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- Newsgroups: comp.os.os2.advocacy
- Path: sparky!uunet!mcsun!news.funet.fi!cs.joensuu.fi!jahonen
- From: jahonen@cs.joensuu.fi (Jarmo Ahonen)
- Subject: I can get something done with OS/2, thanks IBM.
- Message-ID: <1993Jan7.131248.5468@cs.joensuu.fi>
- Organization: University of Joensuu
- Date: Thu, 7 Jan 1993 13:12:48 GMT
- Lines: 73
-
-
- Well... This is obviously an advocacy message.
-
- Some months ago I wanted to be able to run some of
- my big programs at home, but I had a real problem...
- Namely that in order to get those codes run I would
- have required a UNIX box, or at least so it looked like.
-
- I decided, however, to buy a 486 PC.
-
- At first I considered buying some flavor of UNIX for it,
- due to the lack of software I dropped that idea.
-
- In the beginning I tried to run my codes under WINDOWS.
- It was painfull. The memory management felt inadequate.
- would you believe how slow the program got when it run out
- of RAM and paging started? Try it and you will know...
- And no real multitasking. What a pain for a devoted UNIX
- user.
-
- Then a collegue of mine proposed that I should try OS/2.
- Well, I had played with the versions 1.x, and they were a bit
- better than unusable for me. So I was a bit skeptic at first,
- I though that the new OS/2 would just be still another shithead
- system for intel processors, and I actually regretted that I
- hadn't paid more and got a Sun.
-
- During some months I have now used OS/2 2.0 to run/develop my
- code, and I have been *very positively* surprised with the
- usefulness of OS/2. I have found that I'm able to run a number
- chrunching program at background, interactively develope another
- program and use mathematicsl software to analyze the results...
- Just like in UNIX :-).
-
- I'm quite happy with OS/2, although my wishlist for additional
- features is includes at least:
- 1) WPS should be a bit more versatile (is it possible to get it to
- work like X-windows?).
- 2) *much better* documentation. The current one does not earn the
- name of documentation!
- 3) a simple C-compiler as a part of the system. Why not? Now I use gnu,
- but couldn't IBM include a simple C-compiler to the base system?
- It would make life much easier for many people, I believe.
- I believe and hope that IBM is listening :-).
- 4) Useful file-protection system. The method to use extended attributes
- to set the "read-only" bit on is primitive and I do not like it at all.
- It would nice to stop myself from accidentaly doing something nasty :-).
- 5) A full variety of programming languages directly from IBM or from
- ISV's. FORTRAN-90 would be nice (or even FORTRAN-77 with some -90
- extensions). I have not seen many adds for languages for OS/2 :-(.
- 6) How can I tune the system for my specific purposes? Can I tune the kernel?
- The documentation, again!
- 7) Better documentation...
- 8) better documentation...
- 9) ...
- .
- .
- .
-
- And so on. I do not know if NT will be better choice for me when it is out,
- but just now I like OS/2. I believe that it is, even with its faults (which
- it has quite a great deal :-( ) the most useful PC OS just *now*. Future may
- change everything, however.
-
- Please feel free to flame me if you want to :-).
-
- BTW, I'd still, however, trade my PC for a similarly configured
- Sparc Classic anytime.
-
- Best regards everybody,
-
- Jarmo J. Ahonen
-
-