...and I *do* have a box at home running it. But there's so damn little SOFTWARE available for it that it's sometimes VERY hard to do stuff.
And keep in mind that I'm an OS/2 user bitching about a lack of software in the BeOS. I'm used to slim pickings in some contexts. -- -Rich (OS/2, Linux, BeOS, Mac, NT, Win95, Solaris, FreeBSD, and OS2200 user in Bloomington MN)
Why? Because of all the desktop OSes I've tried, OS/2 is still the one I'm most comfortable in. I can use most of the Linux apps I want (slrn, pine, lynx, links, XFree86, GIMP) alongside the OS/2 tools I like (FTE, FileJet, 4OS2, Embellish, StarOffice, ColorWorks) and a few Windows things (AOLPress, ABC Snapgrafix, Drafix CAD), and if I want to take time out to play a DOS game like MAME or Quake or Descent or whatever I can do that too.
It's still a pretty neat OS, really. See my web site for a screen snapshot. I use Linux too, of course, and dabble in a few other things, but the OS/2 setup is still my mainstay. -- -Rich (OS/2, Linux, BeOS, Mac, NT, Win95, Solaris, FreeBSD, and OS2200 user in Bloomington MN)
Larger companies which have historically had heavier computing needs have *never* left the mainframe world, as I'm sure many of us who write new software for our employer's mainframes can attest.
I work in flight operations for NWA, and we have something like ten mainframes here in the MSP computer center being used to run various applications (some IBM hardware, some IBM clones, some Unisys 2200 hardware).
We still use mainframe hardware mostly because mainframes in general have better reliability/recoverability than large Unix boxes have managed yet to date (and we can't afford to have some of our operational systems go down at all -- downtime translates to flight delays, and an hour outage could strand dozens of aircraft and cost us millions!).
Please don't underestimate the HUGE impact that mainframes have had on large-scale businesses, and don't overestimate the impact client-server had on large mainframe sites. Nothing has changed here, though we have more options for smaller projects now, and mainframe use here is growing if anything.
Almost all of the larger airlines, banks, insurance companies, and government agencies used mainframes for their core processing before c/s became the popular architecture in academia, and as far as I know that's still a true statement today. Client/server sometimes gives you additional options, but for most it isn't a real replacement for a decent mainframe-based system. -- -Rich (OS/2, Linux, BeOS, Mac, NT, Win95, Solaris, FreeBSD, and OS2200 user in Bloomington MN)
I love that game. After a heated battle, there's smoking junk lying everywhere!:-)
I'd also love to see Subspace ported to Linux, and Lode Runner! I used to play that for hours and hours... -- -Rich (OS/2, Linux, BeOS, Mac, NT, Win95, Solaris, FreeBSD, and OS2200 user in Bloomington MN)
...VAX/VMS had a very nice hierarchical online help system.:-) -- -Rich (OS/2, Linux, BeOS, Mac, NT, Win95, Solaris, FreeBSD, and OS2200 user in Bloomington MN)
Tell that to the computers that control the behavior of traffic lights, or that control various pieces of medical equipment.:-)
Not all computers are desktop computers, and while this discussion is mainly being done in a desktop PC or server context, don't forget that people who wrote software do so in other contexts as well. -- -Rich (OS/2, Linux, BeOS, Mac, NT, Win95, Solaris, FreeBSD, and OS2200 user in Bloomington MN)
For example, I've purchased several official Linux distributions as well as several copies of FreeBSD. That is open-source software. Open source and payment are not mutually exclusive concepts. -- -Rich (OS/2, Linux, BeOS, Mac, NT, Win95, Solaris, FreeBSD, and OS2200 user in Bloomington MN)
I'm using 10' cables and see some slight shadowing, but it seems fine for the most part at that resolution. I don't do graphics work, tho.:-) -- -Rich (OS/2, Linux, BeOS, Mac, NT, Win95, Solaris, FreeBSD, and OS2200 user in Bloomington MN)
