Editor's Note: It has been some time since we have included this department in AM, due largely to time constraints. As a result, some of the messages we are publishing here may date back as much as a year.
I just browsed your article "Measure of a Platform" as found [in the March 1997 issue of The Amiga Monitor]. I wanted to make some comments on the OS/2 section of this article. Being a long time OS/2 hack (who has now abandoned the platform for UNIX) I have a few things I could not help but say.
OS/2 was a fully robust 32-bit multitasking system by version 2.0, which was released a few years before Win95, not a few months to a year. Further OS/2 was a quite respectable multitasking platform in its 1.21 incarnation as well. It was not very backwards compatible with DOS, and had a very bad (AKA Win 3.0) interface, and was 16-bit for the 286; but it really did multitask, and it really had threads that worked! I would say OS/2 beat Win95 to the multitasking punch by about 7 years! OS/2 2.0 still is a better platform than Win95.
And yes, I loved the Amiga when it first came out. I believe it did beat even OS/2 to the multithreaded desktop.
Being first is not what counts. The best technology is not what counts. The leanest/meanest is not what counts. Marketing is the only thing that counts. The proof is in the pudding so to speak. It is too bad neither IBM nor Commodore figured that out; if they did the desktop computing market would be very different today.
Robert Garskof
I see now that I should have checked my OS/2 facts before putting the article together! I had assumed OS/2 Version 3.0 (Warp) was the first version to support preemptive multitasking. This actually serves to reinforce the point I made in my article, however.
Michael Webb
Publisher and Editor-in-Chief
Like your e-zine. Great stuff. :-)
Just wanted to quickly suggest that a "Return to Table of Contents" gadget at the bottom and/or top of the article pages would be a nice touch - and very useful.
Thank you for your time.
Yours in Amiga computing..
Don Romero
Thanks for the message and the suggestion, Don. It took an awfully long time to implement it, but I thought your idea was a good one, and as you can see, we now have "Return to Contents" links at the bottoms of each non-Contents page.
Michael Webb
Publisher and Editor-in-Chief