No, I only played around with GEM, but oddly enough, for a little personal side-project, I've been playing with it again recently.
I completely agree re us being better off with Windows. TBH, that applies to OS/2, too, and I really liked OS/2 2 back in the day. But even the unfinished beta of Win95 was so much better it was hard to believe. Far easier to set up, far better UI, far better compatibility... and TBH the multitasking wasn't as far behind as OS/2 zealots claimed. I could crash OS/2 2.0 easily but Win95 was very good for its time and for its technical limitations.
I'd love to read reports from alternate universes where some stuff I've idly speculated about on here came true.
Where IBM targetted OS/2 1 at the new 386 chip and every DOS power used wanted it. Where Windows never happened, but maybe OS/2 NT did happen.
Where DR sold CP/M-86 for $40 and MS-DOS remained niche. Where up against late-1980s OS/2 was a multitasking Personal CP/M Plus with X/GEM-based tiling DOS windows.
Emboldened by this it also did a proper multitasking Concurrent CP/M-68K which Atari sold in a cheap multitasking VME-slot 68030 workstation.
Where the GNU Project adopted the BSD-Lite kernel and had a practical, working, and Free xNix OS by 1989 or so, so Linux and the HURD and Free/Open/Net/Dragonflt BSD never happened.
(But Andy Tanenbaum pressed on with microkernels anyway and did amazing stuff.)
Where, after Apple bought NeXT, Be went to Acorn, and the merged result started selling silent, passively-cooled multiprocessor ARM workstations with PCI slots and a pre-emptive SMP OS at the end of the 1990s... and slim and light ARM laptops with no need for extra cooling and battery lives of many hours.
Down at the low end, Sinclair adopted Timex-Sinclair's better ULA for the Spectrum 128 and later hired Alan Miles and Bruce Gordon from MGT, reinvigorating the Spectrum world and successfully selling fancy but cheap 8-bit games machines for half the price of all the American 68000 boxes.
no subject
Oh, I'm sure you are absolutely right!
No, I only played around with GEM, but oddly enough, for a little personal side-project, I've been playing with it again recently.
I completely agree re us being better off with Windows. TBH, that applies to OS/2, too, and I really liked OS/2 2 back in the day. But even the unfinished beta of Win95 was so much better it was hard to believe. Far easier to set up, far better UI, far better compatibility... and TBH the multitasking wasn't as far behind as OS/2 zealots claimed. I could crash OS/2 2.0 easily but Win95 was very good for its time and for its technical limitations.
I'd love to read reports from alternate universes where some stuff I've idly speculated about on here came true.
Where IBM targetted OS/2 1 at the new 386 chip and every DOS power used wanted it. Where Windows never happened, but maybe OS/2 NT did happen.
Where DR sold CP/M-86 for $40 and MS-DOS remained niche. Where up against late-1980s OS/2 was a multitasking Personal CP/M Plus with X/GEM-based tiling DOS windows.
Emboldened by this it also did a proper multitasking Concurrent CP/M-68K which Atari sold in a cheap multitasking VME-slot 68030 workstation.
Where the GNU Project adopted the BSD-Lite kernel and had a practical, working, and Free xNix OS by 1989 or so, so Linux and the HURD and Free/Open/Net/Dragonflt BSD never happened.
(But Andy Tanenbaum pressed on with microkernels anyway and did amazing stuff.)
Where, after Apple bought NeXT, Be went to Acorn, and the merged result started selling silent, passively-cooled multiprocessor ARM workstations with PCI slots and a pre-emptive SMP OS at the end of the 1990s... and slim and light ARM laptops with no need for extra cooling and battery lives of many hours.
Down at the low end, Sinclair adopted Timex-Sinclair's better ULA for the Spectrum 128 and later hired Alan Miles and Bruce Gordon from MGT, reinvigorating the Spectrum world and successfully selling fancy but cheap 8-bit games machines for half the price of all the American 68000 boxes.
Dream dream dream, dreeaaammminnnnggg...