Porting to OS/2 – GitPius

Summary

from the November 1987 issue of PC Tech Journal magazine An inside look reveals how one company rapidly converted a complex data manager from DOS to the OS/2 environment. by Steven Armbrust When Microrim, Inc., became a beta site for IBM’s new Operating System/2 (OS/2) in late 1986, Microrim chairman and founder Wayne Erickson knew immediately what he and his staff had to do. Not only did they have to convert R:BASE System V, Microrim’s largest and most complex database manager, to run under OS/2, but the job had to be done in time to demonstrate a working product when IBM officially announced OS/2. At the time, no one knew how soon the announcement would occur (it came just six months later). Microrim—located in the same Redmond, Washington, neighborhood as OS/2’s developer, Microsoft—is a forerunner in converting to OS/2. The company internally committed to the OS/2 conversion of R:BASE System V in late 1986 and completed it in time to demoastrate the product at IBM’s formal announcement of OS/2 on April 2 of this year in Miami. “We knew the job would be big, because our program is big,” Erickson said. “But with all the enhancements we wanted to make to our product, and because of the endorsements of IBM and Microsoft, we felt we couldn’t ignore OS/2.” Microrim is counting on OS/2 to be a big boon in the constant battles die company must wage with competitors, most notably Ashton-Tate of dBASE fame, to add new features and otherwise improve its products. For R:BASE System V, which already strains at the 640KB memory bounds that are available under DOS, OS/2’s 16MB of memory will open the door to new features. It will also improve system performance by eliminating the need for cumbersome overlays used to squeeze numerous program elements into the overflowing 640KB memory bag. As it is now, heavy use of overlays as required by R:BASE uiider DOS diminishes the product’s performance even on an AT-class computer. Microrim approached the OS/2 conversion systematically a...