bobh@tekirl.LABS.TEK.COM (Bob Hubbard) (05/27/89)
I am not a developer just a lowly "usr". I and many of my colleagues want to have several apps (word processing, graphics, CAD, database, spreadsheets) "open" at once on 386 machines. True multitasking not necessary. Our choices are Windows/386 and DesqView. We also want PC-NFS underneath. We can't get that now. It doesn't seem likely that OS/2 or anything else will work either. DOS may be ugly but there are so many useful and refined applications in it that I(we) forgive many sins. Windows/386 will allow NFS drives and printers to be mounted but will not allow telnet sessions nor will it allow calls to be sent to mounted printers. Relatively small windows are allowed if NFS drivers are loaded before Windows. Microsoft and Sun don't talk to each other so there is no eminent solution. Unusable. DesqView/386 will do all of the above usually except for telnet sessions and it occaisionally fouls up a print call. It's memory manager at least allows NFS drivers to be loaded "high" which gives much more room for large applications (they all seem to want 500K these days). Usable but clumsy. OPINION: I don't really think OS/2-3 is relevant. The hardware is moving so much faster than the software; there are very few protected mode apps and I don't see an avalanche soon; there is an installed base of DOS apps that is very sophisticated and depended on by people that will not accept less functionality. Windows/386 would be the eventual winner (with improvements) except that I honestly believe that Microsoft writes inherently buggy programs that never seem to work right with other apps and they (MS) don't really care (extremely miopic). QuarterDeck seems to write better behaved systems, but text-based is just clumsy. At least they seem to listen to their "usrs".