SOME BENEFITS OF UPGRADING TO OS/2 FROM DOS OR WINDOWS DESCRIBED IN MINIMALLY TECHNICAL TERMS Revision date: April 15, 1994 1. Benefit: Save time by using OS/2's preemptive multitasking with your existing DOS and Windows programs to start a long print task in one program and then move on to another program. Added benefit: OS/2's inherent preemptive multitasking of long print jobs and other programs saves you the time and money that you would otherwise likely spend evaluating, buying, setting up and tuning specialized hardware and software that speeds up printing under DOS or Windows. Examples of programs that create long print jobs are: o Word processing programs that create documents with soft fonts and embedded complex graphics. o Spreadsheet programs that create large spreadsheets that may use soft fonts and print lines separating columns and rows. o Presentation graphics programs that create a series of presentation materials that are handed out as hard copy or turned into overheads or slides. o Recordkeeping and database programs from which long reports are printed. o Drawing, illustration and computer aided drafting (CAD) programs that create complex bitmapped and vector graphics. 2. Benefit: Save time responding to interruptions from beepers, electronic mail, faxes, telephone calls and impromptu visitors. In today's world of "rightsized" businesses and fast paced, time deprived family lifestyles, these interruptions are frequently requests for information accessed through your computer. You want to respond to them as quickly as possible so that you can return to what you were doing before the interruption occurred. OS/2's preemptive multitasking allows your computer and all the programs already running on it to operate without interruption while you load another program from your hard disk or network and use it to provide the information. 3. Benefit: Save time using OS/2's preemptive multitasking to manage the flows of several simultaneous "streams" of information. When you need to, you can simultaneously do all of the following: a) print a document, report or spreadsheet; b) receive/send electronic mail on your corporate network; c) transfer information between your computer and an online service such as CompuServe (Trademark) and d) format a floppy disk and then copy information to it. 4. Benefit: Save time by using native OS/2 programs that incorporate a separate "print thread" in addition to the main program thread. These programs allow you to start printing one datafile and almost instantly return control to you to work with another datafile (some programs let you continue to work on the same datafile) using the same program. This feature is found in only a very few DOS programs and virtually no Windows programs. Examples of native OS/2 programs that have the separate print thread feature include: Lotus 1-2-3 2.0, Lotus Freelance 2.0, Lotus AmiPro 3.0a, Lotus cc:Mail 2.0, DeScribe Word Processor 4.0E, Golden CommPass 2.1a, WordPerfect 5.2a, Corel Draw 2.5, CA Superproject 3.0, SAS 6.08, Footprint Works (note: product name in US, Canada aka Legato in Europe and TakeFive in Japan), Accounting Vision/32 series, Fax/PM, Fax/PM Client/Server, FaxWorks for OS/2, MR/2 2.00 (note: shareware bulletin board, i.e. BBS, offline reader with character mode interface for QWK formatted packets), KWQ 1.2e (note:shareware bulletin board, i.e. BBS, offline reader with graphical user interface for QWK formatted packets), Relish, Arcadia Workplace Companion 1.55 and AlarmPro 1.4h (note: shareware personal information manager). 5. Benefit: Save time by using other native OS/2 programs -- in addition to multithreaded programs that have only a main program thread and a separate print thread -- that use various threads to reduce the time that a computer is idle while it waits to receive more input or send more output. Whether users realize it or not, almost all DOS and Windows programs on today's personal computers spend much of their time waiting. Programs wait to receive user input via keyboard, mouse, touchscreen (and even sometimes voice communications). Programs that receive data from another computer or send data to another computer spend time waiting. These programs receive or send a block of data, wait, receive or send a block of data, wait... They continue working this way, waiting for many little blocks of time that add up to seconds and minutes. The input can be received or the output can be sent using a modem, faxmodem, local area network (LAN) interface adapter/card or wide area network (WAN) communications adapter/card Some native OS/2 programs are multithreaded; they have multiple components, each of which the computer can process independently. With these programs, when one thread is waiting, any of the other threads can continue, saving time for the user that otherwise could be wasted. Multiple threads are particularly useful if one of the threads receives all of its input when it starts -- and therefore does not need to wait for input or output in the middle of its work -- and requires a long time to complete its work. It can fill