Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!ames!vsi1!altnet!uunet!imspw6!bob
From: bob@imspw6.UUCP (Bob Burch)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: BS/2 running 32-bit mode on 386
Message-ID: <147@imspw6.UUCP>
Date: 24 Sep 88 23:25:47 GMT
Organization: IMS Inc., Rockville, MD
Lines: 41

From Ted Holden at HTE:


 
 
From:  Doug McDonald, uxe.cso.uiuc.edu!mcdonald
 
>This is somewhat off the topic, but I saw an interesting thing
>at an IBM "product fair" at our university on Monday: IBM'ers
>wearing T-shirts and blue jeans. (Most T shirts were orange and blue...
>wonder why.) Anyway, one guy was wearing a suit (but no tie). He
>informed me that OS/2 fully supported the native 32-bit protected
>mode of the 80386, and indeed that OS/2 was really INTENDED to.......
 
    The charitable assumption is that the gentleman simply didn't know
what he was talking about.  Recent articles in PC Week and elsewhere
indicate that any version at all of a 386 BS/2 is at least a year away. 
Basically, IBM FEARS the 386, knowing full well it can kill their 36's,
38's etc.  They thought to convince the world the 386 was for file
servers and exotic graphic workstations (partly by charging $10,000 for
their 386 PS/2).  Recently, they have looked around and seen the whole
rest of the world selling 386 machines for $1700 - $2500 and panicked,
making a high priority of a 386 version of BS/2.  Presently, BS/2
running on a PS/2 (or any 386 machine) runs it in 286 emulation mode,
which isn't really running it;  that's walking it.
 
     Microsoft has just spent the last 6 - 8 years perfecting a
relatively simple monitor program (MS/DOS).  A real operating system
such as UNIX or DEC VMS takes eight or ten years or more to get
healthy, robust, and fast for a given architecture.  UNIX, which is the
ONLY portable OS worth talking about, represents the work of true
geniuses at several hundred sites over about a fifteen year period;  as
a basis for comparison, a comparable intellectual endeavor might be the
entire literature of a semi-major nation over a 200 - 500 year period. 
The chances of Microsoft bringing BS/2 anywhere close to challenging
UNIX within the next ten years are slim and none, and Slim's riding out
of town on his horse even as you're reading this article. 
Ted Holden
HTE