I've got a 4-port Belkin OmniCube here linked to four PPro boxes running a variety of operating systems including various Linux flavors, Solaris, FreeBSD, OS/2, BeOS, and both Windows 95 OSR2 and Windows NT, and I can reboot any of them in the background. As long as I don't play with the KVM switch during the boot process, they all seem to detect the mouse and keyboard just fine. It's strange (to me) that it didn't work for you. Do you have it plugged in properly? -- -Rich (OS/2, Linux, BeOS, Mac, NT, Win95, Solaris, FreeBSD, and OS2200 user in Bloomington MN)
Excuse me, but isn't Microsoft MORE than capable of outspending its opponents? How much cash does Microsoft Corporation have on hand again? Speaking as a corporate programmer, I can't for the life of me see how this impacts my ability to design software however I like. This has nothing whatsoever to do with "how software is designed", and everything to do with "how using one monopoly position to leverage another can distort the marketplace and attract the government's attention". -- -Rich (OS/2, Linux, BeOS, Mac, NT, Win95, Solaris, FreeBSD, and OS2200 user in Bloomington MN)
Dunno if I'm typical, but I know I've enjoyed a lot of British shows from The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin (spelling?) to Good Neighbors, 'Ello 'Ello, Red Dwarf, Black Adder, and Dr. Who (particularly John Pertwee and T Baker). Well, maybe the last isn't a comedy, but how can one take a Dalek seriously?:-) Most of what I've seen is older, though. -- -Rich (OS/2, Linux, BeOS, Mac, NT, Win95, Solaris, FreeBSD, and OS2200 user in Bloomington MN)
At least in a straight VDM (not a VMB using a real boot image), the DOS kernel is actually a virtualized DOS interface lookalike which hooks into the OS/2 kernel.
That's why DOS program in a VDM can use the OS/2 mouse and sound drivers instead of having to load their own. -- -Rich (OS/2, Linux, BeOS, Mac, NT, Win95, Solaris, FreeBSD, and OS2200 user in Bloomington MN)
One reason some of us think OS/2 is (or was, anyway) so important is because OS/2 was the very first technically strong contender to Windows 3.1 for the desktop on Intel hardware, and was Windows NT's first strong (and superior, IMhO) opponent. It's a 32-bit operating system with an extremely flexible and consistent desktop, enough native software to be useful, and very good DOS/Win 3.1 support. Plus lots of ported Unix stuff.
[1] Unlike Windows NT, the GUI in OS/2 is completely decoupled from the kernel, and the shell is actually useful.:-) Using the freeware TSHELL, you can bypass the need for PM and the WPS entirely and run OS/2 on fairly small/slow machines. [2] The default shell is a DOS derivative and superset. Other shells (4OS2, tsch, bash) are much better, IMhO. [3] The OS/2 WorkPlace Shell was first released in 1992, long before Microsoft designed their limited WPS knock-off GUI. It's also extensible - programmers can create new desktop objects which inherit the chacteristics of the base object class they're based on. Very slick. [4] I use it as a client, not a server, so I'm uncertain. But even the client version of OS/2 Warp 4 comes with a telnet server which is quite useful. [5] Again, much of the interface in OS/2 predates Windows, so I consider Windows an OS/2 hack rather than the reverse. Since I use Xit, I have LOTS more buttons than a normal OS/2 setup.:-) I still use OS/2 as my main desktop OS at home (even though I also have Windows 95 and NT, Linux, FreeBSD, and BeOS) because I'm more comfortable in the WPS than in KDE, GNOME, or AfterStep under Linux, and because (like Linux) OS/2 has a "real" command prompt, so I can use text-based console-mode tools like lynx, pine, slrn, Yarn, FTE, or whatever in comfort. And it lets me play Quake and C&C in the background.:-) -- -Rich (OS/2, Linux, BeOS, Mac, NT, Win95, Solaris, FreeBSD, and OS2200 user in Bloomington MN)
