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IBM Cranks OS/2 Curtain, Compaq Revives OpenVMS
Freshly Exhumed writes "This site has a couple of divergent OS sagas ... IBM is basically saying "Bring out your dead" to OS/2 fans. Compaq has listened to the faint cries of "I'm not dead yet" and announced a reprieve for OpenVMS." OS/2 has repeatedly refused to die before, though. One interesting snippet from the article on VMS: "The Wildfire version of the Alpha processor will allow users to run OpenVMS in the same box as Compaq's Tru64 Unix operating system, using hard partitioning techniques." IBM 390, upcoming Alphas ... when will mainstream chips do this? :)
Netlabs.Org s a great starting point for people interested in OS/2. Not only do they have Project Odin But they also have many other interesting developments. Project ODIN is the PE to LX converter that allows Windows 95/98/NT binaries to be converted or ran natively on OS/2. There is a new SB Live driver that has been ported from Linux that also created a new library and code to allow OpenSound modules to be used in OS/2. (FIlling in the sound card gap) and alas there is a small passthrough driver that makes WinOS2 think you have a SB 16 installed so that no matter what soundcard you have as your OS/2 driver you won't have to find those tricky "WinOS2" drivers.. just use this "passthrough" one.
On another note, Papyrus 8 was just released. It really is a nice tight/integrated "Office" suite that still fits on 3 floppy disks (yes it does hehe) and PMview 2000 is coming out with a new version.
The most interesting note is the integration of Warp Server E-Business codebase with that of OS2 Warp 4. This was done through Fixpack 13. If you upgrade to Fixpack 13 your not limited to the 528 megs addressable space anymore, you have the 32bit KEE extensions for 32 bit filesystem driverws (such as jfs) and there are many more updates and new addons available.
On top of that a great company called scitech has released video drivers for TNT, TNT2, Geforce, 3dfx (all versions) and Matrox (all versions) cards that make the graphics fly. OpenGL and MGL acclerated support are available as well. (i believe the url is http://www.scitechsoft.com for this company).
As well as having the fastest Java implementation around, one of the best Dos/Windows and OS2 environment easiest to port to platforms, i don't know why ibm would kill it. The device drivers are there, the end users wishing for a new version are there.. and why would they continue to add 32 bit BSD based ip stacks, SMP and server related systems to kill it a measly 12 months from now?
Interesting indeed, but as usuall looks like a laywer and a business need to review this "Future plan" for OS/2 and see what it really means. I can't see IBM telling a bank to redo everything in java when there is NO support for java other then stock tickers and web page games..
And boy howdy, how sweet of a development platform Visual Age C++ 4.0 for OS/2 is once they iron out the bugs.. use the Open API and your app will compile under NT as well.. woah, offer a choice who would have ever thought of that!
You're probably thinking of Dave Cutler, who was one of the main architects, if not the main architect, of VMS (and RSX-11M, I think), and was one of the main architects, if not the main architect, of NT.
> It's syntax was hard as hell. It was sorta arcane. UNIXes were heaven compared to it.
No more so than Windows is "more intuitive" than Unix. I happened to use VMS before either of those, and sometimes I still long for the simple clarity of the VMS command line.
But I know it's just a matter of familiarity. Universalist claims on either side are unsupportable.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
No, the next Y2K scare will the Unix inspired 2038 problem, when all the 32 bit time counters roll over. OpenVMS will still be plugging happily along (even on 32-bit platforms), because the people who designed OpenVMS didn't assume that it would all be replaced in 10 years. (In VMS, the core time representation is a 64 bit quantity, with resolution to a millisecond (IIRC) and range from sometime 1500s until > AD10000.)
Difference between VMS and OpenVMS: 4 letters. Back when Sun/HP/IBM were claiming "open systems", DEC decided to rename the OS. Unfortunately, they did it about the same time they released the first Alpha machines and confused the issue, making some people think that OpenVMS was something to do with the Alphas.
"Legacy systems: the ones that work."
But to digress to a similar story: One time, in my former job, we had a few seconds of power failure in our building, and I, in a corridor at the time, heard cries of woe everywhere from colleagues, whose windows thingies had failed them. Smiling, for I _am_ a BOFH, I returned to my identical hardware, mightily surprised to see my Linux box still in the very same shape I left it in. Much gloating ensued, I can tell you. And I started reading the next Usenet article. My guess is a capacitator for just such power failures wasn't big enough for Windoze (3.1 at the time, I think), idle or not, but enough for an idle Linux box.
