaming 'cause it is pointless now, monopolies aren't listning to customers.
We should have been screaming a long time ago, back in the early 90ties... but back then M$ didn't look like a serious threat.
We must learn from this disaster and make sure that someting like that never happens again... for I don't really think we will be able to repair the damage...
...and yes this has been a disaster, several companies are gone... some of the best ideas are dead... and any kind of resistence are erased (or at lest tried to be erased) from peoples minds
I've got a Linux magazine... on the first page i found an ad for Windows Server...
the whole thing reminds me of the Borg in TNG...

Re:Microsft, the victim

[DuctTape]

We should have been screaming a long time ago, back in the early 90ties... but back then M$ didn't look like a serious threat.

Hahahahahaha! It was just as big of a threat back then, unless you count 1990 and 1991. But Apple wanted to make oodles of money, and Windows was all that was left. And it was pretty harmless back then.

I still pine for the days when only the hobbyists, universities, and corporate wonks had computers. Now they let anyone buy one. And everyone wonders why Ma & Pa Kettle can't figure out why it don't work right four minutes after they connect it to the Internet.

DT

Patents. Dosbox

[Pseudonymus Bosch]

That OS/2's MVDM was significantly better than NT's VDM at running DOS programs?

Wasn't it because of some patent-protected virtualization technology that IBM found for its mainframes?

Funny that now there is people asking for an OS/2 port of DosBox.

Future boy!

[Pseudonymus Bosch]

why don't you download the source and fix it rather than complaining about it! :)

I'm sure in 2035, plutonium is available at every corner drugstore, but in 2005 it's a little hard to come by!

DSOM

[Pseudonymus Bosch]

Wasn't it that DSOM (the network version) was based on CORBA?

Re:DSOM

[doinky]

That would match my recollection, which is admittedly sketchy. The WPS was built on a half-baked early release of SOM that in retrospect was not quite ready for prime-time.

Linux in a World Where Windows 3.0 Never Happened

[Anonymous Coward]

We would all love MS for their support of Linux

Thanks for Windows ME?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to belittle Dave's impressive hack, but probably this rather worsened MSFTs image if anything, since users had to futz with Windows far longer than they should have, instead of making the cut to a real OS like OS/2 or NT. Further, it is likely that the clever and wily Bill Gates would've finagled a way to preempt IBM anyway, as they did with NT. So perhaps 3.0 was a crucial, albeit wobbly, stepping stone, but highly doubtful.

Here's the picture:

QDOS (mostly CP/M) -> DOS -> Windows 3.0 -> ... Windows ME -> Dead end

NT (some OS/2, some Mach Kernel) -> .. ->XP

Again, nothing to say that this wasn't an impressive hack. Even before Win 3.0, there was QuarterDeck and 386 MAXX (memory manager) which supported loading above the 640K barrier, and running separate consoles. very cool stuff.

For that matter, MINIX runs on a 286...

not if Linux was GPL-ed

[sonamchauhan]

> put weight behind Linux? Maybe Apple goes that route instead of using Darwin.

Unlikely (Darwin's the stuff used in OSX right?)
I think one of the reasons Apple chose BSD is because of the license.

Perhaps Linux put Linux out in a BSD-style software license, instead of the GPL, Apple may have chosen Linux instead.

No shipping!

[A nonymous Coward]

Even if they had their entire intact naval force, they could not have maintained a blockade that far from home waters. The farther a force is from home waters, the longer the supply lines, the longer the transit times, everything takes longer. They did not have sufficent force to blockade Hawaii even with their entire intact force.

Conversely, the closer to the enemy, the shorter the enemy supply lines.

You say the Japanese could have blockaded Hawaii with a single ship. Please explain that. I don't know ho wmuch shipping was required to keep Hawaii supplied, but it must have been dozens of ships a week. What single ship can intercept that much traffic, let alone find it in a big ocean, even with no military protection? Are you supposing the entire US naval force had been sunk without loss to the Japanese?

