What happens between announcement next week of the new IBM Personals that may or may not be called the Personal System/2 (CI No 647) and availability of the native 80286 operating system that may or may not come out as CP-DOS and could be up to one year away? Computerworld reckons it has the answer, suggesting that there will be an interim multi-tasking offering based on the much-maligned Control Program for the near-defunct 3270 Personal Computer (the one that was code-named Nina when three forthcoming Personal operating systems were spied on IBM’s horizon, the others of course being Pinta [TopView?], and Santa Maria): the US trade weekly hears that the interim offering will support windowing and multi-tasking, and address more than 640Kb of memory by bank switching – and of course much of it is IBM proprietary, and if developers write software to use the windowing feature, that software will run only on IBM.
