CompuServe Messages

Oh yes Microsoft has TOO "so much as stumbled!" Or have you forgotten MS-DOS 4.0 already? Not to mention all and I do mean ALL versions of Windows prior to Windows 3.0? Remember when Windows was considered "Microsoft's attempted clone of GEM"? And most of the other companies I mentioned had never stumbled much if any prior to their big declines. Ashton-Tate was unquestioned king of the database hill until dBase IV. IBM was where Microsoft is now up until a very few years ago. Indeed, they are still a very powerful force to be reckoned with, or have you forgotten the billion$ they still make off of their DB2 and mainframes and "big iron" systems? This is revenue that they are funnelling into OS/2. Note that it's IBM, not Microsoft, who is in the process of buying out Lotus, another company who had never so much as stumbled until recently. In this business, a company only has to "stumble" ONCE. If they "stumble" badly enough and/or with very bad timing, then it may be their own headstone they "stumbled" over, as in the case of Ashton-Tate. Sometimes, though, companies that "stumble" manage to regain their feet and become king of the hill once again, as in the case of Intel. If Zilog had had their Z-8001 16-bit CPU ready when IBM came a-knockin' back in the early '80s when IBM was looking for a CPU for their new Personal Computer, then the only place you would hear about Intel these days would be in a "Whatever Happened to . . .?" column in some computer magazine. But because Zilog dropped the ball they had picked up from Intel earlier, and Intel was ready with their 8088, the rest is history, and now Intel once again is king of the CPU market. The same could happen with IBM. Or Intel could lose it yet again (note that Compaq, the largest manufacturer of personal computers, has sworn to stop using all Intel chips in their computers within two years). Make no mistake: Microsoft is no more certain to be a major force ten or even five years from now than any other company is. Who would have dared predict five years ago that Borland would be on the verge of utter doom, that Ashton-Tate would be gone, that Lotus would be swallowed up, etc.? Autodesk should also take note of all of this. They may be king of the PC 3D and CAD markets NOW, but they are no more immune than Lotus and Borland and Ashton-Tate and Digital Research. As for OS/2, the main reason IBM is buying out Lotus is to have major popular applications (Notes and SmartSuite and the combination thereof) that are specific OS/2 applications. This, combined with Microsoft's recent backpedalling on Windows95 (it won't have the promised DCI that would have made it king of multimedia, among many other things), may turn the tide. Or it may not. The point is, Autodesk can easily HEDGE THEIR BETS by making it compatible with BOTH OS/2 AND NT! There is no real reason not to. The APIs in common cover everything that normal application software needs — only things like disk utilities would need features not included in the common API. Last time I checked, 3DS was not a disk utility. The point here is that if this is done and anything happens to Microsoft or Windows NT flops, 3DS still has OS/2 to run on. And vice-versa (I'll admit that is a somewhat more likely scenario). Or if there really is room in the market for two major operating systems and both are successful (which I feel is more likely still), then 3DS is attractive to users of both. A good many users of 3DS use OS/2 right now, because it is the ONLY effective way to multitask 3DS Releases 3 and "4." 3DS will not run AT ALL under Windows NT at present. Period. If you're using Windows NT, you must REBOOT YOUR MACHINE and load MS-DOS if you want to use 3DS. If you then want to use a 32-bit multithreaded paint program to touch up a material map, you must REBOOT AGAIN to get back into Windows NT! (Of course, you COULD just use a standard 16-bit Windows paint program, but then why have Windows NT in the FIRST place if you're not going to USE it?) With OS/2 you can simply have both 3DS (complete with both a Render Slave and a Foreground Modelling task running at the same time) and still have a Windows or OS/2 or even Win32s paint program running and toggle between them easily — even while the Slave task is doing rendering! Since OS/2 works so well for us now, why must we loyal 3DS users buy yet ANOTHER operating system and have to install it and buy more RAM (NT requires more than OS/2 just to run) and learn it, when 3DSr"5" can be made compatible with both!? Actually, there's an even better solution than the common API — TAOS!