Night Owl 6/Night Owl's Shareware - PDSI-006 - Night Owl Corp (1990).iso/036a/os2info.zip/INFO13SE.OS2

Text File | 1991-02-03 | 11KB | 208 lines

FIRST IMPRESSIONS:  OS/2 Goes on a Diet

Big Blue targets Windows 3.0 with a leaner, meaner, and faster version
of OS/2

by Stan Miastkowski



When IBM announced OS/2 1.3 last October, many people immediately
dubbed it OS/2 "Lite" because of its claimed ability to do more,
faster, with lower RAM and hard disk drive requirements. IBM, of
course, isn't into cute product names. The product that appeared on my
desk in December is officially named OS/2 SE (for Standard Edition)
1.3. In many ways, it is OS/2 Lite. But as far as features and
abilities are concerned, OS/2 1.3 is no lightweight.

In its latest incarnation, OS/2 has been trimmed down to go one-on-one
with Windows 3.0. It is an ironic situation indeed. After all,
Microsoft developed OS/2. But the Redmond software mavens have all but
abandoned OS/2 as the orders and bucks roll in for Windows 3.0. IBM
isn't hitching a ride on the Windows bandwagon. The changes made to
OS/2 for version 1.3 come from the coding wizards at IBM. And it's
obvious that Big Blue isn't going to give up on OS/2 despite its lack
of market acceptance (at least, so far).

Red Herrings and Other Fish
Ever since its introduction, OS/2 has been the operating system that
users love to hate. Admittedly, it was pushed on a market that was
largely quite happy with DOS. OS/2's early versions were slow and
buggy and used huge amounts of RAM and hard disk space. More
important, that nifty-looking Presentation Manager (PM) interface
lacked the all-important applications that made it viable.
Fortunately, all that has changed, but the perceptions haven't -- yet.

The realities of operating environments for the 1990s often seem to
depend on marketing pressures and user prejudices rather than
technical details. OS/2 was widely criticized for requiring a minimum
of 4 megabytes of RAM. True enough. But at the same time, Windows 3.0
users have been finding that while the graphical user interface runs
in a 286-based system with a single megabyte, you really need at least
2 MB and, ideally, more. With retail prices for a megabyte of RAM
hovering in the $50 range, the whole thing is a red herring. The
bottom line is that both Microsoft and (especially) IBM want you to
buy hardware. And getting the most from Windows and OS/2 often
requires updated hardware.

A Little Horse-Trading
OS/2 indeed drops your basic system RAM requirements from 4 MB to 2
MB. That opens up a large potential market of lower-capacity systems
for OS/2. Of course, there's a performance price to pay. Like Windows
3.0, OS/2 1.3's multitasking makes extensive use of swapping. In the
?OS2?SYSTEM? directory sits a deceptively small (1572-byte) program
named SWAPPER.EXE. The swapper, along with numerous (although not-so-
obvious) changes to the core operating-system code, is the key to OS/2
1.3's smaller memory needs and faster performance.

OS/2 1.3's swapper is faster and more intelligent than its
predecessors. It is essentially a system resource controller that
makes sure that the maximum amount of RAM is available for
applications. OS/2 1.3 requires less RAM because the swapper moves
unneeded operating code into a hard disk file. Swapper also keeps the
DOS Box code sitting on the hard disk until you double-click on the
icon.

During setup, OS/2 1.3 (as did earlier versions) creates space for a
SWAPPER .DAT file on your hard disk that has a maximum size of 512K
bytes. If you have a large hard disk, you can specify a swap file as
large as you want. But there's a trade-off: Making the file larger can
improve system performance, but making it too large can also degrade
performance; it takes longer to write data into or read data from a
huge file.

It was easy to see that OS/2 1.3 kept my hard disk drive from sitting
idly by. In fact, the amount of hard disk file swapping is truly
amazing. But since OS/2 is a true multitasking operating system, the
dancing red light on my hard disk drive didn't adversely affect
overall system performance.

What is the bottom line of RAM requirements? If your system has 2 MB
of RAM, you can easily run OS/2 1.3 and at least two major
applications.

Getting Up and Running
Setting up OS/2 1.3 takes time and patience. Some of the more irksome
parts of the process have been eliminated, and a few new features have
been added. The biggest decision that I had to make was whether to use
OS/2's High Performance File System. If you're installing OS/2 on a
hard disk that already has DOS on it and you want to run the dual boot
feature (i.e., starting either DOS or OS/2 at boot time), you'll have
to forgo the HPFS. But if you can forgo booting DOS, the HPFS is the
only way to go. Although it's not new in version 1.3, it remains one
of OS/2's hidden gems. The HPFS is fast, using on-the-fly location
optimization and integrated disk caching to dramatically improve
overall performance. It's like having one of those expensive hardware-
caching disk drive controllers hooked up to your system.