Stefan.
I'd hate VMS dying, for it did some wonderful things with hardware in my time.
The truth shall make you fret. (Ankh-Morpork tImes motto)
There are still quite a few die-hard OS/2 fans in IBM (Many of whom read this site.) I expect they'll probably be bitter about it, but many of them were starting to make the jump to Linux, if only because it lets them work however they want to, not however someone else wants them to.
I'm glad Linux at least is beyond IBM's control. They'd find some way to fuck it up, otherwise.
In many ways OS/2 is also a study of what not to do with an operating system. IBM tried to preserve backward compatability at all times, to the detriment of the design. It seems like the Linux crowd is avoiding the mistakes IBM made. And it's finally realizing the IBM dream of one OS that will run on all their hardware (Something they wanted to do with OS/2 but were never able to accomplish.)
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Another odd thing is the vnunet.com article is the first I've heard of OpenVMS being in any danger since Compaq purchased DEC, and I keep up on OpenVMS. Simply put Compaq is smart enough to know they've got an excellent product there that they make a lot of money on. Somehow I have to question the reliablity of this information.
To bad they didn't mention anything about when OpenVMS V7.3 will be out. I'm perfectly happy running V7.2 on my cluster (even have VAX/VMS V5.5-2 on one VAX), but I really need TCPIP V5.1 as it fixes a problem that exists with previous versions of their TCP/IP implementation.
For people that have VAX or Alpha systems they can get a free Hobbyist Licenese for OpenVMS.
I'm sorry to hear about OS/2, it is an excellent product. I started running it with V1.3 shortly before I got my hands on Linux 0.12. For a while for me both OS's competed to be my OS of choice. However, the combination of Lotus Smartsuite for OS/2 and the release of Windows 95 drove me to the Mac. These days a merging of a G4 PowerMac frontend and an Alpha based OpenVMS cluster is my system of choice, with a nice fast x86 Linux box coming in a close second.
Zane
There will always be hardcore fans using it. However, in the Internet era, the useful lifespan of an unmaintained operating system is only until the next remote root exploit comes out or the next new technology is impossible for users to get working on it. E.g. does it have IPv6 support? (just one possible death knell for an unmaintained OS)
Hmmm, yes, that's the problem with relying on a big vendor for a proprietory solution - in a few years time, "proprietory" can turn into "dead".
As a side note, I wonder what the chances of somebody buying OS/2 are? (I mean to develop, not to use)
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
Sure, I like UNIX, but there are many advantages to VMS about which a UNIX only geek of today might never learn. VMS is a solid, highly secure OS -- to toss this technology away is plain folly.
I honestly think we'd be better off just devoting time and effort to fixing the (few) areas where the free Unixes are not as good as VMS then we would be trying to salvage anything useful from it.
I really, really don't like VMS. It may be a stable system, but I can't help but wonder if that isn't because it is even uglier then Unix is, and thus no one uses it. The Unix command line at least appeals to geeks after they get to know it, but even the VMS advocates I know agree that it is Very Messy Syntax.
"I've used Mach; Mach is one of the reasons I think micro-kernels are a bad idea. I've used VMS; VMS is one of the reasons I think VMS is a bad idea." -- Linus Torvalds
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Why should anyone stop doing what their doing? If it works use it, if it's more fun stick with it!
I agree. That's the advice I give to others who think they have to keep upgrading/buying software as if they were adding fuel to a car.
...yet, then again, I gave away a box of OS/2 software -- including 3 boxed versions and a dozen+ commercial apps -- to someone at the begining of the year. I hadn't used it for a couple years and had moved exclusively to Linux.
But then again, I've got a small group of abandoned SPARC Station 1 and 2s here also...go figure!
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
I work for a company that writes backup software. They were the writers of a popular backup/media management package, which does some serious backup. There are still quite a few number of large organazations using VMS/VAX with JukeBoxes. Names that come to mind is CitiBank, Bank of New York,.... Most places even forget (exepect one admin) that they are running VMS for backup because it never breaks. We also mess around with windows 95/98/NT/2K, Linux (slackware, Redhat), and Macs. Comparing VMS (or OpenVMS) is like comparing a bulldozer to a army. Both can destory things but the scope and process is extremely different! -- MPCM
"Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?"
So, I really wish IBM would release OS/2 as open source. It is a very good operating system. It is very fast and is much more familiar to us who grew up in the non-Unix part of the world.