See the following URL: http://www.perl.com/language/misc/virus.html which strikes me as a fairly in-depth discussion of the rationale for using "viruses" rather than "virii". Also, the few folks I've known who have written anti-virus software a/o have been involved in computer anti-virus research have generally used "viruses" as the plural form in a software/computing context. -- -Rich (OS/2, Linux, BeOS, Mac, NT, Win95, Solaris, FreeBSD, and OS2200 user in Bloomington MN)
I've heard that over 200 airlines still use Unisys 2200-series mainframes, including the one I work for, and those are direct descendants of the Sperry 1100-series boxes. -- -Rich (OS/2, Linux, BeOS, Mac, NT, Win95, Solaris, FreeBSD, and OS2200 user in Bloomington MN)
The DOS communications program Telemate uses the Scroll Lock key to lock the scrollback buffer at a single location. Otherwise, if you close the scrollback window and reopen it it'll go back to the top. I've also seen it used to stop text scrolling in other terminal software. -- -Rich (OS/2, Linux, BeOS, Mac, NT, Win95, Solaris, FreeBSD, and OS2200 user in Bloomington MN)
How can MSIE "win" on the Linux, FreeBSD, OS/2, BeOS, or the other dozen or so platforms that it doesn't even EXIST on?
Mozilla created a code base which is portable, and while MSIE may well end up winning in the Windows world (big surprise there given the fact that it's bundled a/o required with almost all of MS's other products), there are lots of people on whom it will make very little impression.
-- -Rich (OS/2, Linux, BeOS, Mac, NT, Solaris, FreeBSD, and OS2200 user in Bloomington MN)
...by folks in the audience, sometimes directly from the soundboard, and the free distribution of said tapes among the fan base was encouraged. Their concert stuff is better'n most of their studio stuff anyway, right?:-) -- -Rich (OS/2, Linux, Mac, NT, Solaris, FreeBSD, BeOS, and OS2200 user in Bloomington MN)
Besides, the OS/2 community has largely moved on to Navigator 4.04 now, and I tend to use Lynx for most of my web surfing anyway (there are three separate OS/2 ports of that browser).
I use the BeOS a little at home as well, BTW. If they ever add support for the Intel EEPro/100B, I think I could spend more time there, but so far my own experience is that OS/2's software and driver support vastly outstrips the BeOS. Hopefully that will change over the next couple of years...but it makes BeOS hard to use right now. -- -Rich (OS/2, Linux, Mac, NT, Solaris, FreeBSD, BeOS, and OS2200 user in Bloomington MN)
I still use OS/2 as my primary desktop OS, even though I also have many other operating systems installed on my boxes. And I think it's really sad that more Linux users (who generally have little experience outside of Windows and unix) don't have a chance to see the WorkPlace shell in action, or to see how *good* a general operating system the folks at Big Blue created long ago.
I think it would open some eyes. KDE and GNOME are getting better and will be going places, but compared to the WPS they are still quite rough. When people ask my why I don't use my Linux, BeOS, or NT setups fulltime on my desktop, I simply point to my OS/2 setup and smile... -- -Rich (OS/2, Linux, Mac, NT, Solaris, FreeBSD, BeOS, and OS2200 user in Bloomington MN)
How does the opinion of one judge in the United States suddenly become the opinion of all United States citizens?
I'm a resident and citizen of the USA, and I think the ruling is dangerous and ill-considered because it means that what I write electronically might be subject to the laws of faraway places even though I might not even be *aware* that my postings were being stored and read in those places.
That means, if it were applied to Usenet, that all postings on Usenet would have to meet the legal standards of all states and perhaps countries which had at least one Usenet server, or I as a Usenet poster could be subject to prosecution.
