at least the name superfish isnt missleading, if not ironic.

give us the butterfly! The only cool IBM laptop.

Blue enter key? Are you kidding me?

Also, some OS/2

check out shoebill ( http://emaculation.com/forum/v... ), this guy managed to get A/UX run under emulation. It's pretty cool

SAA is what OS/2's presentation manager was built around. Some pipe dream that the mainframes, as/400's and rs/6000's were going to share a common UI. Well that never happened, and it was a kneejerk thing to push MS out of the UI on OS/2.

Not that it matters, MS-DOS had a lot more device drivers than OS/2, and Windows 3.0's ability to use them made it a winner.

OS/2 was more of a learning tool in how not to push people off of MS-DOS, and instead they moved to Windows, then once machines were fast enough and ME was horrible enough, everyone went to XP Home, and plenty of users are still there.

They kind of did with LanMan server, and things like SQL. The OS/2 Extended Edition bundled lots of stuff together, but it was IBM's way of doing things, and I never saw anyone using EE. However I've setup MS SQL 1.0 on OS/2 and it is a NIGHTMARE. Compared to NT where you install NT, then SQL and away you go. But no, Install OS/2, reboot install the lan driver stuff, reboot, install lan man server, reboot make sure you can now create named pipes, and read them, then install sql server. OS/2 refused to bundle in the important bits, that NT and WfW later would all bring in by default. It didn't take a genius to see the rise of the LAN, however it took some major pushes to get into server space. But nobody enjoyed dealing with netware and their NLM crap, once NT hit v 4.0 everyone was dumping it for NT. But the underpinning network aspects of NT were on OS/2 + LanMan. NT just started from that point and had it all built in.

What is weird is how MS saw the LAN, but missed the internet. Even OS/2 3.0 Warp with that woefully useless IAK, provided no LAN access, or any peer to peer networking capabilities.

Granted the window between 3.0 and 3.1 for workgroups was a crappy period for networking but by the time OS/2 3.0 came out, it was already too late. And it's TCP/IP was that horrible dialup centric POS, nothing multi-homed, or with physical network cards.

in the OS/2 1.x there was a clear leader in the LAN, and it was Netware. But IBM just thought OS/2 should be as crappy as MS-DOS, and let the 3rd parties come along and add in support. Instead they should have at least bundled in LanMan support, but of course that would have killed a part number.

Windows for Workgroups 3.1 did have a network stack, and it was greatly improved in Windows for Workgroups 3.11. NT 3.1 came with TCP/IP, IPX, and support for SNA out of the box in 93. Warp was in '94.

The real 'killer' of course was Win32s+Winsock which gave us Mosaic. And why was IBM not killing themselves to make a Mosaic port to OS/2? Once people saw a graphical Internet, everyone I saw around me was clamouring for it, and it was amazing at the time how many Windows 3.1+Win32s+Mosiac installs talking to various UNIX dialup accounts using SLiRP. Something that was really unstable on OS/2, so more of the OS/2 fans were either going to Linux or to NT 3.5/3.51

It wouldn't matter, as SMP was becoming a thing, and don't forget the coming x86_64 along with the ability to run on RISC. OS/2's kernel was largely untouched from early MS OS/2 2.0 betas, and the device drivers were still 16bit assembly. IBM's L4 port of OS/2 cost such an incredible amount of money, and it produced an OS with no networking, and was dreadfully slow as well. IBM wanted BIG money to run OS/2 in SMP, meanwhile NT workstation supports two processors out of the box. You can guess which I was running on my dual proc P100.

With NT you run basically the same OS on the desk and the server, so for many dev's to make a 'server' version was all too easy. And compared to NT, OS/2 was a horrible server. I'd take NT's registry over the insane config.sys any day. Not to mention one goof in config.sys and you can't boot.

OS/2 could have been made to become more NT like, but IBM clearly wasn't up to the task, instead they were basically maintaining the same codebase from MS OS/2 2.0 circa 1991.

*YES WHY NOT*. PCtask was insanely slow, did you ever use it? And bridgeboards were not only as expensive as a PC, but an Amiga with a 386sx bridgeboard would cost far more than a decent 486 of the era.

AmigaDOS had no memory protection and no resource management. If your program crashed, and left filehandles open you had to reboot. If it overwrote anything important, off to guru land. And good lord, ever setup AmiTCP? Not exactly a walk in the park.

So what really killed the Amiga? It's simple, you could ONLY get them from Commodore. It simply couldn't compete with the Taiwanese factories cranking out XT/AT/386 boards, CGA/EGA/VGA adapters. And they sure weren't going to license Angus/Denise/Paula/Buster and friends to any 3rd parties, along with AmigaDOS. Instead Commodore was more about a pump and dump stock manipulation scheme that finally caught up with them when they were blocked from importing the CD-32 over some stupid blinking xor patent.

Also the Amiga 1000/2000/500/600 all had the same woefully underpowered 7Mhz 68000. The unexpandible models were a joke, and the 3rd party upgrade CPU modules were horribly unstable at best. (I've had several for an Amiga 2000, 3000 and a 600).

Commodore and the Amiga were always doomed to failure, even if they didn't screw up the Amiga 3000/UX deal with SUN, their reliance on trying to own the entire process, and being closed off, along with a hopelessly dated, and un-networkable OS was going to doom them anyways.

So ture. A/UX was Apple's best hope for a decent OS, but they always seemed to do their best to ignore it. It was pretty awesome back in the day, SYSV Unix, with OS 7 finder + apps. Hell even softpc ran on A/UX.

So instead of making more Mac's with full 68040's they did all these LC crap things. Then on the move to PowerPC, they went with AIX of all things on one model but had no MacOS compatibility at all. A/UX was more like OS X today, an they could have had it everywhere in the early 90's but they were more contended with their craptastic OS 7/8/9 at the time.

That was always a 'team os/2' stumbling block. The OS/2 guys belonged to one division of IBM, and the PC guys were another division. The best they would do is set it up for dualboot, but DOS/Windows was the default, I remember people with IBM PC's that went out to buy OS/2 to be surprised when they found out they already had it.

Well not only is the best way to run MS-DOS in the 1990's on OS/2 2.0, but the best way to run a Windows app in it's own copy of Windows was OS/2. IBM did themsleves no favours by charging a fortune for the SDK, and tools, nor was forcing this SAA crap on OS/2 instead of directly using Microsoft Windows on OS/2 like MS had wanted to.

There was that skunkswork project, WLO http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W... which of all things ended up being the basis for Win32 on NT once they dumped the OS/2 cruiser personality.

It was amazing when NT 4.0 shipped how everyone turned around and killed their Netware servers. Of course the whole TCP/IP native services thing helped, and the far cheaper licensing for NT didn't hurt either, and then there was that netware emulation package for NT that was pretty awesome too.

that being said, I've helped a handful of people migrate their old Netware 3/4 stuff onto KVM, and it's kind of funny seeing it running on 'modern' hardware.

Informal English, do you type it?

MacOS didn't get a hypervisor until the advent of the BlueBox in 1999. But it's more a fault of the Motorola processors lacking something like v86 mode.

Windows/386 was amazing for the timeframe. Back in 1987 you could run MS-DOS boxes, *IN A WINDOW*. If you were rich enough to have EGA or VGA, you could play CGA games.. IN A WINDOW.

It was amazing, compared to other things out there. Plus there was the few dozen apps, like Word and Excel.