Big-Name Manufacturers Give OS/2 a Boost
Four of the biggest names in personal computing--International Business Machines, Microsoft, Lotus and WordPerfect--made announcements last week that will have long-lasting impacts.
The setting was Comdex, the annual fall computer dealer exposition in Las Vegas. But the messages were aimed squarely at the men and women who make hardware and software buying decisions at the nation’s corporations.
Lotus and WordPerfect announced that they will share programming secrets and techniques so that their respective spreadsheet and word processor software programs will work closely together in new versions due out next year.
IBM and Microsoft said they are committed to working more closely together to push OS/2 into dominance over MS-DOS as the operating system of the 1990s.
An important part of their strategy will be a new version of OS/2 next year that will work only on the top two microprocessors from Intel, the 386 and 486 chips. The popular 286 chip, used in millions of medium-performance IBM PC/AT and compatible computers, will not be able to run the new operating system, although it runs current versions of OS/2 just fine and will continue to do so.
There are a number of consequences to the announcements, but they certainly do not mean that existing software and computers have suddenly been rendered obsolete or useless. There is no need to reach for your checkbook or throw your old PC out the window just yet.
At the heart of both announcements lies OS/2, a massive group of software programs that control how a computer will operate. OS/2 (which stands for operating system 2) has been controversial for several years, even before it was officially announced in April, 1987.
It is a replacement for MS-DOS (Microsoft disk operating system), a much smaller and simpler set of software programs first introduced in 1981 to control the workings of IBM’s original PC.
Although the original MS-DOS controlled a PC with just 64 kilobytes of memory, the operating system improved over the years to control the powerful, hard disk-equipped computers of today. It does have a limit, however, in being able to utilize at most 640 kilobytes of memory, compared to the 16 megabytes or more of OS/2. (One megabyte equals 1,024 kilobytes.)
For most computer users MS-DOS is just fine and will continue to be for as long as those users need to do just one task at a time. MS-DOS computers also will be fine until the cost of the much more powerful computers needed to run OS/2 falls drastically.
The problem with OS/2 is that there still isn’t much you can do with it. About 40 application programs running under OS/2 were demonstrated at Comdex, some of them not actually for sale yet. There are tens of thousands of programs that run under the MS-DOS operating system.
The Lotus-WordPerfect announcement will certainly change the balance. Both are without challenge as offering the dominant program of their type--Lotus for its spreadsheet and WordPerfect for its word processing--for MS-DOS.
The new OS/2 versions promised last week by Lotus and WordPerfect will finally give business users a good reason to switch to OS/2 because the capabilities of the new Lotus and WordPerfect programs, and especially the synergy between the two, will be much greater than the current MS-DOS versions.
According to the companies, their new programs will share a common menu structure using the graphic design of OS/2’s Presentation Manager user interface. Users will select program modes and functions by opening pull-down menus at the top of the screen and selecting from lists of choices. It is very easily done using a mouse as a cursor-pointing tool, much like on Apple’s Macintosh.
The two programs also will be tightly linked so that a group of spreadsheet numbers can be copied into a WordPerfect document as a data table. Later, numbers can be changed in either the original spreadsheet or the document, and the corresponding numbers in the other file--document or spreadsheet--will automatically be updated.
Lotus showed a preview of its new program, named 1-2-3/G, which has nice graphics features including three-dimensional charts. It also provides a way to analyze the optimal combination of several factors: for instance, the most profitable mix of cookies, cakes and bread from a given amount of sugar, flour and labor.
WordPerfect gave the press a peek at its Presentation Manager version, which builds on the newly released WordPerfect 5.1 designed for MS-DOS. One great feature of the Presentation Manager version will be a “draft mode” that speeds up the screen display of a document by substituting a generic type style for the one that will actually will be printed.
The version also will inherit features of WordPerfect 5.1, which include an easy way to make tables that keep their alignment no matter how much data you add or delete. It also offers excellent renditions of complex mathematical formulas that use Greek letters and special symbols. It even automatically italicizes the proper characters.
To make buying an OS/2-compatible computer system a little easier, IBM and Microsoft said they will work together to make OS/2 efficient enough to work well in a 386 or 486 computer with 4 megabytes of memory and a 60-megabyte hard disk.
The advantage of the next OS/2, in conjunction with the 386 or 486 chips, will be the ability to run multiple MS-DOS programs simultaneously. OS/2 is a multi-tasking operating system allowing several programs to run at the same time, but now they must be programs especially written for OS/2. Many MS-DOS programs can run under the current OS/2, but only one at a time. Others, particularly communications programs and games, cannot run under OS/2.
Even these features should not compel you to discard your present MS-DOS machine. My bet is that many people will be content into the next century with the performance they can get out of MS-DOS running on lower-powered, lower-priced computers.
Computer File welcomes readers’ comments but regrets that the author cannot respond individually to letters. Write to Richard O’Reilly, Computer File, Los Angeles Times, Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles, Calif. 90053.