It could do great battle with Win98/NT if it were GPL'd. It's just a great piece of engineering. Fully SMP, fast TCP/IP stack, fastest Java JIT, can boot a true DOS VM and play games, WPS, great connectivity, etc.
I know people have said that parts of OS/2 are licensed from other companies. Well, IBM, release as much as you can and we will get it to run.
Please, IBM, let it out as open source. If you really want to get back at Microsoft for dumping you and OS/2, this is how you do it.
I bet you thought linux was hard to use when coming from a dos enviroment. VMS is different, and I *like* having a choice of how the OS is designed and laid out. VAXen are extremely reliable, how many boxes have spanned a decade of operation? Theres plenty of VAXen from the 80's still chugging away in closets. Why? Because it continues to work.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
As a former OS/2 user, I come here to bury OS/2 not praise it. Praise is useful to the living, not the dead, and then only when deserved.
IBM's announcemnt a few weeks ago about a "transition" from OS/2 to other operating systems just made official what has been a fact for a few years. OS/2 hasn't been IBM's focus, a smarter multi-OS whatever the customer wants approach is what they've obviously used.
Oddly enough...after another look at the same announcement today shows that IBM has changed the text...making it sound even positive...as if OS/2 isn't really going away.
Don't believe a bit of the soft-padded inclusion of OS/2 -- there's no practical reason to use it.
The Register got it right when they talked about the original announcement.
As a former OS/2 user, I have to ask that others not waste time on Amiga-style wishes to revive any part of OS/2. The WPS was sweet, but unfortunately the GUI as a whole was unstable. Sure, it was better then what the other guys offered but that's faint praise.
Since then, the tools and operating systems have improved. Any OS that has fallen behind won't be able to keep up without borrowing from the leaders. I'm even doubtful that closed operating systems can keep ahead of open ones -- even Apple seems to have realized that.
While it would be great to take a look at the code from OS/2 -- and maybe even incorporate a few parts -- it's not realistic. Most of the parts have been superceeded by better, open, programs.
Even the potentially good stuff such as the WPS GUI and the b-tree support in HPFS is co-owned with Microsoft -- so there's no chance that we'll ever see it.
Besides, with KDE/Gnome and the file system changes that coming along, there's very little to pick from the carcas if it were available.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
Microchannel wasn't all that bad. It was just backed up by a pathetic business and marketing plan.
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
It shows that VMS can take much more flaky hardware errors than can UNIX.
... kills an I/O processor, more likely than not, a UNIX will crash. Another bullet-proof OS, for example, could handle an I/O processor going out in the middle of operation and still keep running.
;-)
Well, I suppose VMS could implement some kind of ECC code in software, sort of a RAID-for-RAM, if you will, and that might help -- unless the bad RAM contains the ECC engine, of course. But really, this sort of thing is a hardware issue.
It's true. Even Win95 is less susceptible to flaky hardware than Linux is. Some severly overclocked systems will run on Win95, but crash on Linux.
Well, that's kind of a mis-truth. You often hear stories of Windows running where Linux does not. This is usually because of one of two reasons:
(1) Cheap OEMs designing hardware that works with Windows, rather then designing hardware that meets the specifications.
(2) Windows doesn't use as much of the hardware as it should. For example, in any SMP system, the extra processors could be defective and Win95 wouldn't notice. Linux would. Does that make Win95 fault tolerant?
(As an aside: I suspect BeOS is the same as Linux here. BeOS also is a much more sophisticated OS then '95.)
Take a PC running Win95 for example. If one
Er, not really. Most OSes I've seen will recover nicely enough if a non-critical system fails. Even Win9X will, assuming failing applications don't take out the kernel in their death. Now, if, say, the system drive fails, then you can bet that will kill most any system. The solution is redundant hardware -- it works better and faster then software solutions anyway.
(I don't know what an "I/O processor" is supposed to be. Severely failing hardware on a PC generally generates an NMI, which cannot be trapped, by any OS.)
I have no experiance with VMS...
But hey, lack of knowledge has never stopped you from posting before, right?
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Right. Then you ask him how much it cost, and you can laugh at him. Normal people can actually afford to make Beowulf or MOSIX clusters.
That ain't anything close to VMS clustering.
Beowulf and friends are distributing processing tools. They take an easily paralizable job and handle the mechanics of distributing it for you. Beowulf is mostly application-level software; the machines still function as seperate hosts.
