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OS/2 Sucessor eComstation Sees The Light Of Day
Bushwacker writes: "Just when everyone thought IBM's OS/2 Warp Operating System was finally dying, the fabled 'licensed-out' 'Warp 5.0' is now in version 1.0.0. Called eComStation, the operating system's developer, Mensys BV promises all of the features and stability of IBM's Warp 4.0, plus many updates, enhancements, and new features, such as efficient SMP support for up to 64 processors as well as easy network integration between client and server versions. eComStation has modest system requirements and should be able to work well on most PCs or x86 based servers without much trouble. But then again there's the age old issue of OS/2 driver support (sigh)... Currently, a preview version is available, with a final release 'coming soon.' The eComStation OS is available in Standard and Pro versions from Indelible Blue." Update: 05/08 11am by C :You can get more information and screenshots from the the .com version of the website.
Easy dude, don't go invading Manchuria or we'll have to nuke that ass again.
Looking around at all the biased, uninformed, ignorant posts reminds me why FUD is such a good marketing tool. How many of you that just bashed Os/2 have ever ran it? For more then a day, and before it quote unquote died? How many are baseing your opinion on other FUD? Have any of you ran a BBS and wheren't running Os/2 or Linux? How often could you surf the web, play quake 1, and have 2 nodes with users actively doing things without a slow down? On a NON-pentium computer? Ohh that's right you never could.
I'm not trying to flame here, but I'm tired of people spreading FUD. Not just about Os/2, but Linux, Windows, Mac's, anything that they haven't experienced first hand but they still shoot their mouths off because "everyone else" says so.
And this *will* get modded as a troll.
in Sweden Nordbankens ATM's run OS/2. I saw one rebooting and rebooting one day in Stockholm. Must have been something wrong with in. But Im sure it runs much better the Föreningssparbanken's ATM, they use WindowsNT and its dog slow.. you get lag when you enter the PIN-numbers. Sometimes they crash and you cant use them. Pretty strange to see a "out of virtual memory" on an ATM machine.
I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!
I'm more disturbed by the name of the company Mensys. Can't help but remind me of, well let's just say, something about "that time of the month".
One thing's for sure : don't let Mensys get involved with Siemens...
Are you sure about this? I don't doubt that parts of the Presentation Manager are owned by Microsoft, but the Workplace Shell? Remember, that was built on SOM, and didn't come along until 2.0 (1991).
It's possible that SOM was contaminated with Microsoft stuff, but if so, why did Microsoft junk SOM for COM?
Like one of these?
Not actually Linux, but pretty much what you mean.
At least OS/2 has a certain amount of relatively modern software available for it (StarOffice 5.1a, Netscape Communicator, XFree86, GIMP), and the built-in DOS and Windows capabilities give OS/2 a lot of flexibility w.r.t. running older software.
I like BeOS 5 (I've been running BeOS at home since the 4.0 release), but it's really hard to move to it fulltime. Not so with OS/2...
--
-Rich (OS/2 Warp 4 and Linux user in Eden Prairie MN)
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
* Because I use OS/2. :-)
;-)
* In the summer of 1992, after I installed OS/2 2.0 next to my existing Windows 3.1 installation.
* I've used various distros of Linux since the 0.99 kernel (SLS 1.01 in the fall of 1992) including RedHat, Mandrake, SuSE, Storm Linux, Coyote Linux, LRP, and tomsrtbt, and also used FreeBSD 2.x and 3.x, BeOS 4/4.5/4, Solaris 2.5, 2.6 and 7, MacOS 6.01 through 8.1, Windows 2.1, 3.0, 3.1, 95, 95OSR2, 98, and NT4, and a number of mini and mainframe OSes (OS2200, VAX/VMS, KRONOS, NOS, etc.). I prefer OS/2 overall on the desktop.
* See above.
* Nobody else in my family uses OS/2.
* Heh. No, when I was a child there weren't any Intel-compatible PCs.
* I use four boxes concurrently (KVM switches are wonderful things) running OS/2 Warp 4, Win95 OSR2, BeOS 5 Pro, and Mandrake 6.1. Most of my non-game time is spent on the OS/2 box.
* No, I don't consider OS/2 use to be normal. On the other hand, would *you* want to be considered a "normal" computer user?
* Yes, few people understand why I use it until I show them what it can do, and then they are more understanding...
--
-Rich (OS/2 Warp 4 and Linux user in Eden Prairie MN)
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
It also used the left mouse pointer to select, but the right mouse pointer to actually drag objects.
Because of the fact that I'd used PC/GEOS (via GeoWorks Ensemble) for years before I say OS/2, the move to OS/2 was quite intuitive for me.
--
-Rich (OS/2 Warp 4 and Linux user in Eden Prairie MN)
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
It seems like you misunderstand who is producing eCS. It is not IBM. It is a company called Serenity Systems, in cooperation with another company called Mensys. True, IBM did produce the OS itself but the packaging was done by a 3rd party.
The only thing Win9x 'inherited' from OS/2 was some GUI features and the win32 API, which was (originally) remarkably similar to OS/2's. All else in win9x was just an upgrade to DOS/win3.1.
NT 3.51, OTOH, was partly based on OS/2, evidenced by the fact that - at least until NT4 - NT could run old 16-bit OS/2 textmode apps and had support for OS/2's HPFS file system (PINBALL.SYS IIRC).
Win9x had a much better GUI but...
Have you ever even used the Workplace Shell? True, in Warp 3 the interface looked a bit 'industrial', without too many bells and whistles, but its functionality is unparallelled. If you don't believe me, then read up on Object-Oriented User Interface design (Theo Mandel has some good books on it).
