You published the most comprehensive review of OS/2 (November Special Report) I have ever seen. You did an excellent job in pointing out OS/2's strengths and limitations, as well as comparisons to Windows and Windows NT. Your readers now have a clearer understanding of what OS/2 is and is not. Other publications have an unexplainable bias toward Microsoft and against IBM.
John Caprioli
Worcester, MA
Jon Udell's November article "Is There a Better Windows 3.1 Than Windows 3.1?" sums up the new direction BYTE is taking in its perennial attack on OS/2. The appearance of NT as a white elephant means OS/2 can no longer be dismissed for requiring 8 MB of RAM and lots of disk space. Comparisons must now be sought with Windows 3.1.
Windows 3.1's background processing makes a system jitter like a chicken wit
h its head cut off; OS/2's multitasking capabilities purr like a kitten. As for NT, OS/2's object orientation gives me the power to tailor my environment to my personality, and not to that of Bill Gates.
Mark Heseltine
London, U.K.
We don't think we've been attacking OS/2. In fact, we voted OS/2 2.1 a BYTE Award of Excellence (see last month's issue).--Eds.
It's about time we began to look beyond mighty Microsoft in the operating-system arena. For two years, Microsoft has been telling us everyone needs a multitasking, multithreaded, protected, 32-bit operating system. But when NT went from a desktop operating system to a network server, Microsoft told us we don't need that power "quite yet." When Chicago comes out, suddenly we'll need that power.
I say we have that power now. It's called OS/2, it's here, and it works. Most magazines are so enamored of Microsoft they won't look at anything else.
Todd Louis Green
Silver Spring, MD
In a nutshell, I don't believe you. Udel
l's Windows-OS/2-Windows NT comparison claims NT has disk I/O speeds more than twice those that DOS-based Windows or OS/2 can deliver. Something's wrong here.
Disk I/O is mature in operating systems and approaches the maximum throughput the hardware can deliver. Am I to believe Microsoft has suddenly developed a manner of handling disk I/O that blows all previous methods out of the water--and then didn't trumpet this new method to the stars? I think not. When something looks too good to be true, it usually is. I think someone needs to substantiate your results, before I start to believe some PR person sent you a case of your favorite wine.
Peter Skye
Glendale, CA
NT can't make disks transfer data faster, but its unified cache manager--which dynamically allocates memory not claimed by the operating system or by applications to the caching of all local and redirected file systems--does a terrific job. You can statically allocate big chunks of dedicated RAM to the Windows or OS/2 disk caches
, but then applications can't share it.--Jon Udell
OS/2 Coverage: Excellent or What?