On the subject of 'merkins -- let's try to avoid sweeping generalizations, shall we? There are many things to discuss related to this topic -- and slamming other Slashdot users isn't constructive. -- -Rich (OS/2, Linux, Mac, NT, Solaris, FreeBSD, BeOS, and OS2200 user in Bloomington MN)
Very true. IBM was the original FUDMeister.
on
IBM & Microsoft Rift
·
· Score: 4
I think Gene Amdahl coined the phrase "FUD" (for Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) to describe the way IBM mainframe salespeople tended to operate, steering customers away from younger upstart companies with arguably superior products (like Amdahl) by using questionable statements which tweaked at underlying user concerns ("Sure Amdahl makes faster machines, but will Amdahl be around as a company tomorrow?")
Also, if I recall correctly, it took action on the part of the US government to induce IBM to behave, and IBM was forced to operate under a series of consent decress starting as early as 1956, which severely limited their ability to preannounce products or tie some combinations of product together, and which had a profound impact on IBM's corporate culture.
Kind of ironic, actually. Microsoft Corporation's very existence might well be largely due to the government's action against one of their predecessors. Had IBM total freedom to do what they wanted, they might've had more incentive to create and bundle their own OS with the first IBM personal computers... -- -Rich (OS/2, Linux, Mac, NT, Solaris, FreeBSD, BeOS, and OS2200 user in Bloomington MN)
Well, okay, that's a bit of an exaggeration... But we've still got a few million lines of FORTRAN code here (some Fortran V, some Fortran 77) at NWA on the Unisys mainframes.
I'm not sure which I dislike more -- ugly C code, or old Fortran V code which makes heavy use of arithmetic IFs and assigned GOTOs.:-( But good Fortran code is surprisingly easy to follow, IMhO. -- -Rich (OS/2, Linux, Mac, NT, Solaris, FreeBSD, BeOS, and OS2200 user in Bloomington MN)
Slashdot Mirror
...and I *do* have a box at home running it. But there's so damn little SOFTWARE available for it that it's sometimes VERY hard to do stuff.
And keep in mind that I'm an OS/2 user bitching about a lack of software in the BeOS. I'm used to slim pickings in some contexts.
--
-Rich (OS/2, Linux, BeOS, Mac, NT, Win95, Solaris, FreeBSD, and OS2200 user in Bloomington MN)
Why? Because of all the desktop OSes I've tried, OS/2 is still the one I'm most comfortable in. I can use most of the Linux apps I want (slrn, pine, lynx, links, XFree86, GIMP) alongside the OS/2 tools I like (FTE, FileJet, 4OS2, Embellish, StarOffice, ColorWorks) and a few Windows things (AOLPress, ABC Snapgrafix, Drafix CAD), and if I want to take time out to play a DOS game like MAME or Quake or Descent or whatever I can do that too.
It's still a pretty neat OS, really. See my web site for a screen snapshot. I use Linux too, of course, and dabble in a few other things, but the OS/2 setup is still my mainstay.
--
-Rich (OS/2, Linux, BeOS, Mac, NT, Win95, Solaris, FreeBSD, and OS2200 user in Bloomington MN)
That number, by itself, isn't all that impressive.
--
-Rich (OS/2, Linux, BeOS, Mac, NT, Win95, Solaris, FreeBSD, and OS2200 user in Bloomington MN)
I work in flight operations for NWA, and we have something like ten mainframes here in the MSP computer center being used to run various applications (some IBM hardware, some IBM clones, some Unisys 2200 hardware).
We still use mainframe hardware mostly because mainframes in general have better reliability/recoverability than large Unix boxes have managed yet to date (and we can't afford to have some of our operational systems go down at all -- downtime translates to flight delays, and an hour outage could strand dozens of aircraft and cost us millions!).
Please don't underestimate the HUGE impact that mainframes have had on large-scale businesses, and don't overestimate the impact client-server had on large mainframe sites. Nothing has changed here, though we have more options for smaller projects now, and mainframe use here is growing if anything.