A VMS cluster essentially turns a group of machines into a single machine. All resources are multiplexed into a single logical unit. If one of them fails, the others pick up all the work it left behind. Beowulf is nothing like it. Doesn't even come close.
(I say this as someone who would rather bash his head into the wall then use VMS. I prefer Unix, but I know where we still haven't beat the competition -- yet.)
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Basically nothing has changed!
The SOHO concept has been ereased from the IBM dictionary a long time ago.
Once again they are going for the software independent concept again (Last time they tried with the brilliant OpenDOC technology)...now it is JavaBeans+XML.
Which means that it doesn't matter what OS you're using..as long as it supports JavaBeans....
The strategy announcement is saying that they will not continue to support the Warp 4...but it isn't saying anything about the Warp 4.5 (released last juli...featuring a new kernel, JFS and acouple of new API's)...and I hear an upgrade of this one is being developed...In march FP13 for Warp 4 was released...featuring the Warp 4.5 uniprocessor kernel (read: a kernel upgrade)...thereby changing the attention of the developers to this new 32-bit kernel....and it works the first driver with Kee support has arrived (The SBLive port)....
In the last 5 months....you've been forced to subscribe to Software Choice...if you want anything else but drivers and fixes...like the TCP/IP 4.1, 4.2 and 4.3 packages...
Live long and prosper...
One couldn't just walk into Egghead Software and pick up a copy of OS/2.
Funny, ISTR doing just that. "OS/2 for Windows", I believe it was called.
You can get the source from DEC, oops Compaq if you are a large customer, also I beleive it comes when you purchase their mission critical support service.
On the otherhand you can get basically the same product by going with FreeVMS which has about 2 dozen links posted here in this thread.
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
If you need a bulletproof environment, host it in a bad ass datacenter like Andover just did. Make it all redundant and always stay 30 ahead of capacity.
Simple enough, but it'll cost a fortune.
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
If you're talking about the SIQ, that can't be "fixed", because some apps depend on it. I believe it allows applications like VoiceType to work.
(SIQ = system/single input queue, where all mouse/keyboard messages go through the foreground app before being dispatched to other apps)
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
Another place I worked had an AS/400 in a closet. While there was a little wall unit air conditioner, one day the janator turned it off. The company called me in a panic, with the system down and about 100 customers waiting for service. The system had gone down rather and it was at least 100 farenheit in the closet. I set some fans up in the doorway and managed to get the thing up long enough to take care of the customers.
Both VMS and OS/400 are at least as complex as UNIX. They're real operating systems that offer all the requisite operating system services. Both VMS and OS/400 come with huge stacks of documentation. The university had a table with 30 or 40 orange books documenting every aspect of VMS, OS/400 had a similar amount of documentation.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
The OS/2 community had been doing a lot of work on emulating win32 programs, and I have read that a lot of this know-how is being channeled into Wine on Linux.
:)
Note that this is not code from IBM itself, but from OS/2 enthusiasts.
Also, someone was also porting a very cool Asteroids-like game called 'Roids over to Linux the last time I checked. Great game, but yeah, a somewhat questionable name...
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
User areas were numbered instead of named, so you could go to area 1, 2, 3, etc. I think there were up to 8 of them on a disk.
There were, of course, no subdirectories in either CP/M or pre-2.0 MS-DOS.
D
----
I worked on DG/UX at one point. Data General had some cool clustering technology (I think VMS still had an edge there, though.) and a lot of B2 security stuff (ACLs, Mandatory and Discretionary access control.) They also had some pretty advanced hardware and were one of the leaders in NUMA technology. It's kind of a pity that they didn't enjoy more success despite their excellent technologies.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Many Slashdotters think that Unix = Good, everything else = bad, but a Unix monopoly would be as bad as a Microsoft monopoly. Many computers users are not even AWARE that there are more than three operating systems available (Unix, Mac, and Windows). Diversity is good! Microsoft's downfall does not mean we should should have yet another monopoly. That's why I welcome alternative systems such as VMS and OS/2 and all of the others.
VMS and OS/2 are extremely good systems. VMS is by far my favorite operating system in the world, and we can only hope that the industry trend is to have MORE different types of systems. This is very good from a security standpoint, because a bug in one system would not be able to take down the whole world. But from a personal point of view, I think most techies would be very bored in a world where there is only one system (I know I would!). The whole excitement of computers is learning new systems, logging on to a new OS for the first time, learning a new language, a new API, etc. If all of the world is an Intel PC running Linux (as it increasingly is becoming), there's isn't a fun any more.