Go read that web page I referenced. Prewar Japan required 10 million tons of shipping to keep it going. 3.5 million of that was foreign tonnage, unavailable as soon as war started. The army and navy drafted a huge portion of the remaining for carrying invasion forces and resupply, so the civilian economy was operating at something like 25% of the shipping it needed, not just to feed itself, but to collect raw materials to produce military supplies.

Please explain how you think Japan could have invaded Hawaii, or even starved it into submission. I'd like to know what you mean by a single ship accomplishing this.

The 7 Dec 1941 attack lost 10% of its airplanes in just two surprise raids. How many planes would they lose in just a few days of covering an invasion? They'd be drained within a week. Where would the replacement planes come from, since it was too far to fly, and they did not have sufficient tonnage to resupply by ship? Where would the replacement pilots have come from, since they had a very slow pilot traing rate?

It's real simple arithmetic. Read that web page and show me where its arithmetic is wrong.

Re:No shipping!

[Minna Kirai]

Even if they had their entire intact naval force, they could not have maintained a blockade that far from home waters

Now you're going off on all kinds of digressions. All I wanted to do is point out that your specific claim that the Japanese couldn't invade Hawaii because it would be difficult for them to feed the native civilians was flat-out ludicrous.

You said "Japan would have to take up the slack in feeding the locals". That is completely wrong, and that's all I was saying.

I'd like to know what you mean by a single ship accomplishing this.

I call it an "aircraft carrier". Uncontested air superiority over a region means that any hostile ship visiting a port swiftly becomes nothing more than a navigational hazard.

Re:No shipping!

[Minna Kirai]

It's real simple arithmetic. Read that web page and show me where its arithmetic is wrong.

Done. The web page is wrong because it assumes that only the Japanese need to bother about logistics. It lists in detail how the Japanese couldn't have brought in enough men/supplies to defeat the large American defense force there, while completely ignoring the possibility of a simple siege.

The page, while correct, is irrelevant to my suggestion of a naval siege, because it only demonstrates that the Empire couldn't have completed a rapid invasion in force. If one assumes, as that web page does, that a catastrophic loss at Midway had devastated the US Navy, then the eventual defeat of Hawaii would've been only a matter of time. Non-self-sufficient islands can never withstand naval superiority.

Such a scenario is quite similar to what would've happened if the Bismark had survived it's maiden voyage: effective blockade of England rendering it combat incapable after a few years. (By "effective", I mean not that every ship is intercepted, but enough shipping is lost to make continuance untenable)

I call BS

[iamacat]

The only "license" that grants all rights is not a license at all: public domain. On the face of it, public domain code may seem like a good idea, but in fact, it isn't. Why not? Because of liability. If I author code and contribute it to the public domain, I am not making distribution of the code contigent on the receiver abandoning his or her right to take me to court should the code not behave as expected. This is why every license (including BSD) have a clause about "MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE."

To demand anything from me, you either need a contract with my signature on it, or an act that implies a contract - like a sale of a boxed product. Books have no disclaimers and neither do public domain slashdot comments. Yet nobody gets sued.

These blurbs are created by lawyers trying to justify their salaries. They will not get a company out of legitimate obligations of real or implied contact - for example I can return their product and get back the purchase price. You can return my free code and get back the price you paid me as well.

DOSBOX has soundcard emulation.

[Richard Steiner]

That would be useful for DOS games if one isn't using an ISA sound card under OS/2.

One hell of a trick...

[kikta]

Since Linux & Mach are both kernels, that would be one hell of a trick. What do you mean? (seriously, I can't figure it out)

Re:One hell of a trick...

[Anonymous Coward]

Since Linux & Mach are both kernels, that would be one hell of a trick. What do you mean? (seriously, I can't figure it out)

From some page I found on the interweb:

"MkLinux is based on the Mach microkernel, and does NOT use the standard kernel from Linus Torvalds and the Linux development community. The MkLinux team patches the standard kernel so that it sits on top of the OSF Mach microkernel (like Mac OS X and the GNU Hurd)"

Re:If Windows had never existed on the home deskto

[drinkypoo]

I would be very, very surprised if Windows NT did not make use of extensive assembly language optimizations. Inlining assembler into C is not even unusual. All you have to do is stash any registers you're going to screw with somewhere in memory, do whatever you're going to do, and restore them when you're done, so it's not hard, either. Since NT only runs on a couple of instruction sets these days it only makes sense. Personally, were I in charge of the project I'd be writing the whole thing portably and then there would be per-platform optimizations, so you could run it on just about anything, though perhaps not rapidly. Of course, this might be how they're doing things now... but I don't know diddly about the NT code, or anyone else's really.

