GUI

[Taavi Burns]

Coming from having bought my first Mac last December, and run OS/2
Warp 3 back in 1997 (would have run Warp 4, but I had only 8MB of
RAM on my 486!)...

On Thu, Nov 27, 2003 at 09:35:51PM -0500, James Knott wrote:
> click, any shell will do.  The WPS can do so much more, that I don't 
> know where to start.  Everything on the desktop is an object, with full 
> properties, which can be use for many things.  For example I used to 

Like the resource fork of each file on an HFS partition.  (cf OS/2
Extended Attributes on HPFS partitions)

> download stuff from Compuserve.  In the properties for a file, there's a 
> page for descripton, history etc.  When I downloaded a file from 
> Compuserver, the application I used, (Golden Compass) would pull the 
> file.idz from the download, and place the contents in the description 
> box.  The download date etc., would be stored in the history and so on. 

I can see this being done via the preview pane in the Finder.  It's not
by default, but I don't see why it couldn't be.

>  Then you could use the searching capabilities of the WPS to search on 
> the contents of the description, history, access dates and times and 
> much, much more, in about a complex of search as you could imagine. 

Yup.  Nice thing about 'find', and the Finder in their respective
environments.

> Another nice thing, was the "shadows", which would be similar in concept 
> to hard links in Linux, in that instead of having the "shortcut" as in 
> Windows, the shadow was actually another instance of the original 
> object.  This means that changes in one affect all.  Also, the object 

Macs have had this for a LONG time in the form of 'alias'es.  Links with
referential integrity.

> you see on the desktop, is actually part of the attributes of the file, 
> and not a separate file pointing do it, in the way that icons are linked 
> to files in Windows and Linux.  This means you avoid the problem you 

I imagine this information can be stored in the resource fork on OSX,
though generally the icon matches the Creator Code or file type (I
don't actually know which...) specified for the file (has nothing to do
with the file's name; I imagine this information is in the resource fork).

> have in Windows, where it's possible to move a file in such a way, that 
> the shortcut loses track of where it is.

That always bugged me.  :)

> It would be a whole lot easier to show the things the WPS is capable of 
> than to try and describe them.

Yup.

> Also, I have found the multitasking in OS/2 to be better than Linux and 
> far better still than Windows.  For example, on my Athlon XP 1700 system 
> with 512 MB, opening Konqueror will interupt the playing of a midi file. 
>  I never had such a thing happen in OS/2, even on a 386!  One of the 

Cool!  :)

> things OS/2 users used as an example, was to format a floppy in the 
> background, while doing something else, with little effect from the 
> floppy operation.  This compares with the Windows desktop virtually 
> locking up in a similar test.

Linux tends to come out pretty well on this test, too.  OSX performs
as well as Linux from process to process, but the Finder is still a
little on the single-threaded side sometimes.

> There were features in OS/2, back in 1992, that have still not appeared 
> in Windows.

Such as?

> In order to appreciate all the benefits of OS/2, you have to use it a 
> fair bit.  And even though I've used it for almost 14 years and even 
> provided 3rd level support at IBM on it, there's still a lot of it, 
> which I haven't used.

Sounds about right.  Same is true for Windows, too, though, I'm sure.
It gets used in the strangest of places...like ATMs.  Then again, so
does OS/2.  Guess which ATMs tend to crash?  ;)

For all the praise you've placed on OS/2, I do suggest you have a look
at OSX as a modern implementation.  No, it probably won't match up
to the industrial strength of OS/2, but it's probably the closest modern
equivalent, and 10 times more UNIXy.  ;)  Quite a shame that OS pre-X
lasted so long in its singletasking hole.

-- 
taa
/*eof*/
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