Demand diversity. Run VMS. Run OS/2. Run OS/390. Buy a Tandem. Get an old HP mainframe. Demand support for these systems from ISP's, ISV's, web sites, and the like. A one-platform universe if it is Linux or Windows or TRS-DOS is a very, very boring and dangerous thing.
The nail went in the coffin with Warp 4. Their largest/strongest customer base was in corporations... so what did they do...
Well of course they fixed the serious GUI message queue problems, made performance enhancements to the shell, and made the FS layer completely 32bit....
Oh wait... that's what they should have done. In true old IBM... "we have no clue what's going on so we'll see what we can do to kill of the product".... they added voice recognition.
I could hear the "What the Heck!" uttered with the announcement... As all the companies promising applications quietly dump the projects.
Anyways, that's when I bailed. Fortunately IBM these days has really turned things around... first sign of that... they didn't immediately destroy Lotus (it was dying anyways but they didn't help it along).
"If they're not making any money off of it and they don't want it anyway.."
Last I checked they made more profit on OS/2 then Red Hat generated revenue. I guess it's all a perception thing.
War is necrophilia.
All the high-end vendors support partitioning and/or recombination in some fashion. There's no technical reason "mainstream," by which I assume you mean "x86" processors could not be arranged in such an architecture. For starters, Intel made a supercomputer, the Paragon I believe, which used 386 processors. It's not a great leap from MPP to partitioning. However, the point is moot, as peecee-type systems aren't likely to have or need this capability. For one, there are usually too few processors for it to be useful; while partitioning one CPU may at times be interesting, it requires a great deal more software and architectural support. For another, people who buy peecee-type systems do so because they want a cheap box. The S/390's partitioning/VM scheme kicks serious ass, but the CPUs and architecture are more than adequate to handle the overhead - x86 CPUs would slow to a crawl. Those who need partitioning can afford to pay for it.
For starters, if you haven't used VMS since 1986, you are not qualified to comment on it. If I hadn't used Unix since Version 7 would you value my opinion?
./ -mtime=1 -name '*.[Hh][Tt][Mm][Ll]' -exec grep -i text /dev/null '{}' \;
The main selling point of VMS is clustering. VMS is generally regarded as the leader in clustering technology, and no Unix clustering implementation comes close to VMS's clustering technology even 10 years ago. No Unix clustering technology today implement shared disk clusters, distributed lock managers, or load balance sets.
The newest VMS technology, Galaxy, is one of the most revolutionary advancements in OS technology in the last 10 years - the only Unix with it is Tru64 - who stole it from VMS.
In general, VMS is considered significantly more secure and reliable than Unix. Whereas most Unix systems usually crash every few months, VMS systems have been known to be up for over a decade.
The user interface of VMS is much easier to use, and much more powerful than Unix. It is an English-like syntax. If you think it is arcane, I have to ask, what were you using? The VMS command to search a directory tree of HTML files modified since yesterday for a string is:
$ SEARCH/SINCE=YESTERDAY [DIRECTORY...]*.HTML "TEXT"
The Unix equivalent is:
$ find
It appears to me that the VMS command is much easier to look at and understand.
VMS also supports many features that Unix never will such as file versioning, asynchronous I/O, rational memory management and IPC, calling standard, etc., etc., etc., etc.
unwarranted (n-wôrn-td, -wr-) adj.
Having no justification; groundless: unwarranted interference. See Synonyms at baseless.
Gotta love subconscious word choice, eh? ;-)
Stay up hacking each weekend. Sleep is for the week.
Depends on how you define "Unix" and "asynchronous I/O". The UNIX 98 spec includes asynchronous I/O calls, in the sense of "start an I/O operation, don't block waiting for it to finish, and deliver an indication (signal, in the case of UNIX) when it completes, e.g. aio_read() and aio_write; at least some implementations of the UNIX API provide async I/O calls. Are they sufficiently close to SYS$QIO? (Perhaps signals aren't as nice as ASTs, but....)
Well, it was one, in part, initially (and there may well still be Microsoft code in it).
Linux doesn't scale well enough, at least not yet.
Ummm...   is not a S/390 IBM mainframe running Linux a pretty damn big scale of an OS?   I patiently await the day MS runs an OS on a mainframe.
