2 Jul
2016
2 Jul
'16
9:25 p.m.
I think OS/2 was certainly closer to Unix than MS-DOS was.
Mostly it had the ugliness of both systems. The presentation manager and
various other aspects got points for the concept, but the implementation was really far
from robust. You spent a lot of time hard-rebooting the the thing when it got wedged.
I was so happy to just switch to AIX on all the PS/2s. One of my contracts was to port
AIX to the i860 on a couple of add in cards (the IBM Wizard and then subsequently the W4).
We actually started with the 370 version of the AIX kernel (closer than the i386
version). Still it was fun because were were running two UNIXes per box: one on the
i860 and the other on the i386. The TCF (borrowed from the UCLA Locus system) made it
all seamlessly move back and forth. We even had it boogeying with a 370 when we were
working at IBM’s Palo Alto center.