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false, it's still very much alive and well and powering point of sales systems at places near you maybe including your post office.

In other words, here's your OS/2

http://www.ecomstation.com/

They probably would run this variant just fine.

Actually many companies, state, and local governments do just that.

OS/2 is still around, IBM allowed these guys to license it http://www.ecomstation.com/

Think again.

OS/2 was withdrawn from sale and ended support in 2006.

Sorta.

OS/2 hasn't been IBM's for the better part of a decade, its controlled by eComstation who does a decent amount of business supporting financial markets.

As for those trying to make excuse for Mozilla? 1.- like it or not the CEO is the face of the company and in this case the face belongs to a bigot, 2.- For those that use the "the state voted for it" excuse? The southern states voted repeatedly and by a VERY large margin that Jim Crow was fine, so by your argument the southern states should still be segregated, and finally 3.- Those that make the lame "gay agenda" bullshit excuse? Did you say the same about blacks in the 60s, that it was a "Negro agenda"? Its about CIVIL RIGHTS, PERIOD.

The state gives preferential treatment to married couples when it comes to taxes, child visitation, property inheritance, there are VERY few places that the government doesn't give some sort of preferential treatment to couples. While I personally believe it is unconstitutional since its clearly joining church and state until we are ALL treated as individuals under the law by the government? it very much IS a civil rights issue, since straight couples are given rights and privileges that gay couples do not get. Oh and before somebody makes the foolish statement about wills and the like? In most states the will does NOT change the tax burden which will be felt by a surviving spouse, which again isn't the same if that spouse was in a hetro marriage.

You can find out what this is really like by downloading EcomStation.

There is a demo of the coming 2.2 release available at http://www.ecomstation.com/democd/ it's a beta so...

Actually OS/2 was 32 bit for quite some time before IBM discontinued it and Serenity Systems picked it up as eComStation.

OS/2 is still around and the latest version of 2011 is for sale. Serenity Systems bought the rights to it, now calls it EcomStation 2 and continues development mainly intended as a point of sale system.

http://www.ecomstation.com/product_info.phtml

Nah - go for eCom Station - *nobody* uses that shit anymore, and you can dust off those ancient OS/2 skills!

You're answer is in your post. Winos2, basically a bug fixed Win 3.1 is still sold with OS/2. Actually an OEM version of OS/2, http://www.ecomstation.com/index.phtml. Can install on modern hardware though you have to be choosy about it and run some things such as SATA in compatibility mode but it has a legal 16 bit Windows.

This is 2012. Any OS that costs money should have wifi support.

How nice that you think so...

http://drdos.com/products/dr-dos/

http://www.ecomstation.com/ does have limited WiFi support -- there's a number of old 802.11b chipsets supported. So maybe that doesn't count, but I'd hardly call that acceptable in 2012 -- FOR GENERAL-PURPOSE OSES FOR NEW HARDWARE.

Unfortunately for you, your thoughts != reality. Y'know, reality, where real businesses need to (or find it cheaper to) run real legacy apps from pre-WiFi times, in the same non-WiFi use cases for which the apps were originally developed. Where "OS for legacy apps" is a real thing, and has different requirements than for new desktop OSes.

Can you not conceive that the OS market is not one giant mass of identical requirements? If you can, why do you think WiFi should be the one thing that transcends such divisions? And no "because I say so", which is all I've heard from you so far, isn't a good answer.

Yes. Even IBM wrote the first USB drivers and they're now being supported based on the old device driver DDK examples. Only USB 2 support currently.
I have a USB mouse and printer as well as flash drives. Flash drives that are bigger then 2 GBs have to be partitioned by the OS/2 LVM. Printer support for newer printers is through CUPS and works with most printers that work under Linux.
SATA-2 support is fine though to have partitions larger then 512 GBs means using a non-standard layout, partitions won't be recognized by other operating systems and the boot partition has to be in the first 1/2 TB. I think the limit is 2 TB. The AHCI support isn't the best but does work with Intel chipsets.
Sound is supported through an Alsa port and supports most sound chips. Video is the weakest with only ATI supported and then in VESA mode. There are older PCI-x video cards with drivers.
There are MPlayer, FFmpeg and VLC ports for video as well as Flash 11. Newest Firefox is only v10esr.
Wireless support is close to zero but being worked on.
See http://ecomstation.com/ for the newest OS/2, rebadged OEM version but sales are tripling every year, mostly for businesses who need to install on new hardware.

