Confusion still reigned at the end of last week over Microsoft Corp’s intentions for OS/2, following the report in the Wall Street Journal at the beginning of the week suggesting that the company was ready to drop its OS/2 operating system, due to widespread apathy from the computer industry. Microsoft denied the Journal’s charge that it would henceforth be concentrating on its bestselling Microsoft Windows, and at a seminar the next day revealed that it is working on a new portable version of OS/2 that would include support for 32-bit MS Windows technology, symmetrical multi-processing, compliance with the Posix standard and security to the Orange Book B2 level. Due out within two years, OS/2 3.0 or OS/2 NT – for New Technology will become available on non-Intel iAPX-86 machines for the first time, with the MIPS Computer Systems Inc RISC chip tipped as the most likely initial version, followed by Sun’s Sparc processor, and hence provide viable competition to Unix for the first time. But critics claimed that the new product does mean that Microsoft has given up on OS/2 and Presentation Manager the New Technology operating system will be a complete re-write and re-focus of original OS/2 to incorporate Windows and MS-DOS applications as well. Meanwhile, IBM, which took over responsibility for Intel-based OS/2 versions last September, remains in charge of OS/2 1.3 and the 32-bit 2.0 version, which is now shipping. But Microsoft did not quite succeed in dispelling compatibility doubts over OS/2 2.0 and the future 3.0, and current and future Windows versions. An official statement claimed we will absolutely have Presentation Manager support in OS/2 3.0. The 32-bit PM support is no issue. 16-bit PM support is a little more complex, and we are still working on the technical details. Microsoft continues to work on MS-DOS 5.0 and MS-DOS 6.0, as well as Windows and various development tools. Release 4.0 of Windows – known as Win 32 – should be out next year, but will eventually be included in the system kernel of OS/2 NT. But given Microsoft’s recent record of keeping to deadlines with OS/2, should we expect it to keep the two-year target for what will be a major re-write of its operating system code from machine language into C and C++? Watch this space.
@T
