CompuServe Messages

Uh, James, uh, no one is talking about doing a SEPARATE OS/2 version. I am only talking about making the ONE AND ONLY version able to run under BOTH Windows NT _AND_ OS/2, which is feasible since IBM will support the vast majority of the Win32 API under future versions of OS/2 Warp. Thus there are no different "application versions" to "insur[e] parallel operability" of. As for networks, no, it's not "another can of worms" because both Windows NT and the forthcoming OS/2 Warp Server can act as both clients and servers to each other as well as to Novell Netware, Banyan Vines, 3Com, LANtastic, and every other single operating system in current existence. And 3DS doesn't use networking calls anyway. It does all of its "network rendering" communications using shared files, which don't care what network they run under so long as it supports file sharing, which all do. In fact, you can use OS/2 RIGHT NOW to implement a "network" for Network Rendering under 3DSr3 and r"4" using just ONE MACHINE, because OS/2 lets you multitask multiple copies of those versions of 3DS (and NOTHING ELSE DOES unless you count Windows 3.1's ability to "crawl" ["run" is definitely not the operative term here] 3DSr3 and "4") and thus share the networking control files. Actually, the way I think AutoDesk should go is TAOS, as that would let ONE VERSION of 3DS (that means one set of binary executables) run AS-IS on EVERY SINGLE 32-BIT OPERATING SYSTEM IN EXISTENCE, NOW OR IN THE FUTURE, WITHOUT CHANGE! At FULL NATIVE SPEED of the host CPU(s)! ONE VERSION of 3DSr"5" would run at full speed on a Pentium, MIPS, or Alpha under Windows NT, or a Sun UltraSparc under Solaris, or a PowerPC (IBM or Apple PowerMac) under OS/2 for PPC or Windows NT or AIX or any other operating system you care to name, at the FULL SPEED of the CPUs! The user need not even know that the program is a TAOS program! The programs carry the TAOS operating system with them, like the game Doom from ID does with its own Doom Operating System when it runs under MS-DOS!