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                  WindowsNEWS - February 4/91
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               Recent announcements of interest to
                   the Windows user community.

== BORLAND TO LAUNCH OBJECTVISION ===============================

An upcoming press introduction by Borland will premiere their new
ObjectVision product. On February 12, Phillipe Kahn, Chairman of
Borland and Rob Dickerson, General Manager of their Database Unit,
will meet with the press to present their "Application Creation" 
software for Windows 3.0.


== MICROSOFT DENIES OS/2 RUMOR ==================================

REDMOND, WA. - Jan. 28 - Microsoft denies today's Wall Street
Journal article alleging that Microsoft is dropping OS/2. Microsoft 
and IBM are continuing the joint development of OS/2. Microsoft 
continues to service, support and sell OS/2.  Microsoft is 
continuing to develop applications for OS/2 adding to the 11 OS/2 
applications currently available from Microsoft.

"The operating system market has multiple segments with varied 
requirements," said Bill Gates, CEO at Microsoft.  "For customers 
needing high-end capabilities, deploying OS/2 applications or 
pursuing IBM's SAA direction, we market and support OS/2.  We will 
continue to enhance it in the future and enable it to run Windows 
applications."Microsoft will outline plans for OS/2 and Windows at 
a press seminar held at Microsoft on Tuesday."


== 32 BIT WINDOWS COMING ========================================

An initial report from the Tuesday meeting, by PC Magazine Editor
Bill Machrone, indicated that Microsoft laid out it's strategy for
the DOS, Windows and OS/2 operating environments.

About DOS, Bill reported "The low-end solution continues to be DOS, 
and DOS will be enhanced beyond DOS 5, through DOS 6 and 7. They 
talked of something that sounded much like HPFS for some future 
version of DOS..."

On the Windows strategy, he reported "The midrange today is the 
Win3/DOS combination, and will evolve to Win32 some time next year. 
The new kernel will be 32-bit, will feature preemptive multitasking 
and multithreading, 2GB address space, and advanced interprocess
communication. Sound familiar?"

He added further "Now for the interesting part: Win32 is a 
technology, not a product. It will run over DOS as a future 
version  of Windows, or over OS/2. In the latter mode, it'll 
support the existing OS/2 API as well. OS/2 3.0 will run all the 
Windows APIs as well as the PM API. It's primarily there for people 
who need strong peer-to-peer communications, as a foundation for 
LanMan, and as a way to support their big customers with an 
investment in SAA."

On the future of OS/2: "OS/2 3.0 will be based on a new kernel, 
called NT, for New Technology. Think of it as VMSjr, since it's 
designed by Dave Cutler and a crack team formerly of DEC. It's 
intended to be fast, portable, and thoroughly modern. They already 
have it running on 4 different processors. It runs all APIs: Win16,
Win32, OS/2, *and* POSIX, for you Unix/Federal Gov't fans."

And interestingly enough: "It will also be the foundation upon 
which they build a true distributed operating system, with fully 
distributed services and location transparency. NT also supports 
symmetric multiprocessing and threads across processors."

=================================================================
WindowsNEWS is compiled and Copyright © 1991 by Donald G. Roy.
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