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Technology Stocks : All About Sun Microsystems -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JC Jaros who wrote (29901)	4/2/2000 7:33:00 PM
From: David Kelly	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 64865

That is the way it looks to me as well. My brother-in-law, who worked at IBM, said that they stayed long enough to find out some stuff they needed and split. But very obviously IBM didn't show them everything. OS/2 was so much better than any W9x product. IBM marketing is not something one should be afraid of.<g> david

To: JC Jaros who wrote (29901)	4/2/2000 11:14:00 PM
From: rudedog	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 64865

JC - it's a popular myth that MSFT took something away from the OS/2 development - a myth more popular at IBM than elsewhere - but the timing doesn't support that notion. Windows95 was not even a gleam in Bill's eye when the OS/2 breakup occurred - Windows 3.1 had not even been started. Windows 3.0 was nearing completion but was a "skunk works" product. MSFT had the ability to ship their own version of OS/2 under the agreement, and they did - the 1.3 version of OS/2 from MSFT ran well in 2MB, whereas the 1.3 version from IBM needed 4MB and preferred 8MB. MSFT never modified their 1.3 codeline and never sold any OS/2 after the breakup - they had already shifted their focus to Windows 3.0 near term, and NT (which had had been in development for nearly 2 years at that time) was set to launch in 1992. And OS/2 1.3 from MSFT was not a substantially different coeline - it was "OS/2 on a diet" with a bunch of stuff whacked out. MSFT had less than 50 people developing windows in 1991, when the final break with IBM over OS/2 happened. A few of the OS/2 developers were transferred to the Windows effort, but most went to NT. The numbers were small in any event, as there were never more than about 100 people at MSFT involved in OS/2 development. Before the break with IBM, MSFT had made an effort to implement similar APIs as those in OS/2 but post-break the effort quickly got abandoned, and the first "real" windows - Windows 3.0 - had little in common with the OS/2 programming model. IBM made a lot of changes to get OS/2 to run Windows code later on, but the reverse was not true - some people have even suggested that MSFT went out of their way to make their programming model hard to execute over OS/2 (perish the thought!!). Remember also that until the surprise success of Windows 3.0, MSFT themselves thought of it as a transitional program bridging to NT launch in late 1992. Windows only supported the DOS file systems, while NT supported the OS/2 formats (HPFS), DOS, and of course NTFS. Windows had been "available" since 1984, and the versions for the 386 (which were largely created by CPQ for their 386 launch in fall of 1986 and given to MSFT) had some decent capability, but almost no one used the product. Prior to Windows 3.0, Windows ran on only about 5% of DOS desktops. A year after 3.0 launched, that number was 50%... and by the time Windows 3.1 launched, the number was nearly 80%. That success caused MSFT to change direction with NT, which had previously had a "presentation manager" style interface, and NT was re-written to execute Windows programs. This caused the NT launch to be delayed by nearly a year. MSFT also built a real development team for Windows 3.1, numbering over 500 people (twice the size of the NT team, and the largest team MSFT had put on a single project up until that time). David Kelley suggests that MSFT went to IBM to learn about OS design - but remember that the only people MSFT had on the job were doing driver and graphics work (and some joint development of "Lan Manager") - the only OS architects were with the NT team and were behind a "chinese wall" with regard to IBM technology. The final proof is of course in the Windows95 product - "DOS with a pretty face". It should be obvious to anyone who has used both Win95 and OS/2 that the two systems have nothing in common. Clearly none of the memory management, pre-emptive multitasking, concurrent I/O or other advanced features of OS/2 had any influence on the Win95 design, which had none of those features.