At Comdex, IBM Corp’s Personal Software Products took the wraps off the first incarnation of the Workplace Shell beyond OS/2, the one for MS-DOS. Similar to the OS/2 Workplace Shell, it is claimed to impose a low overhead with user-customisable desktop, drag and drop file management, nested folders, and an object-oriented elegance not previously available in the MS-DOS environment. It offers task-swapping so users can keep multiple applications open and switch between them. It goes into beta test before year-end. Key technology for it comes from Paper Software Inc, Woodstock, New York. And Personal Software Products also says that OS/2 for Symmetric Multiprocessing will begin beta testing in December. Under OS/2 SMP, applications processes and threads are automatically dispatched by the operating system to run on any of several general-purpose Intel Corp processors. At Comdex, IBM has been demonstrating the operating system in a mixed transaction processing environment using DB2/2 and Oracle7 as well as a high-end box running AutoCAD for OS/2, and a server running 1-2-3 for OS/2. Oracle Corp said Oracle7 co-operative server will arrive concurrently with the operating system.