There's tons of old OS/2 boxes chugging along in a corner somewhere until the hardware finally breaks. OS/2 sales in the form of eComStation has been tripling each year lately due to places like your work needing to install OS/2 on modern hardware. http://ecomstation.com/
And it will still install and run on modern hardware though you have to choose carefully. No accelerated video and only ATI supported. Barely any wireless support and only a few network cards supported. Sound based on Alsa so most sound cards including built in supported. 512 GB partitions if you want them compatible with other operating systems, otherwise the ancient architecture is limited to 2 TB. Best to stick to Intel hardware, especially if you want to take advantage of all cores. OS/2 is licensed per CPU, not core so it does do SMP. Only 64 cores supported though.

the only canadian vendor - site looks like a hobby blog - features their dead cat! Kind of appropriate - a dead cat selling a dead OS?

blondeguy.com??? Really????? It's pretty much just a hobby site.

Development of the base code was completely halted in 2006. What you can buy now is an obsolete system with updated add-ons such as openoffice. That's like someone selling Vista and calling it a new version because they changed the solitaire game. It's dead, and IBM has been telling people for years to get over it already. Even NCR and Diebold switched from it to ... *gasp* XP because XP runs better on modern hardware.

So, do you have any sales figures to back up your claim that someone is actually buying this totally outdated piece of you-know-what?

I thought I read OS2 was still going, being resold and supported by a third party licensed by IBM.

I think it was these folks:
http://www.ecomstation.com/

OS/2 has also been renamed and is still being sold by a different at around $260 a seat.
http://www.ecomstation.com/where_purchase.phtml

If IBM was to open source OS/2, not only would Microsoft be all over them (it was, remember, a joint development effort), but they'd probably be in violation of the agreement with eComStation which allows that company to modify and continue selling the thing.

Actually OS/2 isn't "dead" in that it STILL has a niche and is selling to this very day, whereas good luck actually buying a new copy of any on the list. You can go to eComstation and still buy a copy of OS/2 (because that is what eComstation IS...OS/2 with continued upgrades and support) and have someone there to support you. In my mind that makes it a non dead OS since you can still buy it plus support. From what I understand eComstation is still used in the financial district to some extent, hence the continued sales and support.

Apparently it's still being developed, too!

http://www.ecomstation.com/

Cross-Platform on Win, Mac, GNU/Linux: Firefox, Chrome (maybe just beta?), Opera

Firefox is everywhere man.

It's been ported to ARM phones, OS/2, ReactOS, etc.

Opera is also all over the place, but Chromium is just on the big three.

Funny you should mention OS/2. There's a company still developing and selling it:

http://www.ecomstation.com/

A modified version of OS/2 is still being sold by Serenity Systems as eComStation.

You can actually still buy it and it is still supported, it is just called eComStation now. I heard it is still popular in certain sections of banking and finance because of its excellent security. Although the fact that they still brag it has Windows 3.xx support in this day and age is kinda funny.

And you can still get OS/2 even now.
http://www.ecomstation.com/

ghjkhgjkghjk

And you can still get OS/2 even now.
http://www.ecomstation.com/

z/OS is the System360/System390 OS of today. System36 became OS/400 became System i for the Series i hardware. RS/6000 is now System p and runs AIX or Linux. (I might have mixed 'i' and 'p' up again. Those aren't very intuitive names.)

OS/2 was actually not killed. It's just not within IBM any longer. Serenity Systems sells eComStation which is a modernized OEM upgrade for OS/2. People who still need OS/2, DOS, and/or Windows 3 application support can run Rexx, Java, and many F/OSS apps (including Firefox and OpenOffice) side by side with them. At $259 per seat, it's a little pricier than Linux, FreeDOS, and one of the free virtual machines. Make sure you really need it before shelling out that much for it. I hear it's blazing fast on recent hardware, though.

If you were to run modern loads on an old Warp system, you'd kill it.

Don't be so sure. I can still do things with Firefox, Photoshop 3, Z!, Open Office, and various other things running under Warp 4 FP 15 on a measly 192MB PPro/200 box that might surprise you. :-)

Of course, the real answer isn't Warp ... the real answer is eComStation. Here's a LiveCD you can play with if you want to.

But mine with the good old OS2 machines have that now too! How? They just mounted a cheap little flat panel screen and speaker above the ATM. It is actually quite nice, with the pretty music and pointing out extra features and services you can choose from. And most importantly when it goes down the ATM still works.

As an old greybeard who ran BeOS and OS2 during the 90s(I think I still have my Warp discs in a storage crate in my mom's attic somewhere) I can say without a doubt that the best OS lost. BeOS ran rings around both Win9X and WinNT when it came to multitasking and multimedia creation/editing/viewing and OS2 was built like a freaking tank. While I may use Windows now simply because I have no choice(my hardware and software don't like Linux) BeOS and OS2 were much better for just about anything than Windows was and frankly still is.

