Antivirus

[Steve Lamb]

On Wed, June 18, 2008 4:11 pm, Michael Haney wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 18, 2008 at 12:40 PM, Steve Lamb <grey at dmiyu.org> wrote:
>>    Yeah!  And they could call it OS/2!  No, wait, OS/3!

> Ah, OS/2 Warp.  Now there was an OS.

    Oh yeah.  My OS chain on the x86 was DOS -> OS/2 -> Linux (Slack ->
Debian -> KUbuntu).  I bought 3 versions of OS/2.  2.0, 2.(cough) and 3
Warp.  It's still in use in places today.  With IBM's backing of Linux I
wonder why they don't pull a Sun with OS/2 and open source it.

> The OS was a lot like Unix in many ways but handled its drives with driver
> letters like Windows and DOS.

    True.  One wart on the file system.  On the other hand let's talk about
the GUI shell.  To this day things are still trying to catch up to
OS/2's GUI shell.  One feature explains it all.

    Shadows.  In Unix we have hard and soft links which are useful.  Windows
has shortcuts which are about as primitive as you can get.  OS/2's
shadows were functionally the same as Win95 (and up) shortcuts. 
Difference is they were tied to the original file.  If you moved the
original file /all the shadows were updated to point to the new
location/.  Kinda sounds like how hard links work since they are linked
to the file pointer and not the logical location as soft links are. 
Except shadows worked across volumes while hard links do not.

    Whoops, waxing about OS/2 on an Ubuntu mailing list.  OT, OT!  I'll
leave nostalgia at the door.

-- 
Steve Lamb