Feedback from June 15

Merlin Hardware Requirements.

At least 2 articles this month made an issue of the fact that OS/2 needs "power" hardware and that if it won't run on a 486 with 8 megs, it's doomed.

Well, the bar has been raised by Win95 and NT. Go to any Best Buy and all you see are Pentiums, often with 16Megs. Why? Cuz Win 95 runs better that way. Corporations are buying Pentiums, and often with 32 megs memory.

Face it, if you went out today to buy a 486 you'd find it in the section marked "obsolete", and that ought to give one a clue about what it can run. I have an old 386 with a 486 upgrade chip and 8 megs. It's slow. I can't run Merlin. So either I run Warp forever or get new hardware.

I think that's OK. Older machines eventually become obsolete. Older operating systems do too. If one wants to be productive, one can with anything from a TRS-80 to a Pentium Pro. If one wants to play with the latest software, you might find your hardware choices more limited.

John McGing


More Wet Paper Bags.

I'm just an end-user of OS/2. Do you really believe that OS/2's next version will make any headway into homes? I've often heard the "if they use it at the office, they'll use it at home," stuff, but I also heard this from the Mac people when they spoke about getting everyone to buy Macs if they made them the main computer platform for schools. It may have boosted Mac sales, but there was no marketing coup, at least as far as I could tell in my very limited perception. I'm not taunting or flaming you for what you said; I would just like to know your opinions concerning this.

Kyle England


- I don't know if the next version of OS/2 will be more successful in the home market than the current version is or not. It depends on how successful it is in the business market. If Merlin is a huge success in business, then yes, I do think we'll see a larger presence in the home as well.

My reason for this belief is historical: When IBM released the IBM PC, there were a number of computers already on the market. My knowledge of the exact time schedule is a little sketchy, but the big players were IBM, Apple, and Commodore. Of these, IBM was the only company that marketed their computer primarily at businesses. Apple and Commodore marketed at the home, and Apple augmented their marketing with the school discounts you mentioned.

In 1996, it's pretty obvious who came out on top. IBM's computer. Apple's struggling, and Commodore went out of business. Now, the target market is obviously not the only factor here -- the fact that the IBM PC was so heavily cloned was also a major factor -- but I think IBM's strategy is what gave them the edge. (After all, the PC wouldn't have been cloned if it weren't popular already.)

There's also another way of looking at this: People will naturally want to use the same kind of hardware and operating software at home as they do at work. In most cases, this means that what they use at work gets used at home, too. Why not the other way around? Well, several reasons. First, work environments are often more heavily controlled than home environments. Most users can't just bring in arbitrary hardware or operating systems. Second, a lot of people encounter their first computer at work, and then base their decision of what to buy on their at-work experience. Third, casual software piracy from work to home is very common. It's not so common in reverse because a) the software is expensive, and b) businesses can't afford getting caught pirating software.

Jim Little


Kevin Linfield's Line.

Kevin,

I also think that Merlin will fail. I hadn't thought about the cost factor, though. But you're right, and I think you're on the money in your conclusion. OS/2 will be a niche product. IBM is purposely sculpting it that way. They must be; I can't image them having that many incompetent people making that many bad decisions for such a great product.

Terry Schima


In reference to Linfield's Line "Why Merlin will Fail" in the June 1996 issue of OS/2 e-Zine!:

I appreciate and understand your concerns about the upcoming release of Merlin. I have concerns myself. However, you article lacked validation. You tell us what's going to happen based on things you either think or have heard. You don't provide us with the source of these "facts". Until you do that, I don't believe the article should have been published.

For example you tell us you've heard that Merlin will list for $250, but you make it clear that you're not sure of that. What are your sources? If you're not reasonably sure about it, why do you put a scare into the OS/2 community?

As another example you tell us that Merlin will, effectively, require 16MB of memory to get the same performance that an 8MB Warp machine has. What do you base that on? IBM tells us that Merlin will actually be more memory efficient than Warp (excluding Voice Dictation). Why should I believe you? Give us your reasoning for that statement.

There are other examples, but I think that's enough to make my point.

I'm not saying you're wrong. I am saying that you don't give us a reason to believe your claims. I urge you to do a follow up to your article where you give us a little background for your claims. Complete the article you started.

William Nau


NeoLogic FTPd Review.

I read with more than mild interest your review of my contribution to the NeoLogic Network Suite. As an author I'm pleased with the review.

My nit:

"In addition, you can open a window with information, albeit far more sparse, about the users currently and recently logged on (GIF, 5k). One peeve here: if you close this window, rather than minimizing it, you can not re-open it without restarting the daemon."

I haven't had anyone report this behavior in the server, nor have I seen it myself. I'll be happy to figure out the problem if anyone is seeing this happen.

Paul Hethmon


NeoLogic FTP Review.

editor's note: When we originally published our NeoLogic FTP review, we accidentally reported some "errors" which in fact were not present. We were corrected by NeoLogic (as can be seen below) and immediately updated the article. In the interest of accuracy though, we are posting NeoLogic's letter so those who read the issue before we had a chance to correct our mistake can be alerted that these problems do not exist.
First of all thank you for the stellar coverage of our product, however in the conclusions for the FTP product, there are some glaring errors.

First, V4.5 of FTP does support reget when working with servers that have the server side of reget implemented.

The second point about "one-off" sites is also misleading. There is no need to add a one-off site to the server phone book since the user is free to type any address into the server field provided.

Steven Gutz
President, NeoLogic Inc.


- Please accept my apologies for missing these two features. We had assumed 'reget' was not supported when we failed to reget a file using NeoLogic FTP connected to NeoLogic FTPD. The presense of these two features does indeed make the product much more useful.

Chris Wenham

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