I believe in KISS and switching to Windows on ATMs, where hackers have every reason to hit with everything they've got, is truly madness. OS2 WORKS. It runs 24/7/365 solid as a damned rock and from what I understand OS2 by design is a hell of a lot harder to crack than the tissue paper tiger that is Windows security. That is why eComstation still sells it and continually is updating it to run on newer hardware. I have been thinking of building a box around eCom for when my mom gets online. It is simple, basic design, and frankly just works. But sticking Windows on an ATM is just crazy. Always use the right tool for the job, and Windows frankly should not be used in RTOS jobs, especially where security is critical. That is just stupid PHB thinking there.

http://www.ecomstation.com/

OpenOffice.org is only available for money by buying a support agreement. ( http://www.ecomstation.com/openoffice.phtml ) There is nothing wrong with this as money was required to pay the programmers who ported it. As long as anyone who buys it also gets the source code it is still meeting the GPL.
It is also stated that you are free to distribute OpenOffice but I believe they ask nicely that you don't as porting costs money.

I thought those 2 went to eComStation along with OS/2? Hard to believe there is a company today that not only continues to build on top of OS/2,but actually brags on their front page about their Win3.x support! WTF are you going to do with a Win3.x program in this day and age? Oh,and check out this screenshot if you want to see what it would look like if the "1992" look never went away.

I thought those 2 went to eComStation along with OS/2? Hard to believe there is a company today that not only continues to build on top of OS/2,but actually brags on their front page about their Win3.x support! WTF are you going to do with a Win3.x program in this day and age? Oh,and check out this screenshot if you want to see what it would look like if the "1992" look never went away.

I think it is a bet that you would lose. Try installing and running Linux 1.x on a modern day dual core machine, then try installing the newest version of OS/2 (actually rebranded as eComStation, http://www.ecomstation.com/ ). OS/2 will just work if you have a decent box and an ATI graphics card.

Core Distro doesn't offer tech support and doesn't hold your hand, but it's a lean, mean, fast CLI Linux.

eComStation is an update to IBM's OS/2. It will run all the commercial OS/2 applications. There are ports of lots of BSD, GNU, and other open source software for it. That includes OpenOffice. It comes with Firefox and a Java system. It also runs Windows 3.1 software, and has a WINE-like clone of 32-bit Windows APIs that runs some applications for newer Windows versions.

eComStation runs on a Pentium 133 or a dual-core Athlon. The minimum RAM for a CD installer is 48MB, but the installed system will run with as little as 32MB, with 64MB a recommended minimum. It'll support up to 4GB. As little as 500MB of hard drive will store the system, with 1GB recommended for a full installation. You can get a 20GB drive dirt cheap these days. There's no Bluetooth support and not all hardware has drivers, but a well-supported machine with this runs like wild cheetahs.

At $259 per seat for a non-upgrade version, though, it's cheaper to build a bargain basement new PC and put a free OS on it. There's a free eComStation demo CD, but it requires 160MB of RAM as it's a live CD.

You can always try turning off any motherboard features you don't use in the BIOS, disabling keyboard and video checks, disabling the memory tests, and switching to whatever your systems call "fast POST" or "quick POST". That'll cut down on the hardware's portion of the boot time.

If multitasking is the reason for not using DOS and you're developing your own applications, there are a few multitasking libraries out there for DOS applications. The OS doesn't offer multitasking support, but it doesn't get in the way of it either. There are also a number of alternative DOS versions which offer everything from multitasking and multiple users to built-in memory extenders and support for filesystems other than FAT.

Core Distro doesn't offer tech support and doesn't hold your hand, but it's a lean, mean, fast CLI Linux.

eComStation is an update to IBM's OS/2. It will run all the commercial OS/2 applications. There are ports of lots of BSD, GNU, and other open source software for it. That includes OpenOffice. It comes with Firefox and a Java system. It also runs Windows 3.1 software, and has a WINE-like clone of 32-bit Windows APIs that runs some applications for newer Windows versions.

eComStation runs on a Pentium 133 or a dual-core Athlon. The minimum RAM for a CD installer is 48MB, but the installed system will run with as little as 32MB, with 64MB a recommended minimum. It'll support up to 4GB. As little as 500MB of hard drive will store the system, with 1GB recommended for a full installation. You can get a 20GB drive dirt cheap these days. There's no Bluetooth support and not all hardware has drivers, but a well-supported machine with this runs like wild cheetahs.

At $259 per seat for a non-upgrade version, though, it's cheaper to build a bargain basement new PC and put a free OS on it. There's a free eComStation demo CD, but it requires 160MB of RAM as it's a live CD.

