MS-DOS and OS/2 beat all comers

by Lloyd Borrett
The Age, Computer Age, Tuesday 13 December 1988

MS-DOS and OS/2 beat all comers.

Forget about Unix, Xenix and their thousands of variations, MS-DOS and OS/2 are the future operating systems in the Australian office.

As things stand, DOS is the most widely used operating system, not only in Australia but the world. The market for MS-DOS-based software is more than double any other software market, let alone the small and but slowly increasing Unix market. And little is happening in the Unix worid to change this trend.

Meanwhile, the MS-DOS world has a multitude of solutions available. However, the PC and MS-DOS were never intended to be the important player in our society they have become. In August 1981, when IBM shipped the first PCs, it was introduced as a computer for the home and education market. It quickly outgrew that image and, by March 1983, when it was released in Australia, the PC had already become widely adopted as an important business tool.

This trend continued. The PC and PC-based software quickly became computer market. The limitations of MS-DOS were obvious, and by 1985, with the release of the IBM AT, business was crying out for faster and more powerful PCs.

Compag introduced the 386-based computer, others followed. All manufacturers adopted improved screen display technology and improved printer technology. PC to PC LANs, and PC to mini/mainframe links made the PC even more important as a business workstation.

In April 1987, IBM annonced its PS/2 range, and more importantly OS/2 and its place in the Systems Application Architecture (SAA) strategy. OS/2 is a single-user multi-tasking operating system designed to use the power of the Intel 80286 micro chip. That means programs using up to 16 megabytes of memory and the ability to address mainframe-sized disk files. OS/2 is an operating system that provides the security and control computer professionals require, and allows existing MS-DOS based applications to run in a DOS compatibility mode.

Unix is a multi-user operating system first used in 1968. It was created to allow the power of the DEC 222-11 to be shared between a number of users. It is a text-based operating system that uses dumb ASCII terminals to display the text infermation sent to each user. All of the processing happens on one central CPU.

Now, just because the current Intel 80286 and 80386-based PCs have more power than the DEC PDP-11 and compare favorably with many of today's small minicomputers, the Unix camp thinks this is enough justification to say that Unix is the future.

Wrong. Ask anyone who has had a minicomputer or PC running Unix, or any other multi-user system, for some time what their greatest problem is. The answer you will get is lack of CPU power.

Everything off one machine. It is difficult to distribute the resources to those who need them the most. It is even more difficult to do it without inflicting severe penalties on other users. When one user runs a big resource-hungry application, everyone suffers.

And the users are stuck with an ancient text-based view of their applications.

The Macintosh, Microsoft Windows and other graphics-besed user interfaces have been shown to be vastly superior to text-based interfaces. OS/2 has Presentation Manager built in as its graphics interface.

But graphics-based interfaces are hungry on computer resources. In the PC world that's not a great problem. Just improve the power of the PCs CPU and/or make the graphics controller even more intelligent.

And in the Unix world? To introduce a graphics interface to a Unix machine means the CPU's power would become almost totally consumed in just providing the graphics interface. Either the CPU would have to become significantly more powerful (and more costly), or the terminals would have to become more intelligent (dare I say, PC-like).

Yet those in the Unix camp focus their narrow view on the fact that OS/2 is not "multi-user" and proclaim it to be doomed to fail when compared to Unix.

What do you call a multi-tasking PC running OS/2 linked to other PCs, minis and or mainframes, and capable of sharing data with any of them. I call that true multi-user distributed computing, and that’s what 05/2 is all about.

The evolving standards in the PC world are going to see all this happen within the next 12 to 18 months. Sure that seems a long time since the announcement of OS/2 way back in April 1987, but much work has been going into software development. The increased complexity of multi-user, multi-tasking solutions requires more time to produce solutions. (It has taken Unix over 20 years to get to where it is today.)

But the OS/2 solutions that have been created in this period will now become the building blocks for a new generation of software. OS/2 with Presentation Manager is now available. And we can expect to see the first wave of applications early in 1989.

OS/2 LAN Manager is just being shipped. This product allows both MS-DOS and OS/2 PCs to share information and resources on a local area network (LAN). In turn that network can connect directly or remotely with other LANs, or minicomputer and mainframes.

OS/2 SQL Server will be available within the next few months. This will allow PCs running applications running under MS-DOS and OS/2 to access data using SQL as the machine to machine interface. Instead of the PC having to search through and sort the database, the SQL server does it and passes the results back to the PC.

Once such applications are installed the user is going to be unaware of whether the data came from their own PC, the SQL Server on their local area network, an SQL Server on another local area network they are connected to, the minicomputer down the corridor, or the mainframe interstate!

That is true distributed computing. That is what OS/2 and SAA are all about.

If an individual user needs their own fast printer they can have it. If they need a 80386-based CPU to crunch their data instead of an 80286 they can easily get it. If the SQL Server can’t cope with the load, it can be upgraded, or another one can be added.

Lloyd Borrett is the founder of the Melbourne PC User Group, Sysop of Australia's PC based bulletin board system, and a product specialist at MicroHelp Computers and Communications.