Almost all of the larger airlines, banks, insurance companies, and government agencies used mainframes for their core processing before c/s became the popular architecture in academia, and as far as I know that's still a true statement today. Client/server sometimes gives you additional options, but for most it isn't a real replacement for a decent mainframe-based system.
--
-Rich (OS/2, Linux, BeOS, Mac, NT, Win95, Solaris, FreeBSD, and OS2200 user in Bloomington MN)
I love that game. After a heated battle, there's smoking junk lying everywhere! :-)
I'd also love to see Subspace ported to Linux, and Lode Runner! I used to play that for hours and hours...
--
-Rich (OS/2, Linux, BeOS, Mac, NT, Win95, Solaris, FreeBSD, and OS2200 user in Bloomington MN)
...VAX/VMS had a very nice hierarchical online help system. :-)
--
-Rich (OS/2, Linux, BeOS, Mac, NT, Win95, Solaris, FreeBSD, and OS2200 user in Bloomington MN)
Tell that to the computers that control the behavior of traffic lights, or that control various pieces of medical equipment. :-)
Not all computers are desktop computers, and while this discussion is mainly being done in a desktop PC or server context, don't forget that people who wrote software do so in other contexts as well.
--
-Rich (OS/2, Linux, BeOS, Mac, NT, Win95, Solaris, FreeBSD, and OS2200 user in Bloomington MN)
For example, I've purchased several official Linux distributions as well as several copies of FreeBSD. That is open-source software. Open source and payment are not mutually exclusive concepts.
--
-Rich (OS/2, Linux, BeOS, Mac, NT, Win95, Solaris, FreeBSD, and OS2200 user in Bloomington MN)
I'm using 10' cables and see some slight shadowing, but it seems fine for the most part at that resolution. I don't do graphics work, tho. :-)
--
-Rich (OS/2, Linux, BeOS, Mac, NT, Win95, Solaris, FreeBSD, and OS2200 user in Bloomington MN)
I've got a 4-port Belkin OmniCube here linked to four PPro boxes running a variety of operating systems including various Linux flavors, Solaris, FreeBSD, OS/2, BeOS, and both Windows 95 OSR2 and Windows NT, and I can reboot any of them in the background. As long as I don't play with the KVM switch during the boot process, they all seem to detect the mouse and keyboard just fine. It's strange (to me) that it didn't work for you. Do you have it plugged in properly?
--
-Rich (OS/2, Linux, BeOS, Mac, NT, Win95, Solaris, FreeBSD, and OS2200 user in Bloomington MN)
Excuse me, but isn't Microsoft MORE than capable of outspending its opponents? How much cash does Microsoft Corporation have on hand again? Speaking as a corporate programmer, I can't for the life of me see how this impacts my ability to design software however I like. This has nothing whatsoever to do with "how software is designed", and everything to do with "how using one monopoly position to leverage another can distort the marketplace and attract the government's attention".
--
-Rich (OS/2, Linux, BeOS, Mac, NT, Win95, Solaris, FreeBSD, and OS2200 user in Bloomington MN)
Dunno if I'm typical, but I know I've enjoyed a lot of British shows from The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin (spelling?) to Good Neighbors, 'Ello 'Ello, Red Dwarf, Black Adder, and Dr. Who (particularly John Pertwee and T Baker). Well, maybe the last isn't a comedy, but how can one take a Dalek seriously? :-) Most of what I've seen is older, though.
--
-Rich (OS/2, Linux, BeOS, Mac, NT, Win95, Solaris, FreeBSD, and OS2200 user in Bloomington MN)
At least in a straight VDM (not a VMB using a real boot image), the DOS kernel is actually a virtualized DOS interface lookalike which hooks into the OS/2 kernel.
That's why DOS program in a VDM can use the OS/2 mouse and sound drivers instead of having to load their own.
