Comments by "Lawrence D’Oliveiro" (@lawrencedoliveiro9104) on "The Computer Chronicles - Multitasking (1988)" video.

  1. 09:35 “Short-term product” that turned out to be the future of Windows. While OS/2 receded from the limelight into a niche, it was the ability to multitask existing DOS programs that really drove the marketplace to embrace Windows. GUI programs specifically written for Windows came later.
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  2. 15:16 This was a sore point with other makers of Microsoft*-compatible PCs: IBM had the sole right to sell “OS/2 Extended Edition”, which came with a built-in relational DBMS, which other vendors did not. *Even back then, the standard for compatibility was not any product from IBM, but Microsoft Flight Simulator. So from very early on, it was not IBM that defined what “compatible” meant, but Microsoft.
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  3. 1:37 Ah, ReadySetGo. I preferred that to PageMaker and QuarkXPress, because of one neat little feature: each tab stop not only had a position, it also had a width. That meant that you just had to tab while typing text, and you automatically got a block of text which had inset margins on both sides. I’ve never seen that in any other package since...
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  4. 15:58 “six-point-two” I believe meant “LU 6.2”, which was IBM’s standard for peer-to-peer networking. Its overall networking architecture was called “SNA”, and already went back decades by this point. But it had always been hierarchical-based, with a centralized mainframe controlling everything. But everybody else was favouring the peer-to-peer paradigm, to the point where even IBM realized it had to get in on the act.
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  5. Windows NT had full multitasking from the beginning. Its main architect, Dave Cutler, had already been responsible for two major multitasking OS architectures--RSX and VMS--for his previous employer, DEC.
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