in the gaps while another thread waits. Examples of threads that can receive all of their input at the beginning include reformatting of documents or graphics files, searching of files in memory, indexing of files in memory, sorting of files in memory, calculating optimal solutions to mathematical models and other complicated mathematical calculations. Examples of native OS/2 programs that feature multiple threads include: Lotus 1-2-3 2.0 (note: solver thread), Lotus cc:Mail 2.0, DeScribe Word Processor 4.0E, Golden CommPass 2.1a, Footprint Works (product name in US, Canada aka Legato in Europe and TakeFive in Japan), Accounting Vision/32 series, Fax/PM, Fax/PM Client/Server, FaxWorks for OS/2, MR/2 2.00 (note: shareware bulletin board, i.e. BBS, offline reader with character mode interface for QWK formatted packets), KWQ 1.2e (note: shareware bulletin board, i.e. BBS, offline reader with graphical user interface for QWK formatted packets), Relish, Arcadia Workplace Companion 1.55 and AlarmPro 1.4h (note: shareware personal information manager) Example of a native OS/2 program that allows programmers to develop client applications with two threads: a separate thread for the graphical user interface and a single process thread: Enfin-3. Examples of native OS/2 programs that allow programmers to develop client applications with multiple process threads: Application Manager 4, Gpf 2.1, GpfREXX 1.0, VisProREXX 2.02 and VX-REXX 2.0. 6. Benefit: Save time by using native OS/2 programs that let you print data by dragging and dropping the icon for a datafile created or edited by the program onto the icon of the printer. Many (perhaps all) of the programs that let you perform drag and drop printing will automatically start the program that created or edited the datafile (if it is not already running). The drag and drop printing function of these programs does what is needed behind the scenes. Examples of native OS/2 programs that are enabled for drag and drop printing are: Lotus 1-2-3 2.0, Lotus Freelance 2.0, Lotus AmiPro 3.0a, Lotus cc:Mail 2.0, DeScribe Word Processor 4.0E, WordPerfect 5.2a, CA Superproject 3.0, Relish, Arcadia Workplace Companion 1.65 (note: beta test, check for general availability). Examples of native OS/2 programs that allow programmers to develop client applications that are enabled for drag and drop printing: Gpf 2.1, GpfREXX 1.0, VisProREXX 2.02 and VX-REXX 2.0. 7. Benefit Save time by using native OS/2 fax programs that let you send faxes by dragging and dropping the icon for a datafile on the icon for a fax device on the Workplace Shell desktop. Examples of such native OS/2 fax programs are: FaxPM (ASCII files and datafiles for any native OS/2 application that is enabled for drag and drop printing and FaxWorks for OS/2 (ASCII files and WordPerfect 5.2a for OS/2 datafiles). 8. Benefit: Save time and money by using OS/2's Workplace Shell user interface because you can avoid buying and installing a separate program that lets you create a customized computer desktop to replace the DOSSHELL or the Windows Program Manager. Using OS/2's Workplace Shell you can organize your computer to match the way that you most naturally use it. You can organize objects representing programs, data and physical devices (e.g. printers, modems and fax/modems) into folders. You can nest folders. You can even create multiple "shadows" of objects so that a single object can be included in multiple folders if your organization system demands it. 9. Benefit: Save time (and maybe money) by using OS/2 because you do not have to learn how to set up and use a DOS memory manager utility to squeeze DOS and Windows device drivers (e.g., for video adapters, CD-ROM drives, sound cards, local area network requesters and other utilties) out of DOS low memory into DOS high memory. Many OS/2 device drivers are available that support DOS and Windows applications without using up any DOS memory. 10. Benefit: Save time by using OS/2 when you set up your memory hungry DOS or Windows programs that need "extended memory" or "expanded memory." When a DOS or Windows program is "migrated" or otherwise "registered" to the Workplace Shell, OS/2 automatically sets it up with 3 types of expanded and extended DOS memory. The default amounts of memory available to the application are sufficient for most users of most programs. If you need more, then you can use separate slidebar controls for each program that let you have up to 32 MB EMS memory, 16 MB XMS memory and 512 MB DPMI memory. This is enough for any user! 11. Benefit: Save time by using OS/2 when you use record keeping or database software. OS/2's advanced file systems, Super-FAT and HPFS, are faster than the older FAT file system used by older versions of DOS.(the only DOS that includes Super-FAT is IBM PC DOS 6.1) These file systems save you time when you index, search through or sort data. Added Benefit: you save more time by using OS/2 when you store your data using the fragmentation resistant HPFS file system. Under almost all circumstances, you no longer need to buy,setup or use defragmentation utilities.