Re:Philip K Dick...

[MrCreosote]

The Man in the High Castle

Re: 512MB app limit.

[Richard Steiner]

I think it has been expanded in the latest kernels, yes. Not sure, though, since the only thing I've seen it impact is WIN32S 1.30.

Letter I wrote to that idiot. . . .

[untouchable]

Jorge Lopez, I have something to tell you.
You should go back to DeVry and demand your money back, because you got completely screwed in their education process.
This article you wrote about the Mac mini is so complete of FUD, I honestly wonder if you know anything about computers, or if Microsoft slipped you the mickey.

Ill admit, we were excited at first to get one in the lab to put through its paces. I had heard about the machine and seen a few clips on G4 of Steve Jobs' keynote at Macworld San Francisco in January. My curiosity piqued by the pronouncement of a $499 computer from Apple, I checked out Apple.com to look up its specs. While the hardware is about roughly equivalent to a Windows PC circa 1995, what got me interested were Apples claims about its size, weight and footprint.

Dude, what 1995 computer did you use? An intel PC circa 1995 ran about 200mhz, not 1.25 ghz. Ram was about 16mb - 32mb, not 256mb. Completely ignorant, or blantant FUD?

If you believe Apples marketing department, the new Mini is smaller than most packs of gum and weighs less than four quarters. Well, we received our test unit from Apple yesterday, and let me say right off the bat that those claims are a wee bit of an exaggeration. Far from being Trident-sized, the Mini actually measures about 6.5x6.5x2, about the size of two wonderbread cheese sandwiches stacked on top of each other, or about 50 packs of Bubble Yum. As for the weight, it feels about three pounds. Hold a Mini in one hand and four quarters in the other and tell me which one feels heavier. You could perform this experiment yourself at an Apple store.

Dude, now you're saying you can't read. The Ipod shuffle is about the size of a gum, not the Mac mini. Wow. You're not even trying here anymore, are you?

As for the style of the unit, its alright. It reminds me of a ShuttlePC. But since its sleek look comes at the expense of the parallel port, serial ports, the PS/2 ports and the drive bays, potential Mac mini buyers should ask themselves just how much utility theyre willing to sacrifice for style. Oh, did I forget to mention that the Mini has no PCI slots either? And no floppy disk drive? Well, no wonder they got the unit to be so small. No keyboard or mouse either. Sorry, Kayla, daddys got to make another trip to Best Buy before you can play with your new computer. Hmmm...let's see here...

Um, the Mac platform has stop using floppies since the second version of the Imac. In 1998. The fact that no new Macs since then has ever shipped with one should not be a surprise to someone in the industry. But, trolls will be trolls. Yeah, the mini has no pci slots. A form factor that size, some sacrifices had to be made. If you want to do some modifications for your computer, the mac mini wasn't meant for you. It's for people who just want a computer that works. And, please, we both know that if the mac mini had come with a mac keyboard and mouse, you'd just bitch about the fact that you don't like the mac keyboard and mouse. So, I suppose it's a win-win for you, isn't it? You get to troll both ways. ...I could get a Mac mini computer for $499 and have no keyboard or mouse, no serial ports, no way to connect a printer, no PS/2 ports, no floppy drive, no 5.25" bays, no PCI slots, no speakers, and no Windows XP...

