Roy J. Tellason wrote in a message to Jack Stein:

 RJT> They may just try,  but I don't think they'll succeed.

 JS> I hope you're right, but, I have serious reservations.  The 
 JS> power of MS, IBM, INTEL and ZIFF-DAVIS cannot easily be 
 JS> under-rated.

 RJT> "The power" that those folks may hold,  such as it is,  is a
 RJT> matter of economics,  and of doing things within some fairly
 RJT> narrowly defined commercial channels -- the home and
 RJT> smaller-end business market for M$,  the medium and larger
 RJT> business market for IBM,  etc.  That's why OS/2 isn't being
 RJT> agressively marketed by IBM,  it crosses that boundary.  The
 RJT> whole philosophy behind Linux is outside that framework.

I can't agree with you here Roy. Both the home, and business (large and small) 
is totally domonated by MS products.  You would be hard pressed to locate a
business that was not running MS OS's.

 JS> Who would ever guess that 25 years after the worlds greatest OS 
 JS> was presented to the world, 

 RJT> You talking about unix here?

Yes.

 JS> the world would be totally dominated by the likes of DOS/WIN,

 RJT> The world?  The home pc market,  maybe.  Businesses and
 RJT> academia do tend to run a lot of other stuff besides.

They are dominated by MS OS, and not by a little.

 JS> the worlds worst OS's for at least 15 years running?   It 
 JS> boggles the mind, doesn't it?

 RJT> Not really.  There are a few factors that tend to account
 RJT> for some of this. 

Sure, it is a rather complicated issue on the surface, but underneath, it gets 
much simpler.

 RJT> For one,  unix was originally a very proprietary product,  
 RJT> owned by Bell Labs, and licensed to a small number of vendors.  

Yes, and very expensive, and made for big iron, there was no little iron at
that time.

 RJT> I don't know just when that changed,  but it did.  A variant 
 RJT> written for smaller machines called Minix (also written as a 
 RJT> teaching tool) came about,  and growing out of that is how 
 RJT> Linux got started. 

When the computer was ready to burst on the home scene is when the fun, and
market manipulation began.  IBM was in charge, and they chose MS to run the
software end of the business.  That has not changed, and the result of course
is the worlds worst OS dominating the home and business market.

 RJT> I think it's just starting to gain momentum.  And since I've
 RJT> started paying a bunch of attention to it the traffic in
 RJT> that echo has grown from moderately busy to about twice the
 RJT> volume of this one!  

LINUX gets 3 times the traffic here.  This is good but, OS/2 conferences have
always recieved a LOT of traffic in FIDO, and that didn't help OS/2 survive in 
the real world.  Almost no one in computing read any of this stuff.

 RJT> While,  sad to see,  the tone of OS/2 echos in general is 
 RJT> starting to remind me of that of CP/M users after ms-dos had 
 RJT> been around a year or two.  Not that I'm ready to dump it,  
 RJT> but... 

The problem with OS/2 is mainly that no one uses it, and IBM likes it that
way.
Hard to promote a product when the company that sells it doesn't want anyone
to use it.  
                                              Jack 
--- timEd/2-B11