--
-Rich (OS/2, Linux, BeOS, Mac, NT, Win95, Solaris, FreeBSD, and OS2200 user in Bloomington MN)
One reason some of us think OS/2 is (or was, anyway) so important is because OS/2 was the very first technically strong
:-) Using the freeware TSHELL, you can bypass the need for PM and the WPS entirely and run OS/2 on fairly small/slow machines. :-) :-)
contender to Windows 3.1 for the desktop on Intel hardware, and was Windows NT's first strong (and superior, IMhO) opponent. It's a 32-bit operating
system with an extremely flexible and consistent desktop, enough native software to be useful, and very good DOS/Win 3.1 support. Plus lots of ported Unix stuff.
[1] Unlike Windows NT, the GUI in OS/2 is completely decoupled from the kernel, and the shell is actually useful.
[2] The default shell is a DOS derivative and superset. Other shells (4OS2, tsch, bash) are much better, IMhO.
[3] The OS/2 WorkPlace Shell was first released in 1992, long before Microsoft designed their limited WPS knock-off GUI. It's also extensible - programmers can create new desktop objects which inherit the chacteristics of the base object class they're based on. Very slick.
[4] I use it as a client, not a server, so I'm uncertain. But even the client version of OS/2 Warp 4 comes with a telnet server which is quite useful.
[5] Again, much of the interface in OS/2 predates Windows, so I consider Windows an OS/2 hack rather than the reverse. Since I use Xit, I have LOTS more buttons than a normal OS/2 setup.
I still use OS/2 as my main desktop OS at home (even though I also have Windows 95 and NT, Linux, FreeBSD, and BeOS) because I'm more comfortable in the WPS than in KDE, GNOME, or AfterStep under Linux, and because (like Linux) OS/2 has a "real" command prompt, so I can use text-based console-mode tools like lynx, pine, slrn, Yarn, FTE, or whatever in comfort. And it lets me play Quake and C&C in the background.
--
-Rich (OS/2, Linux, BeOS, Mac, NT, Win95, Solaris, FreeBSD, and OS2200 user in Bloomington MN)
See the following URL: http://www.perl.com/language/misc/virus.html which strikes me as a fairly in-depth discussion of the rationale for using "viruses" rather than "virii". Also, the few folks I've known who have written anti-virus software a/o have been involved in computer anti-virus research have generally used "viruses" as the plural form in a software/computing context.
--
-Rich (OS/2, Linux, BeOS, Mac, NT, Win95, Solaris, FreeBSD, and OS2200 user in Bloomington MN)
I've heard that over 200 airlines still use Unisys 2200-series mainframes, including the one I work for, and those are direct descendants of the Sperry 1100-series boxes.
--
-Rich (OS/2, Linux, BeOS, Mac, NT, Win95, Solaris, FreeBSD, and OS2200 user in Bloomington MN)
The DOS communications program Telemate uses the Scroll Lock key to lock the scrollback buffer at a single location. Otherwise, if you close the scrollback window and reopen it it'll go back to the top. I've also seen it used to stop text scrolling in other terminal software.
--
-Rich (OS/2, Linux, BeOS, Mac, NT, Win95, Solaris, FreeBSD, and OS2200 user in Bloomington MN)
So how about using .NE. ? :-)
--
-Rich (OS/2, Linux, BeOS, Mac, NT, Win95, Solaris, FreeBSD, and OS2200 user in Bloomington MN)
How can MSIE "win" on the Linux, FreeBSD, OS/2, BeOS, or the other dozen or so platforms that it doesn't even EXIST on?
Mozilla created a code base which is portable, and while MSIE may well end up winning in the Windows world (big surprise there given the fact that it's bundled a/o required with almost all of MS's other products), there are lots of people on whom it will make very little impression.
