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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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.

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

[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

[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

[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

[elgatozorbas]

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

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:Hmm

[TheKidWho]

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

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

[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

[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.

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.

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

[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

[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

[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.

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.

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).

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...

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?

[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?

[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?

[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.

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?

[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! :)

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

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...

[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.

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.

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:Engineer?

[budcub]

People with a Phd can be called doctor too.

Besides, not all engineers design bridges.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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: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.

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.

Been thanking the wrong guy!

[Mr. BS]

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

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

Re:Engineer?

[Hal_Porter]

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

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.

WOSWESU?

[gelfling]

Which OS would evil Spock use?

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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??

Re:Per? Were!

[jaklein]

"If 'buts' and 'or' were filthy whores, we'd all be covered in chanker sores."

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: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

MCSE DeVry grad reviews Mac mini

[bonch]

Since Slashdot rejected my submission, enjoy: http://www.divisiontwo.com/articles/MacMini2.html

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

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

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: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!

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.

Here's a web site to read

[A nonymous Coward]

The mechanics of a Pearl Harbor invasion

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.