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IBM To Release OS/2 Warp 4 With 'Convenience Packs'
Bushwacker writes: "Recently, the OS/2 SuperSite has announced some big (somewhat unfortunate) news about the Warp Client v.4. There's both good and bad news here: First the bad news -- Contrary to hopeful rumours spreading around, A Warp version 5 will not come out this year, if ever. IBM will instead release 'Convenience Packs' which are like FixPacks, but cost you money. The good news -- Unlike the free FixPacks,
Convenience Packs will provide more important upgrades which cover a larger field than their lesser cousins. Maybe one of them will include the fabled Project Odin?
At least XFree86 is still free ..."
In industrial and military/government computer systems, you don't throw away working hardware and software without a good technical or financial justification. It doesn't matter if the system can't run the latest games and Microsoft bloatware, these aren't general purpose desktop computers running word processors and spreadsheets.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
One of the reasons that I like IBM is that they support customers running old and "obsolete" hardware and software. Unlike Microsoft and many other companies, that tell you to get fscked if you aren't running the latest version of the product or if the product has been discontinued.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
That isn't true. I have the IBM OS/2 Programmer's Library on CD and paper. It has all the API documentation that you could want. Just because IBM didn't give it away for free doesn't mean that it doesn't exist.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
...do people get so nostalgic about OS/2?!
:) ). Hobbes, the main OS/2 archive, used to have OS/2 programs. Now it has ports of Linux programs. Save your energy and run Linux instead.
I ran the thing for over 4 years. Gave up on it after Warp 4...I just couldn't get the hardware support I needed. (I switched to Linux. Linux in 1996 had better driver support than OS/2. What does THAT tell you?)
Furthermore, I got sick of it crashing. It actually did that a LOT. Seriously. My experience with OS/2, after years of using it and developing for it, on beefy boxes as well as constrained systems, was that it NOT more efficient than Win95: It crashed as much (and more than once took the filesystem with it), and didn't run faster or in less space.
Actually, Warp 3 and OS/2 2.1 were probably better than Win95 as far as resources go, but ghod, Warp 4 was BLOATED.
And I really don't see the attraction to the Workplace Shell. It's okay. It's a different paradigm. I can respect that. Generally speaking, I consider X to be just an excuse to open a whole bunch of Xterms, so I'm really not into the cool GUI features so much...but if the "object oriented" metaphor of the WPS was worth anything, it was most undeniably never taken advantage of.
Actually, it wasn't the drivers that drove me from OS/2. It was the apps: there WEREN'T any.
And don't give me any shit about this one. There were NO apps. There was no StarOffice, for what good that thing is. There was two browsers: WebExplorer, which was crap, and Netscape 2.02, which was more than a YEAR out of date when it made its way to OS/2.
The only saving grace of OS/2 was EMX: the GCC port to OS/2. Of course, IBM wouldn't release any API specs for the operating system, so you basically limited to porting Unix apps.
Which brings up a good point: I don't understand the need to port everything from Linux to OS/2. Why are people porting Enlightenment to OS/2?! (apparently the WPS isn't so magical for everyone.
Basically OS/2 was a good idea that was (and still is) mistreated by its creator, and is WAY past its usefulness. I see no reason to artificially extend its life. If you want Linux apps, run Linux. If you want Win32 apps, run Windows, but don't expend your talents on a dead OS when there is more potential for good elsewhere.
Ugh. I hate to write that, having spent years doing my share of OS/2 advocacy. There are still some chunks of OS/2 that could be useful to the Open Source world if IBM released the code, but I'm not gonna hold my breath until I turn blue...so to speak.
--ryan.
Don't say, "don't quote me," because if no one quotes you, you probably haven't said a thing worth saying.
Many casinos are using them for their most important application--slot machine monitoring. Slots are the biggest revenue source for casinos so uptime is extremely important. I worked for the Sands in Atlantic City when ACSC was developing the OS/2 version of their slot monitoring software (ca. 1995) One reason for choosing OS/2 was to stick with the IBM-all-the-way solution (IBM AS/400, Token Ring, IBM Industrial PC's, IBM Artic Cards {multiport serial cards for interfacing with slot machines}) The AS/400 is big in the Hotel/Casino industry. And the idea of using Windows for a 24-hour high-availability application was (is) a joke. A casino using Windows for slot monitoring would have been like a hospital using it for life support systems.
About a year and a half ago I was working for the Bank of the Northern Hemisphere (aka F-U National Bank) and they were still using OS/2 for their customer service terminals. Again it was a situation where high-availability was a must. Can't have Windows crashing in the middle of a phone call. Of course, they're replacing those boxes with NT now and their Novell servers as well.
