Feedback from July 1

Review of OS/2 Warp J.

Though it's a great developement that OS/2 finally addresses the Japanese language, I must disagree with the anthusiasm of the reviewer.

The last sentence of the article suggests that there's no OS better than OS/2 J. Five years ago a Dutch company asked me if I could get them a PC running a native Kanji (Japanese) OS and wordprocessor. The only system capable of this (apart from a dedicated Japanese "Wapro") was the Apple Macintosh. All the features mentioned in the article, were available then on the Mac, with (surprisingly) absolutely no extra memory requirements (running on a Mac Classic 4 MB!). The only extra costs were the MacWrite Kanji Wordprocessor, we had to buy in Hawaii. All new OS's of the Mac now support this and they've been very happy users, so there's no way I will convince them to change to OS/2 J.

I know that OS/2 will run on all Intel based machines, so for a new user this might be an advantage, but anyone that asks me will hear that the Mac is the way to go when using Kanji software. (I've got no use for it, because I can't read Japanese, so I'll stick with Warp).

Joannes A.M. Paanakker


Kevin Linfield's Freeware List.

I just wanted to congratulate you on the excellent site you've put up here. I love the OS/2 Must Have utilities list, but being on a budget, I also like to know what I can get for free, probably because if I knew a little something about programming, I'd put my own little projects up there for everyone to use... Just the feeling of knowing someone's got a program on their computer written by me would be thanks enough. :)

So excellent site! It's making it into my own OS/2 resources page, and my hotlist, which I BARELY use... so you need a great page to make it there!!! :) If there's one thing about OS/2, it's extremely FUN to use and play with, and freeware is really the root of all that!

Rob Caputo


IBM's Marketing.

When Microsoft first started promoting Win95, they went all out. They contacted our User Group about doing a presentation. They offered to rent a hall so we could bring in the public for the demo (we took 'em up on it.) When they showed up they gave a well prepared, professional, glitzy demo.

In the spirit of equal time (and to placate us diehard OS/2 users) a couple of months later we got an IBM rep out to demo Warp. This was not a spur of the moment thing -- we had worked on IBM for months to get him.

Microsoft sent a professional presenter. IBM sent a volunteer engineer, who made it clear he came for the free trip, and really didn't want to be at the meeting. He was comepletely unprepared, and he was demoing off the laptop he uses for work. Because of space limitations on the laptop hard disk he had deleted his Windows software (like WinWord) but NOT deinstalled it (so the icon was there but wouldn't run.) He didn't have "StartupfoldersOnly" turned on in his config.sys (he didn't even KNOW about it) so when an app bombed big time and locked up the queues, restarting didn't help because the app restarted and bombed again.

There were two active OS/2 members in our user group when he came. There are currently two active OS/2 members in our group today. Had we NOT gotten an IBM presenter we might have more. This was an unmitigated disaster.

OK, maybe mass media advertising for OS/2 may not be a good idea. But damn it, IBM needs a road show, with presenters that show the public how OS/2 works, and do so with glitz and pizazz. Yes, I know there are presenters for OS/2 that can do this. We have been begging IBM for someone like this for a couple of years now, but we have a tough time even getting IBM to return our calls. IBM has to make it look like they're interested in the market.

I've got news for them. The people in _small_ (and medium, and even some large) corporate America who make decisions about what OS to use base their decision on what they are familiar with, and that's Windows right now. Why are they familiar with it? It's what they use at home, that's why. That home market is not insignificant, even if your target is business.

Steve Garcia


HTML-Ed Review.

I just have to agree with you about HTML-Ed. I have started my own web design company and HTML-Ed has been nothing but a "hyperspace jump" in speed for me. I also like how it was coded, and HTML-Ed is the first software I have ever payed for (and not pirated), simply because I like the programming style and recyclement of DLLs.

Bojan Landekic


Off-line Adventures.

Trevor -- Interesting article. I to have been fiddling with grabbing things from the 'net without be around. Call it agents or robots whatever... It is often easier to get to these things on off hours.

A possibility of "more elegantly" ending the DOP session is killem, a command line process killer.

Mike Beedlow

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