Posts by Fred Down

After just one phone, Essential Products ascends to the great venture capitalist in the sky

I have an Essential Phone

I have an Essential PH1 - it is an amazing phone, I bought the 360 Camera for $62. In the 3 years I have owned it - no crashes, reliable, elegant and novel.

The add on bus is unique.

It's 30 years ago: IBM's final battle with reality

Re: Interesting times

I worked on OS/2 at IBM Hursley, and at least in the versions I worked on OS/2 hand a single message queue to Presentation Manager. I did a talk on comparisons between Presentation Manager and X Windows and this was discussed,

OS/2 had for the time excellent multi-threading, the theory was that any program would grab a message from PM's queue, spin off a thread to handle it and then release the message queue, easier said than done.

My views on why OS/2 died :-

1 very poor developer support the development kit was expensive whist Microsoft was practically giving theirs away.

2 Poor peripheral support, for the longest time it did not support Sound Blaster the de-facto sound device at the time.

3 Required much greater hardware than was common at the time. The minimum stated hardware requirement was way to small to allow it to run properly.

I came from running Xenix on 286 hardware which managed pre-emptive multi tasking properly and had for years before OS/2.

Aussie air zealot savages prêt-à-porter stealth fighter

Memories are short

May I remind you of another Lockheed product sold around the world to US allies, The F104 Starfighter.

Care to comment, known as the widow maker for some reason, now what was that.