Re: Did Commodore cheat with the quad density floppies?

Den Wed, 9 Jan 2019 13:27:01 +0000 skrev smf <smf@null.net>:
> On 09/01/2019 09:23, silverdr@wfmh.org.pl wrote:
> > Even mouse worked far better than the serial mice connected (in 
> > absence of a better choice) to modem port in other PC machines,
> 
> The first PC mice used ISA cards and used a similar protocol to the 
> Amiga & ST mice, the Amstrad PC1512/PC1640 had a similar port on the 
> keyboard. I personally would have preferred a mouse port like that.

In the long run, cables with 8 or 9 wires (2 or 3 buttons, power,
ball readers) made up a non-negligible part of the cost.

> > not to mention that they attempted to deliver a relatively
> > reasonable, multitasking OS along with it.
> 
> It was too ambitious and reliant on their biggest competitor who were 
> prepared to cut corners in their own product.

The main problem was IMHO that the hardware wasn't really ready for
that kind of OS. At least a 386 with its V86 mode would had been
required at the time, while many PS/2 systems had a 286 and some even
an 8086. Of course the 286 is fully usable for a multi tasking
operating system, it's just not usable to make such operating system
able to run legacy DOS programs in a reasonable way.

> > Surely this was too good to succeed on the market or they went too
> > far the opposite direction of the original PC policies... 
> 
> The cost & system requirements were too high, the compatibility was
> too low.
> 
> I quite liked OS/2 Warp 3 and ran it for about a month and then a
> couple of things happened.

At the time, in like 95-96, I had a mult-boot setup on my PC with OS/2,
NT and probably Win9x.

As I had lost interest in action games, I realized that the superior
choice of the MS related operating systems were Windows NT.

> We got hold of Windows 95 & our novell netware server died.
> 
> For a short period of time we were running a backup of our old novell
> M: drive from a samba share on a windows 95 box.
> 
> I have a vague feeling OS/2 wouldn't access the share and so it got 
> replaced, but it's days were numbered because it only had Windows 3.x 
> compatibility and even that was pretty slow.

This was a stupid thing - IBM didn't realize that local networks had
just become a thing of "power" home users. There were a "connect"
version of OS/2 Warp which had those network drivers built in.
Something that were rather unknown by the general "power user" public
was that Microsoft had their own SMB clients for OS/2 which afaik
worked fine on OS/2 Warp (non-connect version) and which could connect
to for example a Win95 share, but were really ment for connecting to
NT/Lan Manager servers.


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