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	Rex Ballard - Director of Electronic Distribution
	http://cnj.digex.net/~rballard


On Thu, 3 Oct 1996, Dave Tholen wrote:

> What alleged disaster from IBM's exclusive control of OS/2 2.x?

OS/2 1.3  wasn't terribly glitzy, but it was sufficiently stable that it
was adopted within the business community for products such as quote
servers and news feed handlers.

When IBM received OS/2 2.0 from Microsoft, it looked like microsoft had
just recompiled everything with a 32 bit integer and let pointers blow the
operating system into oblivion every time a cast should have been done and
wasn't.

I was a consultant for IBM during the early days.  I had been spoiled with
SUN SparcStations and was accustomed to having 6 to 8 active windows
opened at the same time, each active with functions such as statistics,
quotes, or other real-time feedback.  Unfortunately, OS/2 had a bug.  When
a context switch occurred while a process was writing to cached disk
drives, the desktop would corrupt itself.  Eventually, one of the
processes would get "Hung" and take the scheduler with it.  In effect the
operating system would become permanently crippled.

The traditional solution of CTL-ALT-DEL only made matters worse.  The
rebooting system would try to load the corrupted desktop which would cause
the operating system to corrupt the control blocks of the file system.
Eventually, the drive would degenerate to the point where the entire
system had to be rebuilt.  Even the drives had to be low-level formatted.

I could reduce OS/2 to a shredded disk drive in a matter of a few hours
just by putting a few servers and a few status screens on the system (I
was developing an RPC package at the time).

OS/2 Warp did add features to facilitate recovery, but only back to the
original desktop or the most recently saved desktop.  You still have to
rebuild the desktop by hand.

As a single user, it was barely tolerable.  When I was dealing with 5
servers with an MTBF of 5 days and an MTTR of 8 hours, I had to keep a
full time staff member to support this one platform.  My Unix admin could
keep 20 servers fully functional without leaving his desk.  My OS/2 admin
rarely got out of the computer room.

Having had exposure to both OS/2 (1.2 to 3.0) and AIX on Intel and Power
PC, I much prefer AIX with Open Desktop.  I'll settle for Linux - the
price is much more realistic (I spend about $70/quarter on upgrades).

The good thing about Linux is that IBM doesn't have to pay AT&T or
Microsoft royalties for the hard stuff.

	Rex Ballard



From rballard@cnj.digex.net Mon Nov  4 01:16:22 1996
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