My previous VA rep was a quadriplegic. She had some use of her arms & hands, but using any kind of a mouse or track ball was a real challenge. For her quite often the issue wasn't clicking the buttons, but clicking when she didn't want to or movin' the mouse while clicking. Everything she tried required finer control than she could attain & the keyboard was even harder to use.
Frankly, the solution for her would have been voice navigation. At that time OS/2 was doin' it nicely w/ 99.5% accuracy, but didn't support her applications. Neither Windoze or Linux supports it well. Ideally that would be the best solution.
Blending Writing
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Ask Larry Niven
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Howdy Mr Niven,
I am a daily reader of Dr Pournelle's Chaos Manor & have read quite a number of your joint projects not to mention quite a few of each of your individual books. What is it like working with Jerry days on end & how do you manage to blend your writing styles so well? I often wonder, while reading one of your books, who did which chapter. I've read that you alternate writing chapters. How does that work so that the book flows so well? Do you two have compatible writing styles or has it come from years of working together?
I ran OS/2 on my home built desktop from '93-'97. Was forced to switch to Win9X b/c I couldn't get drivers for a couple of necessary peripherals following a major motherboard meltdown. I installed OS/2 at Sprint for almost a year b/c they found they couldn't access their 3270 sessions or 5250 sessions from either Win3.x or NT 3.x. I also was an OS/2 sysop for a local ISP b/c I was the only person (at that time) who could get it to connect to the 'Net thru their DOS based BBS gateway. (we're talkin' '93-'94)
I loved OS/2 b/c I could run the same apps at home on my OS/2 machine (486DX40 w/ 16Mb of memory) far, far faster than my work machine (a Compaq DeskPro Pentium 90 w/ 96Mb of memory).
I also remember long nights of downloading 32 diskette service packs for OS/2 on my 14.4 modem. Ugh!
I've read thru much of what has been posted here & I see one factor that few if any knew about that truly killed OS/2. IBM had a prior license to use Win16 API's in OS/2. OS/2 developers were able to reverse engineer all the Win32 API, but w/o the license. IBM sought to get a license to code true Win32 API's into OS/2. As it turned out, OS/2, in the development lab ran Win32 apps much faster than Win95 & ran them more stably. This didn't make Micro$oft happy at all. So M$ refused to license the API's to IBM to use in OS/2. (I learned this from an IBM'r.) B/c of the severe drought of apps for OS/2 IBM figured they'd never get it to go mainstream & supplant the preinstalled glut of Win9x. During that time OS/2 was outselling Win3.x & Win9x about 10:1 over the counter.
The other problem w/ IBM's support of OS/2 was that the beancounters had way too much control. Developers Packs for OS/2 were stupid expensive while Windows Developers packs were virtually free. Marketers repeatedly called for giving their developer packs away, & for a short time IBM made them very, very inexpensive, but that didn't make the beancounters happy b/c they weren't seeing a return on the investment fast enough. W/in a year the price went back up.
So it was a combination of 2 things that really killed OS/2. Micro$oft knew their OS's couldn't match OS/2's performance. Deny OS/2 the next iteration of Windoze apps (i.e, all the Win apps upgraded to Win32) & OS/2 would die slowly on the vine. The lack of OS/2 apps created this problem b/c IBM made it so difficult for the little developer to afford the developers packs. Too many of the old school IBMer's were still around pulling strings. Their philosophy of never giving anything away combined w/ Micro$oft's fear of OS/2, was truly what killed OS/2.
I knew folks at the National Weather Service that were running complete weather websites on the OS/2 desktops in the background while they did day-to-day work on the same machine. I used voice navigation on my 486DX40 that I still haven't been able to match using Windoze--even on my Athlon XP2100+ running XP at 2Gb of memory. My other favorite OS/2 trait was that is was so easy to port unix apps to OS/2.
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My previous VA rep was a quadriplegic. She had some use of her arms & hands, but using any kind of a mouse or track ball was a real challenge. For her quite often the issue wasn't clicking the buttons, but clicking when she didn't want to or movin' the mouse while clicking. Everything she tried required finer control than she could attain & the keyboard was even harder to use. Frankly, the solution for her would have been voice navigation. At that time OS/2 was doin' it nicely w/ 99.5% accuracy, but didn't support her applications. Neither Windoze or Linux supports it well. Ideally that would be the best solution.
Howdy Mr Niven,
I am a daily reader of Dr Pournelle's Chaos Manor & have read quite a number of your joint projects not to mention quite a few of each of your individual books. What is it like working with Jerry days on end & how do you manage to blend your writing styles so well? I often wonder, while reading one of your books, who did which chapter. I've read that you alternate writing chapters. How does that work so that the book flows so well? Do you two have compatible writing styles or has it come from years of working together?
I ran OS/2 on my home built desktop from '93-'97. Was forced to switch to Win9X b/c I couldn't get drivers for a couple of necessary peripherals following a major motherboard meltdown. I installed OS/2 at Sprint for almost a year b/c they found they couldn't access their 3270 sessions or 5250 sessions from either Win3.x or NT 3.x. I also was an OS/2 sysop for a local ISP b/c I was the only person (at that time) who could get it to connect to the 'Net thru their DOS based BBS gateway. (we're talkin' '93-'94)
I loved OS/2 b/c I could run the same apps at home on my OS/2 machine (486DX40 w/ 16Mb of memory) far, far faster than my work machine (a Compaq DeskPro Pentium 90 w/ 96Mb of memory).
I also remember long nights of downloading 32 diskette service packs for OS/2 on my 14.4 modem. Ugh!
I've read thru much of what has been posted here & I see one factor that few if any knew about that truly killed OS/2. IBM had a prior license to use Win16 API's in OS/2. OS/2 developers were able to reverse engineer all the Win32 API, but w/o the license. IBM sought to get a license to code true Win32 API's into OS/2. As it turned out, OS/2, in the development lab ran Win32 apps much faster than Win95 & ran them more stably. This didn't make Micro$oft happy at all. So M$ refused to license the API's to IBM to use in OS/2. (I learned this from an IBM'r.) B/c of the severe drought of apps for OS/2 IBM figured they'd never get it to go mainstream & supplant the preinstalled glut of Win9x. During that time OS/2 was outselling Win3.x & Win9x about 10:1 over the counter. The other problem w/ IBM's support of OS/2 was that the beancounters had way too much control. Developers Packs for OS/2 were stupid expensive while Windows Developers packs were virtually free. Marketers repeatedly called for giving their developer packs away, & for a short time IBM made them very, very inexpensive, but that didn't make the beancounters happy b/c they weren't seeing a return on the investment fast enough. W/in a year the price went back up.
So it was a combination of 2 things that really killed OS/2. Micro$oft knew their OS's couldn't match OS/2's performance. Deny OS/2 the next iteration of Windoze apps (i.e, all the Win apps upgraded to Win32) & OS/2 would die slowly on the vine. The lack of OS/2 apps created this problem b/c IBM made it so difficult for the little developer to afford the developers packs. Too many of the old school IBMer's were still around pulling strings. Their philosophy of never giving anything away combined w/ Micro$oft's fear of OS/2, was truly what killed OS/2.
I knew folks at the National Weather Service that were running complete weather websites on the OS/2 desktops in the background while they did day-to-day work on the same machine. I used voice navigation on my 486DX40 that I still haven't been able to match using Windoze--even on my Athlon XP2100+ running XP at 2Gb of memory. My other favorite OS/2 trait was that is was so easy to port unix apps to OS/2.