Never ceases to amaze

[Parker, Ron]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jonathan Hutchins [mailto:hutchins at tarcanfel.org]

> Quoting david nicol <whatever at davidnicol.com>:
> 
> > As I understand it, OS2 was demonstrating hot 
> plug-and-play of multiple
> > identical cards in the early nineties.  Microsoft still requires a
> > rebooting.  
> 
> Sorry, I've hot-plugged PCMCIA cards under most MS OSs.  NT4 
> is the only one 
> that's sticky about it, and with the right card manager 
> software it works.

I believe OS/2 was also hot-plugging MCA cards in the pre-PCI days, Just to
put the timeframe in perspective.  I'm talking 92'ish.  At the time Windows
3.0 was a vast improvement of Windows-[23]86 but was still an "Operating
Environment", Microsoft's term not mine, and not an Operating System.  It
was much easier to get multiple NIC's working with OS/2 than trying to load
them under MS-DOS 5/6 with QEMM and still have enough low-memory, ~384KiB,
to get Windows 3.0 into 32-bit protected mode.

There were some things that OS/2 was very good at and there were some things
it was very bad at, integration of Windows applications for instance.  This
was not too dissimilar to how things are now with Linux.  The hardware
support was good but those Windows applications were problematic.  I can
tell you that even the bleeding edge version of GNOME and KDE are no less
stable than Workplace Shell was back then and at least on my machines if X
crashes it doesn't take the whole operating system down and you don't need a
20-minute rebuild of hard drive upon rebooting when the machine has not been
shutdown.

Okay, this is depressing me.  Reading my own writing seeing the parallels
between where Linux is now compared with where OS/2 was 10-12 years ago.
But I am confident that Linux will succeed where OS/2 failed.  I see a wave
of support building for Linux.  This is a wave I never really saw with OS/2
and I think in time it will become a tsunami that even Microsoft cannot
overcome.