--
-Rich (OS/2, Linux, BeOS, Mac, NT, Solaris, FreeBSD, and OS2200 user in Bloomington MN)
...by folks in the audience, sometimes directly from the soundboard, and the free distribution of said tapes among the fan base was encouraged. Their concert stuff is better'n most of their studio stuff anyway, right? :-)
--
-Rich (OS/2, Linux, Mac, NT, Solaris, FreeBSD, BeOS, and OS2200 user in Bloomington MN)
Besides, the OS/2 community has largely moved on to Navigator 4.04 now, and I tend to use Lynx for most of my web surfing anyway (there are three separate OS/2 ports of that browser).
I use the BeOS a little at home as well, BTW. If they ever add support for the Intel EEPro/100B, I think I could spend more time there, but so far my own experience is that OS/2's software and driver support vastly outstrips the BeOS. Hopefully that will change over the next couple of years...but it makes BeOS hard to use right now.
--
-Rich (OS/2, Linux, Mac, NT, Solaris, FreeBSD, BeOS, and OS2200 user in Bloomington MN)
I still use OS/2 as my primary desktop OS, even though I also have many other operating systems installed on my boxes. And I think it's really sad that more Linux users (who generally have little experience outside of Windows and unix) don't have a chance to see the WorkPlace shell in action, or to see how *good* a general operating system the folks at Big Blue created long ago.
I think it would open some eyes. KDE and GNOME are getting better and will be going places, but compared to the WPS they are still quite rough.
When people ask my why I don't use my Linux, BeOS, or NT setups fulltime on my desktop, I simply point to my OS/2 setup and smile...
--
-Rich (OS/2, Linux, Mac, NT, Solaris, FreeBSD, BeOS, and OS2200 user in Bloomington MN)
How does the opinion of one judge in the United States suddenly become the opinion of all United States citizens?
I'm a resident and citizen of the USA, and I think the ruling is dangerous and ill-considered because it means that what I write electronically might be subject to the laws of faraway places even though I might not even be *aware* that my postings were being stored and read in those places.
That means, if it were applied to Usenet, that all postings on Usenet would have to meet the legal standards of all states and perhaps countries which had at least one Usenet server, or I as a Usenet poster could be subject to prosecution.
On the subject of 'merkins -- let's try to avoid sweeping generalizations, shall we? There are many things to discuss related to this topic -- and slamming other Slashdot users isn't constructive.
--
-Rich (OS/2, Linux, Mac, NT, Solaris, FreeBSD, BeOS, and OS2200 user in Bloomington MN)
I think Gene Amdahl coined the phrase "FUD" (for Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) to describe the way IBM mainframe salespeople tended to operate, steering customers away from younger upstart companies with arguably superior products (like Amdahl) by using questionable statements which tweaked at underlying user concerns ("Sure Amdahl makes faster machines, but will Amdahl be around as a company tomorrow?")
Also, if I recall correctly, it took action on the part of the US government to induce IBM to behave, and IBM was forced to operate under a series of consent decress starting as early as 1956, which severely limited their ability to preannounce products or tie some combinations of product together, and which had a profound impact on IBM's corporate culture.
Kind of ironic, actually. Microsoft Corporation's very existence might well be largely due to the government's action against one of their predecessors. Had IBM total freedom to do what they wanted, they might've had more incentive to create and bundle their own OS with the first IBM personal computers...
--
-Rich (OS/2, Linux, Mac, NT, Solaris, FreeBSD, BeOS, and OS2200 user in Bloomington MN)
Well, okay, that's a bit of an exaggeration... But we've still got a few million lines of FORTRAN code here (some Fortran V, some Fortran 77) at NWA on the Unisys mainframes.
:-( But good Fortran code is surprisingly easy to follow, IMhO.
I'm not sure which I dislike more -- ugly C code, or old Fortran V code which makes heavy use of arithmetic IFs and assigned GOTOs.
--
-Rich (OS/2, Linux, Mac, NT, Solaris, FreeBSD, BeOS, and OS2200 user in Bloomington MN)