13 Aug
2021
13 Aug
'21
5:31 p.m.
On Fri August 13 2021 14:57:21 dep wrote:
I have often considered what it would be like to boot
and run one of my old
OS/2 installs on my current system. When OS/2 2.0 was released IBM said
that we needed 4 but preferably 8 mb -- not gb, mb -- of memory. And I had
a luxurious 340mb Micropolis hard drive (purchased at the
they-ll-never-be-this-cheap-again price of $650). So it should be possible
to load the entire system into a ramdrive and have, what, 31 gigs of
memory left over. I think it would run pretty quickly.
OS/2? That brings back memories. I worked for three months in 1988
on IBM OS/2 networking as relations with Microsoft were starting to
head south.
The initial objective was that a dentist could buy a box of OS/2 and
take it to his office and install and configure it. However IBM had
this corporate culture that any senior salesperson could demand a
feature in order to (potentially) close a big sale. Meanwhile
Microsoft by and large cherry-picked just the most sensible features.
My main contribution was a massive sed script - 500 lines, 2000 maybe,
I forget - which converted the build makefiles from a couple of dozen
DOS boxes to a half dozen boxes running an OS I'm not allowed to name
and made it buidl an order of magnitude faster.
Meanwhile the networking had gotten so complex that I doubt if even
10% of the developers could install and configure it.
--Mike