Um, most printers come with usb cables nowadays. Again, the mac hasn't used ps/2 ports since about 1998, usb ports all the way. This is a mac mini. Do you think they could honestly call it that if you put 5.25 bays, PCI slots, and speakers inside it? Hmm, you speak of Windows XP missing as a bad thing. . . ...or I could grab an equally stylish, full-featured eMachine at the gas station with a bag of chips for less than half the Mini's price, with the added benefit of being able to run Windows XP. Decisions, decisions.

Yeah, you could buy a comparable eMachine computer for the same price as a Mac mini. Just like I could buy a comparable Dell for

Re:Letter I wrote to that idiot. . . .

[untouchable]

Hate to reply to myself, but I think that that site is just a joke website. Sigh. Got trolled in that one. . . .

Nonsense

[A nonymous Coward]

One ship does not a blockade make. The Bismarck was not capable of blockading Britain (NOT England!) by itself, even if it had infinite fuel and ammo onboard. It had to refuel and resupply either at sea or in port and could not have maintained a blockade. Ditto for any single Japanese aircraft carrier. It did not have the fuel to sit out there all by itself, even for a week or two, while maintaining a blockade. Heck, the 7 Dec 1941 carriers didn't even have the fuel necessary to get to Hawaii itself, they had to bring tankers with them and refuel prior to the attack.

The island force could easily go a week or two without immediate resupply, but not the blockaders. Blockade has to be continuous and leakproof. That's why that web page didn't concern itself with island resupply. If the blockader can't maintain a blockade more than a day or two, it's not a blockade, it's a raid.

You are incredibly ignorant of military matters to think a single aircraft carrier can get to Hawaii, blockade the island all by itself for a month or two, all without resupply or refueling.

Even if the Japanese had taken Midway, that would not have helped them one white in blockading Hawaii. I am at a loss to see how anyone could think that way. Your ignorance and lack of imagination is apalling. A blockade takes a long sustained force, not one carrier for a week at most.

Re:If Windows had never existed on the home deskto

[dmforcier]

As much as I hate to say this, WPS was not one of the things that was done right on OS/2. It looks good in theory, but there's a fundamental problem with inheritance that didn't show up until they started mixing and matching 3rd party developed desktop classes. Unless the entire hierarchy is stable and well-known, you can't predict behavior. You have no idea what someone else may have done to the your superclasses in the runtime environment. Suddenly your parents don't act as you expected (or tested). Lots of unexpected field failures that didn't help endear OS/2 to developers or graphical users.

Microsoft got this one right ([arrg!] it burns!) with composition rather than inheritance. It makes programming less elegant, but it makes an unknown runtime environment a lot easier to survive.

Otherwise, OS/2 rocked!!

Re:If Windows had never existed on the home deskto

[Locutus]

From everything I've read about it, SOM was one of the first, if not THE first, CORBA implementations. As you probably know, the first few revs of CORBA were not complete( is any industry spec ) and they got better as it matured and this lead to far better interoperability among CORBA product vendors. Regardless, it sure looks like the WPS was based on SOM, which was based on CORBA, which was/is an OMG.org distributed object spec. Google'ing this resulted in these:

http://www.scoug.com/OS24U/1996/SCOUG605.2.ODOCN EW .HTML

And under the SOM section of:
http://kb.indiana.edu/data/aeri.html?cust=625 870.5 5493.30

LoB

Re:In every way? Methinks not...

[bjb]

Because its features are still current, and the point is that current OSes still don't match the features available 11 years ago in OS/2. That's a sad statement.

I've seen this statement numerous times over and over in forums about any old/unpopular/deprecated/dead operating system. For example, I can't count how many times I've heard people mention that there were features in the Amiga OS that still aren't in modern operating systems (e.g. "assign" command). Usually, when these comments come out, they're also using such a tone as in "those other operating systems are SURELY inferior without feature XX".

C'mon. It's easy to make a blanket statement such as this, but without qualification, whats the point? I can easily say that OS X doesn't have multiple resolutions on the same screen, a feature created more out of hardware limitations of the time, but why do we need such a thing these days? Sure, I'd love to see something like Amiga "assign", but Windows' "subst" gets close, and OS X / Linux has mount; I'd then claim that therefore, "assign" isn't exactly necessary.

rant off..