-- Win2k: "It's not so much that it's only 65,000 bugs, it's just that they stopped at 65,535 to prevent an overflow."
IBM will use OS/2 on at least the commentator stations in the Sidney 2000 Olympics.
Maybe they will use it in more places but I don't like reading PDFs.
__
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
Actually, multitasking and multi threading have no relation to each other. Multi tasking is the ability to run more than one process. Multi-threading is the ability of one process to have multiple, simultanious paths of execution. Both OS/2 and Windows have the same multi-tasking/multi-threading model. For 32bit apps, both are preemptivly multitasked, and many parts of the OS and some apps are multi-threaded. Second, don't go dissing the Win95 process/thread model. It kicks UNIX's all over the place (not in security of course). Under UNIX, a thread is a lightweight process. As such, the scheduler is process oriented, and threads take much more time and resources to create under UNIX. Under OS/2, Windows, and BeOS, a thread is the smallest unit of sheduling, and are very lighweight in terms of resources and creation tim. Lastly, there is no such thing as "true multitasking." Hell, under any definition of mulitasking, DOS had multitasking (TSRs.) Win95, OS/2, BeOS, and Linux both employ something called preemptive multi-tasking, where the OS decides when an app should give up processing to another app. Under cooperative multi-tasking systems, like 16 bit Windows and MacOS 10, the application has to call a function to return control back to the OS so it can shedule another process.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
A two step program to end the drug problem:
1. Make drugs legal.
2. Put IBM in charge of marketing.
1000 SlashDot sigs
You're exactly right about the Microsoft hatred being about the only thing in common between the OS/2 and Linux crowds. For someone truly intrested in OS/2 and not into all the politics, one of the most depressing places on the internet has to be comp.os.os2.advocacy.
Excluding the never-ending Tholen threads, which don't have much to do with anything at all, most posts these days are about Microsoft -- sometimes in relationship to OS/2, but a lot of times OS/2 isn't even mentioned at all. Not exactly the best advocacy in the world, especially when any OS/2 developer who decides to also port their software to Win32 has to run the gauntlet of bitter OS/2 users branding them traitors and telling them to go to Hell. You'd think that they'd be pleased that someone is still writing software for OS/2, especially given IBM's own lackluster support, but I guess the hatred is more important. Sad, really.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
I'm rather suprised to hear this. I had an issue w/ useful life of OS/2 a few months back, and IBM told me that they would be updating it through the end of 01, if not for just their core dependants. I had also heard buzz about an updated Warp Server pack due out in Q1, with OEM preview and announcement late Q3. Then again, I think their move to Linux for many of the roles 'reserved' for OS/2 traditionally is putting a crimp it their style, and they'd like to move faster to exploit the explosive curve going on now..
.sig: Now legally binding!
Actually, there are many open OSs that are not UNIX-like. My favorite (for reasons that will becomes obvious soon) is AtheOS. It is a project run by one person, but is actually progressing quite quickly. It even has hardware accelerated drivers for some Matrox cards. The best part is that its architecture was heavily influenced by BeOS, and its file system is basically a clone of BFS that he made using the book that the guy who wrote BFS published.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
There are still folks out there running DOS 3, not to mention the Cult of the Amiga and the Trash-80 and the Timex-Sinclair. How do you put a stake through the heart of these beasts? (esp. one that Big Blue sold to banks, governments, etc).
"IBM wants its customers to deploy ebusiness technology applications concurrently with existing OS/2 applications until platform neutrality has been achieved, and then change the operating system," said the spokesman (quoted from the article)
Wonder if the folks who thought then that they couldn't get fired for buying IBM are sweating, or if they're not getting fired for buying Micro$oft now?
I love vegetarians - some of my favorite foods are vegetarians.
Yo, COM is not without its merits. There is only a few major architectural differences between SOM and COM, the most important being that SOM supports direct inheritance, while COM doesn't. COM does something called aggregation which achieves the same effect. They support two different philosophies. SOM is slightly more fragile at the benifet of being more flexible, while COM is more resistant to base-class derived class interaction problems at the expense of requiring more programming effort to derive an object. I am of the mind that developers in general aren't responsible enough to do unchecked deriving, and that by making it less automatic in COM, the developer is required to have a clearer understanding of the interface between the base and derived class.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
This is incorrect. Nothing in Unix says that threads must be lightweight processes, there
are many implementation possibilities. Solaris is the only design firmly in that camp.
