COMDEX/Fall’93 free diskette!

I saw this floating around on some web site… And I thought I’d take a look!  Well it’s exactly what it sounds like, an ancient MS-DOS text base database from the fine folks at Folio who would later on sell off, merge and become part of LexisNexis.

And what fine things were there in 1993?

Let’s not forget the false hope and promise of the IBM/Apple/Motorola PowerPC that was going to save us all, and give us the grand unifying microkernel OS of them all, PINK.

The IBM Power Personal Systems Division is introducing and demonstrating technologies featured on its family of personal workstations.  The Personal Workstations marry  the high-performance PowerPC RISC microprocessor with industry-standard PC components.  The PowerPC is featured with new human interfaces, integration of multiple operating systems environments on a single platform, and the latest in operating system, multimedia and collaborative computing technologies.  OEMs, IHVs and ISVs can explore how they can use these technologies.

Yeah, as we all know Windows NT for the PowerPC wasn’t a thing until late 1995, then killed off in 1997, Solaris saw a single release, MacOS stayed hybrid 68000/PowerPC until the acquisition of NeXT, and then was the basis of Rhapsody/OS X 1.0 and then OS X 10.0 .  A/IX easily transitioned from the POWER to the PowerPC, while OS/2 only went as far as a limited beta, and PINK/Taligent just never happened.  Although thanks to hard ware assisted virtualization (VT-x/AMD-V) it really didn’t matter as we can run pretty much whatever OS we wish at pretty close to native speeds.  The line between Type-1 & Type-2 hypervisors has been blurred to the point of really not mattering anymore.

If anyone cares, I extracted the temperamental disk image as F93.ZIP