offer - OS/2 for the PDP-11

[madodel]

Fred Cisin wrote:
> On Tue, 1 Jan 2008, Jason T wrote:
>> Any idea how this came to be?  Weren't DEC and IBM fierce competitors?
> 
> OS/2 was written at MICROS~1 by Gordon Letwin.
> LATER IBM took over rights.
> 
> Did it have anything to do with Dave Cutler moving from DEC to MICROS~1 to
> combine OS/2 and some DEC stuff to create NT?
> 

OS/2 1.0 through 1.2 was written as a collaborative effort between IBM and 
Microsoft.  Each had specific assignments and it was the microsoft parts 
that tended to produce the most headaches.  As of OS/2 1.3 IBM took over 
all OS/2 code and all microsoft code was pretty much re-written by the 2.0 
release.  See 
http://www.os2voice.org/VNL/past_issues/VNL0797H/vnewsf.htm#WarpGuru for a 
history of OS/2 written by someone who was there from the beginning.

>>  Hard to believe there would have been collaboration on such a
>> project.
>> And what would be the point?
> world domination

As far as I know the only released platforms for OS/2 were the x86 and the 
dead at birth OS/2 for PPC. I have never heard of it for any other 
platform.  I'd love to see a directory listing of this PDP-11 version.  It 
is possible this may have been a version of NT which had some rudimentary 
OS/2 text mode support, but was not based on OS/2.  I recall that NT had 
support for x86, PPC, and Alpha CPUs, so it would not be hard to believe 
that microsoft might have toyed with porting it to a DEC platform.  But I 
see no listing for NT for the PDP-11 on Wikipedia.

>> Wasn't OS/2 a graphical system from the start?
> 
> NO.  It was written to replace MS-DOS.
> (But it wanted a meg of RAM)
> IFF you wanted GUI, then you ran "Windows for OS/2" on OS/2.
> That was later renamed "Presentation Manager" as part of the MICROS~1
> effort to make sure that no product had a name that would give you a clue
> what it was.

OS/2 1.0 was text mode only.  OS/2 1.1 introduced the Presentation Manager 
which was similar to the GUI in windows 3.1.  OS/2 2.1 was even sold as 
OS/2 for Windows because it could run an existing copy of windows 3.1. 
That name created a lot of confusion as many thought OS/2 ran under windows 
rather then the other way around.

Mark


-- 

  From the eComStation Desktop of: Mark Dodel

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