Linux is actually quite the opposite, if I remember right, in that both processes and
threads are created with the same spawn system call.
>>>>>>>>
Actually, I believe that you have it reversed. I know Solaris uses their own implementation of threads, and that Linux uses POSIX threads. I have seen test results that show that POSIX threads take 10 times longer to create than NT threads (which take serveral times longer than BeOS threads), and the system slows down significantly at a much lower thread count than under NT and BeOS. (Both of which have nearly a hundred threads from bootup.)
Also, the (imho only) advantage of lightweight processes is that the the resources to
create a thread are far less than any object that the OS is aware of. This is exactly the
opposite of what you said.
>>>>>>>>
Actually, under most systems stuff like semaphores and locks take far less memory. The advantage of threads is two fold. First, the multiple paths allow multiprocessing, and second, they keep subsystems of a single program from having to on one another. This is a big help considering that fact that even the most basic PC these days has four processers, the I/O processor, the graphics processor, the sound chip, and the main CPU.
The problem with lightweight processes is that support requires complex libraries and
redundancy with the OS (which has to support multiple processes anyway) and requires
non-blocking versions of all system calls, which are much more complex (interesting
enough MicroSoft makes a big stink about their non-blocking support and their multi-
threading support, when realistically only one of these needs to be implemented!)
>>>>>>>>>>>
Threads and non-blocking systems calls are neither complex, nor terribly difficult. If the OS is designed from the core to support threads, (like BeOS and NT) multithreading naturally flows to the whole system.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Yes, it is partially hardware, but a great deal software. It shows that VMS can take much more flaky hardware errors than can UNIX. (It's true. Even Win95 is less susceptible to flaky hardware than Linux is. Some severly overclocked systems will run on Win95, but crash on Linux.) Take a PC running Win95 for example. If one shoots the harddrive, and the resultant shock sends a electric surge up and kills an I/O processor, more likely than not, a UNIX will crash. Another bullet-proof OS, for example, could handle an I/O processor going out in the middle of operation and still keep running. I have no experiance with VMS, so I don't know it can do that, but I think that's what the author was getting at.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Ahh, its all clear now. I didn't realize you were talking about non-OS managed threads. I had the idea that you were saying BeOS and NT threads are resource intensive.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Really?
Back in the '80s you sure did. It was (mostly) written in Bliss, and totally distributed on MicroFiche (i.e. you can't recompile it unless you retype it...not real assurance that the same source you got was used to compile the system).
I think the idea was that if the full bookshelf of manuals didn't cover it, the source could help out a bit.
There are lots of things I don't like about VMS, but lack of disclosure isn't one of them. Tons of disclosure come with VMS. Or at least 800 pounds of manuals. Seriously.
The Open Group recently released OpenMotif, with mention of "Open Source," and even the Raymond/Perens/Debian definition thereof. As well as mentioning that
The number of occurances of the word "Open" in the press release should be a good tip-off that it's marketing-speak time.
OpenVMS, which hearkens from the days of "Open Systems," is one of the cases of there being a fiction of openness. "Open Systems" are ones where the APIs are disclosed. And generally this means using some UNIX variation or some simulation thereof.
In the case of OpenVMS, they provide a POSIX-compatible API, as well as most of the components defined as part of the UNIX95 specification. You can pretend it's UNIX, if you hold your nose. (VMS aficionados would say the same thing, but mean something else... :-) )
With OpenVMS, you can probably compile some POSIX C code, and perhaps run some UNIX shell scripts. That's what "Open" means, in this case.
You decidedly don't get source code to the system.
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
Manufacturing. Merely as an example. We currently use VMS to handle an entire warehouse. Everything from automated forklifts, to temperature controlled areas, to 100 ft cranes, to weighing of material. For us a move from VMS to UNIX (any form) would cost millions and take a long time. A real long time. And personally I couldn't gaurentee the same level of capabilities and/or reliability. (note though I have not been asked to look into the feasability)
Besides which it does have (by my experience) more reliability than our UNIX boxes. Our computer room got 'hot' one day. Real hot. The UNIX boxen all shut down. Not real nicely either. Almost lost data. The vaxen just kept right on going. Never missed a beat. Dispite a backup tape melting inside one. It really didn't care. Nor did we. There were more of them in a nice redundant rollover cluster. Just replaced the tape and did another backup.
-cpd
Same site, other articles.
One is on the release of Solaris 8, which is about $20 for the unwarranted version, and NDS directory services.
