Originally published in September, 1995

benchmark 1. A marketing metric with little or no relationship to reality. 2. The measurement and recording of performance. 3. A standard which emerges from such activity, against which others are compared.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity.

I wonder if Charles Dickens had benchmarks in mind when he opened his classic novel "A Tale of Two Cities" with those lines. If not benchmarks, then maybe he was thinking of the month of August, when temperatures were rising and heroes were dying. And if not benchmarks, and not the month of August, perhaps he had in mind the launch of Win95, when Microsoft proved conclusively that they are the masters of hype.

There were heroes: one died, one was wounded, and one was disqualified. Mickey Mantle passed away, bravely and soberly after finally winning his battle with the bottle but losing to cancer in the bottom of the ninth. David Barnes, the world-famous ambassador of OS/2 was ambushed by a reporter he had tried to help install OS/2. Peter Lewis, the New York Times writer who sacrificed Barnes' reputation to try and support a baseless article in the paper the week before, was defrocked for 'conduct unbecoming.'

There were highs. My personal best (read that most gratifying) came early in August. The Central Texas PC Users Group (join this group if you like personal computing) presented a David Barnes demonstration of Warp OS/2. It was David Barnes who made Microsoft decide not to participate in 'shoot-outs' after scoring a TKO in a head-to-head over Windows NT at a users group meeting in Houston. Not only do they now avoid such situations like the plague, they looked so bad their legal department forced IBM to remove the NT portion of the demo from a tape that circulated after the shoot-out.

Before the demonstration, I attended a cocktail party IBM threw for the computer press in Austin. Lori Hawkins of the American-Statesman was there. Peter Lewis was there, too. I even got to shake his hand. I had been hoping for a chance to meet him since sitting in on his panel discussion on 'writing in cyberspace' at the SxSW multimedia show.

The crowd at the J. J. Pickle Research Center auditorium was just short of 250. My friend Lindsay Allen was the host. He embarrassed me when he asked me to stand and be recognized, but what an ego rush. Then David Barnes took over the mike and started the show. He used a Thinkpad on a podium in front of him to do the demo, but the notebook's screen was magnified to theater size on the screen behind him. It showed very well. I sat in the very back of the auditorium and had a great seat. Everyone did. I noticed Peter Lewis get up and move away from the two boys who came with him to take a seat directly in front of Barnes, about six rows back. He settled down into it like a F-16 pilot getting comfortable in his cockpit.

I have to tell you something about David. He is a dweeb (although I think he prefers the term geek). He loves this stuff and it shows in his enthusiasm. It's contagious and his sincerity and knack for knowing how to show OS/2 at its best win over audiences. I don't blame Microsoft a bit for not wanting to go up against him.

"I think I need to get out in the sun more often" Barnes quipped as he put Warp through its paces: going live on the Internet, smoothly multitasking, and bringing spontaneous applause from the audience in a couple of spots. One came when he did voice dictation of a memo (the software correctly parsed 'write a letter to Mr. Wright, right now') and then reformatted the dictated note by changing the font and point size without ever touching the keyboard.

When is the last time you saw a technical demo interrupted by applause? David Barnes has a genius for this sort of thing. Forty-five weeks out of the year he is on the road doing shows and presentations on OS/2. He and his family live here in Austin and they love it. When he is home, his home is his office. He has (in addition to Warp) Windows NT, Win95, and Linux installed on various computers. Even with good reason to do competitive analysis, I submit to you that having two or more operating systems running at home is prima facie evidence of dweebness.

I was as mesmerized as the rest of the crowd. Cartoon characters scampered across his screen in a humorous display of Warp's multimedia and multitasking capabilities. When he stopped for a second to talk about Austin, I was totally unprepared to hear him say "Where else in the country can you live where they have a column called 'The Dweebspeak Primer'?" That didn't embarrass me so much as it stunned me. I was incredulous that he even knew about Tech-Connected and the column. It was quite a night, believe me. The glow lasted for days. Nearly a week, as a matter of fact. Until the morning Peter Lewis's article appeared in the Times.