Which brings me to a slightly off-topic question. I've worked at three Fortune 100 companies in the last 2 years. At all three they plan (or were planning) to replace their Novell servers with Windows -- despite the fact that there was no one I could find in IT that actually thought it was a good idea. They all referred to a previous commitment to go with "NT 5.0" when it was available. Does anyone know anything about this?
numb
Additionally, there's a windows programmer mentality in the OS. What does that mean? Well what that means is that programmers don't hesitate to use application or system modal dialog boxes. They also tend to assume that their app is the only one running on the system, and will grab focus and raise to the top at the most annoying times. They also tend not to utilize the OS/2 threading system to minimize the impact of the single system input queue. OS/2 and Windows systems tend to feel sluggish to me.
On the plus side, the entire environment is object oriented (And very similar to Gnome,) something which continues to elude Microsoft. The whole desktop is a tree of objects and once you learn how everything works, the interface tends to be very intuitive. It's also easy to modify. Want some extra buttons on your title bars? No problem -- just find the frame SOM object and subclass it systemwide.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Microsoft still holds many of the copyrights in the code for OS/2. Figuring out what they did versus what IBM did would be an insurmountable task. It'd be easier just to design an interface/API for Linux or some other open source OS which would bring over most of the best features.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Unfortunately, man¦woman does not live on bread alone. Lack of (or age of) application software did their thing to impose severe pressure on this operating system. IMHO, IBM should've given away a SDK for free, for everyone and not just some handpicked 'key developers'. Imagine what a bunch of enthusiasts together with gcc and a suitable GUI development kit could have done. sigh...
And, of course, their main competitor (don't recall the name, but I faintly remember something some quarrel before court) has its own way of making the competition's life pretty damn hard...
Would love to see the OS/2 Workplace Shell (WPS) being released under the GPL and OS/2 itself containing txtutils like sed, awk & co. Plus, of course, an up-to-date (not-only-limited-to internet-) app suite.
Use The Source, Luke!
Many airlines use OS/2, but ValueJet ran Windows, maybe that's why they crashed ;)
According to Bill Gates, "OS/2 is the operating system of the future".
I use Merlin, and have been using OS/2 as my primary desktop since 1992. I'd say it's more stable than Windows, but that's not really saying anything. Back in 1994, someone I worked with realized how stable OS/2 when he saw OS/2 crash during a database import. I was running a database import in a DOS box, and the desktop crashed and restarted itself. The import that was running, did not stop.
Fight Spammers!
I just can't get over the fact that I was doing things on a 12 mhz 286 with 3MB of RAM in 1990 that I still find difficult to do on Windows 98 today (like doing real work while formatting a floppy). I could download things at 2400 baud without any foreground slow down! Try that in Windows 3.0.
A sad passing for a truly fine operating system. If only Bill Gates had used his powers for good not evil and had backed OS/2 1.3 as the premier desktop/server OS it was and let Windows be merely a footnote next to Microsoft Bob.
Consistency.
It took the object appearance of a GUI, and carried it to a far deeper level. The desktop objects also had inheritance, and it showed throughout the UI.
For example, one time I was changing icons, waltzing through the silly dialogs, thinking that it was a pain in the neck. Then I thought, "WIBNI I could just drag that icon that I want and drop it over the current icon on the settings page?" I tried it, and it WORKED.
Many other things turned out to be that way. If you thought an object ought to behave in a certain fashion, give it a try. Most of the time, the desktop objects behaved in the absolutely intuitive fashion expected.
Discoverable
You could get along in a very simplistic fashion, but you could always find a deeper layer, and new things that the OO underpinnings could do for you.
More depth
Being CORBA based (SOM was an early CORBA) meant that classes could be replaced. There were add-ons that extended the WPS in many ways, Stardock's Object Desktop being the most noteworthy.
There's more, but not now.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
The convenience pack release which will be rolled out this Fall will effectively be the improved base operating system, complete with any fixpacks that addressed bugs and added improvements. This is great because we get all the fixes and improvements to the base OS all on one CD. You won't have to install the base OS and then the various fixpacks for the base OS, TCP/IP, etc. This is great news.
Also, I don't recall reading anything that says that IBM will stop producing and releasing free fixpacks for OS/2. They often release more than one fixpack a year in order to try and address issues in a timely fashion. So you have a choice. Continue using the free fixpack route or go for the convenience pack to streamline installation.
You are eligible for the convenience packs if you are a subscriber to their related support system which runs about $200 for two years. This entitles you to other stuff beside the convenience pack by the way.
OS/2 has its place and has been on my system since ver 2.11. I do have a win98 system which I only use for games or building Access databases (yuck!). I also have SuSE 6.3 installed and running and love using Gimp under it. Perhaps if OS/2's WPS were ported to linux (or if someone wrote something from scratch as nice) I might be inlined to switch over to linux for my main computing needs. I do have a number of OS/2 apps that I would miss though and I hate trashing software simply because it isn't "new".
IBM continues to focus on the needs of their big clients who run OS/2. Individuals like me who use it aren't much of a concern for them. Still I get to benefit from the support that IBM is making available to companies who can spend more on computers in a single quarter than I'll likely make in a lifetime.
Jeff