This is kinda odd, tho -- although eDirectory will run on Solaris, W2K and Linux, check this:
> Novell is pursuing aggressive sales for
> eDirectory. It will give a 100-user licence free
> to customers buying Windows 2000 Server within
> 90 days of its release. Sun Solaris 7 buyers
> will be offered the same deal until 31 January.
What, no Linux? People actually buy Linux, ya know.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
Sort of like what Dec did with the 8400 Alphas and ATM (clustering), just it's all wrapped in one package. In short, makes the VMS environment more friendly with non-VMS systems using methodolgy from the old days.
Don't just whine about poor internet privacy and freedom policies,
What in Linux heaven or M$ hell do they mean? That they can ftp all customer stuff to the other platform, where it can be used? And that from a company, that used M$ tactics since before Bill Gates was born, only not that succesfully... And whom are they going to be friends with? Us, or them? The article leaves much to be enquired.
Stefan.
IBM invented noninteroperability as a marketing strategy long before Microsoft, but failed because Amdahl left them, knew reverse engineering and how the IBM machines were designed.
The truth shall make you fret. (Ankh-Morpork tImes motto)
I am wondering: is there any likelihood/possibility that OS/2 code or techniques might end up in Linux code? I know IBM is unlikely to open-source OS/2, but with their recent involvement in Linux, are they paying any OS/2 developers to work on Linux? (If not, what exactly is the extent of their involvement with Linux?) Just a thought...
If they're not making any money off of it and they don't want it anyway, it would be nice if they just gave it away. That's what I would do. Of course, I'm not IBM. The FSF could do more with it than IBM wants to.
-JD
I can't speak to the Israeli Team OS/2 branch, but in general, Team OS/2 started out as you describe. Later on, though, things got really ugly, and the group eventually became a negative drag on OS/2, both with the non-OS/2 users, and eventually even with the OS/2 userbase itself.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
I enjoyed stability, and the joys of true multitasking (not Win95 multithreading). No geek ever knocked the technical merits of OS/2 in my dorm. They just said "I like it too, but it just doesn't have the applications I need." Too bad for them -- OS/2 never ate my term papers. I enjoyed having a MS compatable OS that ran Win 16 apps better than Windows 3.1.
My OS/2 days are long gone -- as well as the 486 DX-2 40 that I ran it on. I'll remember OS/2 as a testament to the engineering talent of IBM and the ineptness of their Marketing team (OS/2 sponsored the superbowl -- didn't remember that? I'm not suprised).
I wonder if Linux would be as huge today if Windows had some stiffer (OS/2) competition. Maybe if Windows hadn't sucked donkey ass in such a hurry since then maybe we wouldn't have all these developers and user jumping ship to this labor-of-love called Linux.
I'll always remember OS/2 as a window killing piece of engineering bliss that just never blossomed. IBM: you suck.
Unix didn't kill VMS. DEC killed VMS through stupid policies. And having used both extensively, and programmed for both extensively, I'll point out that VMS had/has technology that Unix systems (not to mention Linux) are still reaching for. Like clusters: talk to a VMS person sometime, tell him/her about "linux clusters", and then listen to her/him laugh at you. A properly set up VMS cluster is a thing of beauty, with capabilities and reliability orders of magnitude beyond anything available on Unix.
Then tell the VMS person about how we're getting different languages to work together. They will look at you in amazement, wondering why there isn't a standard calling convention that all the languages use.
Yes, DCL (the standard "shell" on VMS) is not the best possible interactive environment -- the unix shells are clearly superior. But DCL isn't VMS, anymore than bash is Unix. The VMS operating system is powerful and complete, and has solved problems the Unix people haven't gotten around to thinking about yet. The only thing that really sucks on VMS is the device:[directory]file.ext;version file names (although once you've lived with *real* (i.e. supported by the OS) file versioning, you miss it a *lot* when you do without).
And we Linux people our proud of our months of uptime, but VMS people measure uptimes and availability in *years*. Many of the production lines and processing plants (refineries, etc.) in the US and around the world are run by OpenVMS machines.
Don't get me wrong: I *like* Unix, and I'd much rather have a Unix box for my day-to-day programming environment (except that the DEC debugger blows away gdb) than VMS, but that's mostly because I'd much rather have bash than DCL. VMS definitely has its annoying quirks and faults. But slamming VMS based on a few weeks use of DCL and not liking the syntax is just prejudice.