8 posts tagged "os/2"

I’ve been keeping track of the various characteristics of personal computers I’ve owned during the past 32 years, and here’s a table comparing those data points.

30 years ago I bought a copy of the recently released IBM OS/2 Warp 3 operating system, and I used it in the primary partition of my computer for a while, until around 1997, when I sold my 486 PC and moved back to Argentina.

As technology waves come and go, the names of iconic companies follow the movements, first reaching the pinnacle of their glories, and later fading into irrelevance.

I finished reading “Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance?” an autobiography of Lou Gerstner, CEO of IBM from 1993 to 2002, and I can say without hesitation that it’s one of the best business books I’ve read in decades. Here are some notes (quite a few actually!) I took while reading it.

Here’s more dabbling in programming languages to re-create my venerable interpretation of Conway’s Game of Life, this time using three stereotypical languages of the IBM galaxy: the Rexx scripting language, good old COBOL, and Fortran 95.

Back in the 1990s, shared libraries were all the rage. Instead of having to ship a 20 MB *.exe file to your customer in various floppy disks, you could cut some code out, put it in a set of *.dll files, and reuse that code across all your products. Every vendor would then install lots of DLL files in your system, and they would be reused by other apps from the same vendor.

I got my first personal computer 30 years ago this month. It was during the summer of 1992; I had just finished my first year of studies at the Collège Sismondi, and it was the first summer after we arrived from Argentina that looked like a real holiday.

Looking at the software industry, it appears that most big companies usually share more traits than they would like to admit.