Afterwards Barnes stayed on-stage for an extended Q&A session. As I was leaving I noticed Peter Lewis and John Soyring deep in conversation. It looked like Peter was interviewing John, but I really wasn't sure. After the Zuckerman story in the New York Times the week before, I was more than a little curious about that conversation. Zuckerman had completely distorted IBM CEO Lou Gerstner's remarks to financial analysts and unilaterally interpreted them to justify the amazing headline that "IBM concedes defeat on the desktop." These (as I reported in earlier months) are the same bozos who decided that the Lotus purchase was a sure sign that OS/2 was dead.

There were lows. Lewis's assignment had been to follow up on the attack by Zuckerman. He did that. I read about his story online and was incredulous, so I stopped at 7-11 to pick up a copy of the Times and see it for myself. There it was, a shotgun blast at close range delivered in bold Times-Redmond typeface: David Barnes (the story said), the world famous OS/2 evangelist, doesn't recommend Warp for home use. Instead he is installing Win95 at his own home.

The firestorm which erupted online following Lewis's article was something to behold. OS/2 users were shocked, saddened, and grieving. Windows advocates gleefully shouted that here, at long last, was conclusive proof that OS/2 is dead. Everyone waited for IBM's reaction. Rumors of lawsuits, of demands for retraction, of publication of Barnes's side of the story were rampant. But day after day brought nothing but silence. I spoke to David the following weekend and came away even more depressed. Not about his support for OS/2, he quickly put my mind to rest about that. He remains the world's biggest fan of OS/2. My depression was at feeling first hand the pain the story had caused him.

IBM responded to the Zuckerman story in traditional style, saying "That hurt. Thank you." Gerstner sent a letter of rebuttal which the Times promptly ignored. Eventually, there was a reply to both the original story by Zuckerman and the follow-up by Lewis. It came in the form of three page ads run in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and other major business and financial papers around the world. Three pages worth. Two of those pages listed businesses large and small around the globe using OS/2. It also included a quiet restatement of the fact that OS/2 is here to stay.

'OS/2 is dead' stories are nothing new, especially to the Times. But this one hurt on a personal level. David could not tell me the details of the interview itself, but he did tell me that the days following publication had been the longest week of his life. He felt betrayed. He and his family received hate-mail and angry phone calls as a result. An 18 year veteran of IBM, he worried for his career.

I asked Peter Lewis for the context of the Barnes quote ("I am going to install Win95 at home") , but he refused to elaborate. Whatever really happened, it's a crying shame. Evidently, Peter asked for help installing OS/2. David gave up an hour of personal time to try to try and tame the rogue iron, but there was no joy. Peter claimed the experience was enough for him to toss OS/2 and go with either a Mac or Win95.

That a journalist cannot install software he reports on isn't news. That some hardware won't run OS/2 is beyond dispute. But Lewis jumped from the pot to the barbecue pit by going with Win95. One of the biggest reasons for the lower than expected sales of Win95 has been the enormous number of problems early purchasers have encountered. Microsoft support has been so swamped (over 20,000 calls a day plus many others that could not get through) that wait times are humongous and they have been forced to at times to busy-out the lines so they could cut down on the size of the queue. Online it's more of the same. In its first six days, the MSWIN95 support forum on CompuServe was flooded with more than 14,000 messages.

The most common problem seems to be a system hang on the second install diskette, but many complain that Win95 won't install from their CD-ROM. The very problem Peter had with OS/2. The very thing that convinced him to give up on OS/2 without ever having run it. The reason for the back shot.

August, 1995. What a month it was, truly deserving of benchmark status. The pain and glory of its heroes, the treachery of its villains, and the incredible hype we endured make it a month to remember. Or to borrow a line from the Win95 theme song, it "makes a grown man cry."