You can always try turning off any motherboard features you don't use in the BIOS, disabling keyboard and video checks, disabling the memory tests, and switching to whatever your systems call "fast POST" or "quick POST". That'll cut down on the hardware's portion of the boot time.

If multitasking is the reason for not using DOS and you're developing your own applications, there are a few multitasking libraries out there for DOS applications. The OS doesn't offer multitasking support, but it doesn't get in the way of it either. There are also a number of alternative DOS versions which offer everything from multitasking and multiple users to built-in memory extenders and support for filesystems other than FAT.

Actually the same thing could be said about OS/2 and IBM OEMed it to Serenity for eComStation to become the new OS/2 for modern systems.

The reason, for running legacy software that only works on the original OS and not an emulator. There are a lot of business apps written for PalmOS that cannot run on other operating systems. A lot of data collection software using proprietary hardware attached to Palm Pilots and other PalmOS PDAs is too expensive to port to a new OS and the companies that write the software refuse to port them.

The same problem exists for legacy Windows software as Windows Vista cannot run the custom business programs written for XP, and 2000, and older Windows versions like PLC (Programmable Logic Controllers) software used in assembly lines to control robots or alarm systems. Which is why projects like ReactOS exist as Microsoft is dropping support and sales for XP and 2000 and earlier operating systems based on Windows.

You can download an eComstation live CD for free:

http://www.ecomstation.com/democd/

You can not buy OS/2 anymore. IBM stopped selling it on Dec 2005. The last version Warp 4.52 /Warp Server 4.52 (April 2002) are now abandonware and IBM can provide special support for special big customers.

If you want to legally use OS/2 you will have to check out eComStation. I had tested version 2.0 RC4 on Dual Core Intel and it can be installed without problems.
http://www.ecomstation.com/

You can purchase Ecomstation here, http://www.ecomstation.com/ which includes the last version of OS/2 released by IBM. At that to install on and take advantage of modern hardware you pretty well have to go this route.

You can get a live CD here, http://www.ecomstation.com/democd/ Unluckily you can't do all that much with it.

eComStation (a repackaged version of the OS/2 4.52 client with various add-ons) has a LiveCD version available here: eCS 1.2 Demo CD

Actually up till a year or so ago OS/2 would install on any decent hardware that Linux would install on. Now you are limited to ATI video cards if you want to use an up to date one. OS/2 supports most all hard drives, lots of sound cards, networking is getting trickier but there is now a wrapper to use Windows drivers. USB support isn't to bad though as usual IBM followed the standards and MS didn't so often a thumbdrive has to be reformatted and have a partition table added. Also once again it you need quality hardware.
Also of course you need the newest version especially if you want to take full advantage of that new quad core cpu.
There is a live CD here, http://www.ecomstation.com/democd/ if you want to try it.

Yea the old store bought OS/2 won't install on a hard drive over 4 GBs without updating the disk driver. If you'd like to try it go here, http://www.ecomstation.com/democd/

Aside from reasons already mentioned (non-exclusive ownership and other unknowns or ambiguities), OS/2 is still a commercial product under the eComStation brand by Serenity Systems. I'm sure their contract with IBM has something to say about exclusive distribution rights or some such.

IBM themselves have finally moved on, though. Their hardware management consoles still used OS/2 until a few years ago, but they're all Linux now.

moderate me a troll but i could have sworn ibm sold os/2 to a german company that makes POS solutions: http://www.ecomstation.com/

IBM has already licensed off OS/2 to another company, Serenity Systems, who is continuing to support it under the name eComStation. This might have been an exclusive agreement. There is again, of course, all the issues with whether or not the actually own all the stuff.

Quite right. OS/2 still lives on even if under a new name. http://www.ecomstation.com/

Again, your lack of knowledge is astounding. The latest release of OS/2 was last year(2006). There is another release scheduled for the end of this year or the beginning of next.

I can find support for almost every add on card on the shelf right now at CompUSA or BestBuy. As a matter of fact, I was adding SATA drives to an older computer of mine and bought an off the shelf CompUSA SATA add in card. The DANI drivers from http://hobbes.nmsu.edu/ supported it.

The USB drivers for OS/2 support my Linksys 200M wireless USB Ethernet adapter to.

To further your knowledge on OS/2 why don't you try a live CD of the latest release of OS/2 http://www.ecomstation.com/democd/ It runs on every computer I have tried here at work. Why don't you download it and try to find a computer that it won't run on.

Sometimes I think it is funny the lack of knowledge people exhibit about OS/2 and then claim to be an authority on it.

Your lack of knowledge is just sad.

Nathan