What I Like!

"The More People I meet, the more I like my hamster."

This page is under construction.

More than anything else on my web site, this page serves as a soapbox for me to chatter on about things I like. Diasgree with me all you want, but I'm not changing my mind on any of these!

Index to What I Like!

Command Line Interfaces
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
OS/2
Guided Tour

Command Line Interfaces

Ah, DOS 2.1! That was my first experience with DOS, and it seemed like such a nice operating system to use after the time I had spent with the ones on the old IBM clunkers we had at work.

Since then, although OS/2 and Windows have revolutionized the personal computer industry with their graphical desktop model, I find myself constantly using a DOS command line, a DOS shell called the Norton Commander, and a DOS editor called QEDIT. Why? Because with these tools, I can get work done! I am always bemused when people struggle through with their cute GUIs, complaining they don't know how to get things done or that it takes then so long to do it. Not at the command line. Learn its syntax, figure out how to program batch files, and customize a few good tools for yourself, and you can do amazing things with a lot less work!

Of course, a good shell helps a lot, too. For me, the best command shells available for DOS and OS/2 are from JP software. They're called 4DOS and 4OS2. If you use the command line more than once a day, you can't go wrong with these.

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

Pity the poor CBC. Maligned on every side, decried as an unnecessary expense to the taxpayer, and facing massive budget cuts from the government, Canada's public broadcaster is facing perhaps the toughest time in its sixty year history.

But I like the CBC. For a paltry sum - approximately fifty cents a day on my federal income tax - I get good journalism, news reports every hour on the radio, and superb programming. Where other radio stations try to make themselves heard by being either louder or dumber than the next one, my local CBC radio station is an oasis of intelligent, thought-provoking, and informative series of programs every day of the week.

Many critics of the CBC take their aim at English television service. But it's only part of their services. They also have English radio, French TV and Radio, and Radio Canada International, the shortwave service that brings Canada into homes around the world. All of these combine to make the CBC one of the premier broadcasting services in the world. If we lose it, Canadian broadcasting, especially radio, could well dissolve into a wasteland of brain dead programming hosted by DJs with IQs only a factor or so larger than their shoe sizes.

Here's to intelligent broadcasting. May the CBC provide it in abundance to Canadians for another sixty years!

Visit the CBC's web site
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Guided Tour

OS/2

"When Windows 95 grows up, it wants to be like OS/2."

There's some truth in that statement. For all the hoopla that surrounded the massive launch of Windows/95, OS/2 users noted that a lot of what was in there had been part of their operating system for years. An object-oriented desktop, full drag-and-drop capabilities, bootable DOS virtual machines (which Win95 doesn't really do), and, of course, Microsoft's discovery that its mouse, one of the most popular on the market, actually had two buttons!

One of the things I noticed with the Win95 rollout and the subsequent feeding frenzy by the PC trade press was the incredible bias that surfaced. Prior to Win95's release, reviews of OS/2 tended to say it was a neat OS with a cool desktop, but difficult to use because you had to relearn some of the mouse-click combinations. The Windows 95 came along, borrowing a lot of its mouse operations directly from OS/2. Suddenly all the reviewers said this is a cool new way to operate your computer!

Over time, I've put some thought to what I call "killer reasons" to run OS/2. It was no contest between OS/2 and Windows 3.1, but Windows 95 narrowed the gap significantly. So far, I have found three major areas where OS/2 is superior to Windows 95.

1. OS/2 is OS/2: No, it's not a circular argument. OS/2 was designed from the ground up to be a pre-emptive, multitasking, 32-bit operating system. Windows 95, for all its technical achievements, appears to be a very fancy GUI shell running on top of DOS - an 8 bit operating system! Now, that's an impressive achievement!
2. OS/2 has HPFS: the High Performance File System: The most obvious benefit to running OS/2 is its dumping of the tired old FAT file system in favour of something that was designed for disks bigger than 180K single-sided floppies. A lot of users don't realize that when you allocate a 1 byte file on a FAT formatted 1.2 gigabyte hard drive, you consume using 32,768 bytes for that one little file! That's called "cluster overhang" and it's a big space waster on the FAT file system. HPFS, on the other hand, grows files in 512 byte chunks, so you lose a lot less space in every file.
3. OS/2 has Boot Manager: In its arrogance, Microsoft assumes that if you're running Windows, you don't need to run any other operating system. IBM, though, has a history of offering multiple operating systems for its computers: just ask anyone who's worked on IBM mainframes! So with OS/2 they offer a really neat product called Boot Manager, which presents a menu on startup, asking you which operating system you want to boot. The OS can reside on a totally different disk and need not be one OS/2 recognizes. Many people I know use OS/2's Boot Manager to boot operating systems as diverse as DOS, Windows 3.1, Windows 95, OS/2 Warp, OS/2 Merlin, and Linux.

Guided Tour

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Brian Lowe / Winnipeg PC User Group / blowe@wpcusrgrp.org
Last updated on October 27, 1996. Accesses since September 30, 1998: (Counter image not available)