Re: consider the facts of the Stac case..

[amicus_curious]

"Vincent Fritters" <Vince@nowhere.invalid> wrote in message 
news:gojolo$fv0$1@news.albasani.net...
> On 2009-03-03, amicus_curious <ACDC@sti.net> wrote:
>
> > Stick with the bologna and goetta, Vince, you are likely to be better at
> > that than you are at remembering the chronological order of things.
> > Microsoft had their falling out with IBM over Windows 3.0, not NT.
>
> Microsoft were actively developing NT at the time which is why I said
> posioning the marketplace with FUD. It was a "wait until NT comes out
> rather than OS/2 because NT is going to kill OS/2". They kept companies
> from comitting to OS/2 while at the same time smiling and helping
> IBM develop OS/2.
>
>
> > NT came
> > much later, after OS/2 and Win95 were locking horns.
>
> Yes.
> That was version 2.0
> I was speaking as far back as 1.3 which is as far as I go.
> That was direct competition in the marketplace to see who got released 
> first
> and who was better.
> IBM blew that one big time for reasons you state below.
OS/2 with PM was released well before Win3.0 as I remember, but it was 
pricey, over $1000 as I remember.  OS/2 needed 4 mb of memory, too, and 
Win3.0, when it first came out, worked in the old 640K.  Back then memory 
was almost $1 per K and moving to OS/2 cost a lot of money compared to the 
advantages it had for most people.

> >  IBM didn't want a
> > cheap GUI based platform like Windows as competition for their rather 
> > pricey
> > OS/2 with its Presentation Manager.  Gates saw the future differently, of
> > course, and was able to gain the upper hand.  If IBM would have had its 
> > way
> > and managed to kill Windows at an early age, we would all be using OS/2 
> > on
> > IBM's PS/2 or maybe by now it would be OS/5 on the PS/5, but there would 
> > be
> > no massive competition for Wintel PCs, that much is certain.  IBM was 
> > unable
> > to recapture the PC market in the early 90s because they were opposed by
> > Microsoft and the cloners like Compaq and Dell and many others.  Would 
> > you
> > rather IBM had the monopoly in hardware and software?  Silly boy.
>
> That was true for the 1.x versions, but IBM opened up for the 2.x version.
> The problem was it was too late and Microsoft was holding developers hands
> to write drivers. IBM was charging for the privilage.
I remember that time.  The OS/2 dev kits were $2000 and you had to go to a 
week-long course in Boca Raton.  At that time I worked for a company that 
was an IBM Industrial Computer partner and we had a factory floor data 
distribution and collection system that was base on their industrial PC 
hardware.  We started playing around with a Windows version of our stuff and 
IBM's sales guy reacted by sending us 20 or so sets of the OS/2 SDK gratis. 
Microsoft virtually gave away their SDK for free, including it with a copy 
of Windows for a total of $50 for anyone who owned a Microsoft C compiler 
package.  It cost more than $50 to ship the huge box of manuals that came 
with the SDK.


> Presentation manager was in OS/2 1.x not OS/2 2.x
Correct.

> 2.x had the workplace shell, although technically it was built on PM.
>
> OS/2 2.0 was not tied to the PS/2, it's not PS/5 BTW.
> That was OS/2 1.x.
Well, the war was over by the time 2.0 came out.  "A better Windows than 
Windows...".  What I was saying was that without Microsoft to beat up IBM, 
IBM would have been the guy beating up on everyone and I believe that they 
would have held onto the hardware business, too.  They certainly tried with 
the PS/2 and MCA patents.


> As for us using OS/2 compared to Windows, OS/2 was light years ahead of
> anything Microsoft had at the time.
> IBM was arrogant, Microsoft were very good a product promotion and we
> got stuck with Windows.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.  Microsoft is always crappy and they always win due to 
promotions even though they constantly abuse their customers.  That is the 
COLA mantra and you can say it from dawn to dusk.  It still makes no sense. 
You can say that Microsoft goes to extremes to bribe customers to use their 
stuff, and that might be somewhat true, but at the end of the day, the 
customer has not gone elsewhere and Microsoft is still in charge.
>