Also new in OS/2 1.3 is selectable setup. Unlike the previous OS/2
setup utilities, 1.3 didn't ask me whether it should add serial-device
support, retrieve-command support (a quick way of recalling previously
entered commands), or the command reference help. Instead, it assumed
that I wanted all these features. I was given the choice of disabling
them later on when the setup utility asked me if I wanted to use the
default configuration or customize it. The default configuration is
one area where it's possible to fine-tune 1.3's memory requirements.

OS/2 is a hard disk space hog. It needs 11 MB of storage for a full-
fledged installation. If your hard disk space is tight, you can forgo
a few features (like the command reference). But you still need 8 MB
of hard disk space for a minimum configuration.

Printers and Fonts
One exceedingly welcome and long-awaited addition to OS/2 1.3 is a
printer setup step during installation. In earlier versions, its
absence was understandable because OS/2 printer drivers were few and
far between. That's changed with a vengeance; OS/2 1.3 supports nearly
100 printers, along with a couple dozen plotters. And it's not just
IBM printers that are supported. The list is quite long and complete.

Most important for serious users, OS/2 1.3 now comes with full-
featured drivers for the Hewlett-Packard LaserJet (all flavors) and
PostScript printers. It's in the PostScript realm that OS/2 1.3 really
shines. In the spring of 1990, IBM decided to implement Adobe font
technology across its entire product line, and OS/2 1.3 is the first
to see the fruits of this decision. OS/2 1.3 includes Adobe Type
Manager, which has twelve "core" scalable outline fonts that come in
matching screen and printer flavors. If you're using a PostScript
printer, you get true WYSIWYG. It's a great leap forward for OS/2.

REXX the King?
For advanced users, another feature new to OS/2 1.3 is REXX. REXX
isn't new but has been confined to IBM's mainframe and minicomputer
markets. It's a general-purpose procedural language that Big Blue has
designated as the standard language for developing interpreted
procedures for all Systems Application Architecture systems, which
means all IBM products. Essentially, REXX is a sophisticated batch
language that offers a myriad of features for those who
(understandably) find DOS's batch language insufficient. However, if
you are like most end users, you'll never use it.

Speed from the Starting Gate
Is OS/2 1.3 faster than previous versions? Definitely. Besides the
intelligent swapper, the core operating system's crucial loader has
been completely rewritten. It can now load data in larger blocks than
its predecessors, resulting in fewer I/O cycles. Also new is IBM's
implementation of the previously unused data-compaction abilities of
OS/2. Taken together, it means faster performance.

How much faster? IBM says that in a "memory-constrained environment"
(meaning 2 MB), file accesses are "significantly faster" than in
previous versions of OS/2. Using a relatively wimpy 20-MHz 386-based
AT clone with a fast (15-millisecond) hard disk drive, I found an
overall performance increase over OS/2 1.2 of from 25 percent to 40
percent using standard OS/2 applications, such as Lotus 1-2-3/G and
the DeScribe Word Publisher; your mileage may vary.

According to IBM, OS/2 1.3 is even faster in network access. I wasn't
able to test the claims, but an IBM spokesperson told me that it now
loads programs off a network server "two to three times faster" than
version 1.2.

Tying It All Together
After several false starts and disappointing incremental upgrades
(punctuated by a few public spats between IBM and Microsoft), OS/2 is
finally an integrated and complete product. It took IBM to do the job.
Version 1.3 is remarkably stable and bug-free. I used it with a wide
range of the increasingly available OS/2 applications and threw it
curves by opening multiple copies of the same application. Even with a
dozen programs open and running concurrently, OS/2 never even
flinched; I encountered no incomprehensible error messages or system
hang-ups. The same can't be said for Windows 3.0. OS/2 remains the
only true multitasking environment.

There are realities that can't be overlooked. Sure, you can run OS/2
1.3 in a system with 2 MB. But if you want to get some real work done
with several different applications, you're better off with 4 MB or
more. The same can be said about Windows 3.0.

The battle isn't over yet. By now, it's clear that OS/2 isn't going to
take the operating-system market by storm. But the argument that it
does not work, lacks printer drivers, or uses too many system
resources is now moot. It still has a long way to go to overcome the
Windows 3.0 juggernaut, but unlike Windows (which is cobbled onto a
now-ancient operating system), OS/2 SE 1.3 along with PM is a next-
generation integrated operating environment.


----------------------------------------------------------------------
Stan Miastkowski is the BYTE senior editor for new products. You can
reach him on BIX as "stanm."
----------------------------------------------------------------------


OS/2 SE 1.3: $340; upgrade from prior versions, $100; upgrade from DOS
             3.0 or higher, $285

Requirements: IBM AT, PS/2, or compatible with at least 2 MB of RAM
              and between 8 and 11 MB of free hard disk storage.

IBM Corp.
U.S. Marketing and Services
1133 Westchester Ave.
White Plains, NY 10604
[phone]
[phone]