As for the looks, as early as in 1994 there were desktop enhancers (like NPSWPS) that could jazz it up a lot!
In the Workplace Shell, the UI choice was made that one notebook tab can have more than one pages. The page you're at is indicated somewhere at the top, like '1/3'. The big advantage is that you don't get a big mess of tabs in your control panel. The disadvantage- as this case probably indicates- is that some users don't cycle through the pages but only click on the tabs, thereby missing some important settings pages.
I asked the manager why they didn't have any and he said that Microsoft had threatened to raise their cost for Microsoft products if they where caught selling any OS/2 software - even special ordered.
I always thought that was odd that they still sold OS/2, until it hit me - by allowing Egghead to have OS/2 on the shelf w/out any other OS/2 software, Microsoft was able to create the impression that no 3rd party OS/2 software existed.
Serenity Systems has been delaying the release date. I think they are too small to handle this full business profesionally. At least they sent a beta to those that prepaid. I wonder if the final quality and bug correction will be worth the price.
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
It's a pity that much of the open source software in OS/2 is ported from Unix. It uses forks that more expensive in OS/2 than in Unix. The right thing would be converting it to threads, but free OS/2 developers usually find better things to do with their time.
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
I know that OpenDoc is just one part of the WorkPlace Shell, but you have been able to download the source code for IBM's OpenDoc 1.2 (the version in Warp 4 is 1.1) for Win95, OS/2 and AIX since the jump to Java.
The license agreement stipulates that you only use the source code for debugging and education. Be wary about exploiting side effects that you discover in the source code, because the IBM OpenDoc team may change the code in future editions.
Has anyone actually used it in some other product?
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
I'd have to go with Amiga advocates. At least the company that built OS/2 is still around. (No, the "New Amiga" doesn't count)
Yeah, but with Mac OS X, the Mac is like the Mac, only with a powerful command prompt and reasonably easy access to ported Unix software.
Only runs on plastic see thru hardware, but still...
So where does one get an eCS demo disk? Looked quickly, but didn't see anything at the indelible-blue site or at ecomstation.com.
I use OS/2 for server installations.
...and atleast a dozen other call-rep utilities for handling/managing user accounts/account information.
:)
:( my work demands it, as does my game playing. No, I will not use Linux at this time (my most recent experiences were spending 3 days tweeking V/H refresh settings blindly on an undocumented monitor in order to get a GUI running under RedHat. Or hand hacking memory assignment so that the computer can blindly access the the 256MB that has, but can't see. Or better yet, how about the CD-R that I could only get mounted on the system by faking it out as a SCSI device. And while it will atleast read CDs now, it sure as hell wouln't write a CD to save it's life. IMHO that's bullshit and I will not put myself through that again if I can help it.
:(
:(
No, I don't use OS/2 Server, I use OS/2 Client versions.
My clients want a machine that will do 1 or more of the following:
1) Web server (intranets or internet with small->moderate loads)
2) Firewall/Proxy
3) E-mail services
I keep an extensive personal library of current and past releases of numerous OS/2 titles (both free and "for limited use"/freeware). Products which allow me to set up a customer for nothing but the cost of a Warp 4 Client box and my time (and at times registrations when needed for shareware such as InetMail/InJoy). Anything else that is needed, I may write custom in REXX or JAVA, and on rare instances use IBM's Visual C/C++ or Borland C++.
Case in point...
A company I worked with needed to build an Intranet for their call center. When I got there they were running NT4/IIS and 128 MB of RAM on a P133, serving nothing but static pages. The machine was dog slow handling aprox. 150 reps. giving static page response times of upwards to 15 seconds (30+ seconds for pages with scripting!)
When I came in, and without using the existing machine, I asked them to purchase a copy of Warp 4 client. I applied all relevant services/fixpacks. Then I pulled a P90 IBM PC750 off the shelf, bumped it to 64 MB, removed the stock HD, and replaced it with 2 2GB HDs (for data redundancy) installed IBM ICS 4.2.1 web server (free for non-SSL use). Built them a new streamlined web site, added a specialized call-tracking pipe-server (written in ansi C under Borland)) that communicated with a client side Java app that each call-rep used to log every single call and it's disposition. Created a REXX based user ID search that parsed an 8 MB flat file for ALL matches in no more that 5 seconds.
The system was put on-line, and even with the addition of 3 other call-centers adding their load the machine still served ALL responses to ANY client request (within the facility) to no longer than 8-9 seconds at worst, for actions that were running CGI. Web pages were usually delivered within 4-5 seconds at worst, although the system normally ran around a 1 second response time on all static page requests once the OS and the web server had "settled" (ie... caching and disk I/O had optimized from the extended use).
The machine perfomed it's own maintenance with scripts I wrote, so that while the office was closed on Sundays, it would clean old logs for storage, perform it's redundancy backup to the second HD, and reboot itself (I seemed to have a small memory leak in the pipe-server that I was never able to nail down otherwise the machine wouldn't have needed to be restarted).
I left that company with three commendations for improving productivity and turning the call center around from a "under consideration to close" to a "nessicary hub".
That machine ran for over a year until a new person came into management there and demanded that they "remove the OS/2" machine. They went back to NT and my friend there cursed me every day he stayed at that job because he could never get the NT box to perform even remotely close to what the OS/2 box did.
I'm sorry for going on like this, and I'm not trying to brag, but even a Client install of OS/2 rocks over any Windows variant as a server, and is about a billion times easier to use than any UNIX variant (which funny enough we jokingly refer to OS/2 as a "single user Unix") Sorry Linux fans
Installs like this need no fancy hardware... need no fancy software... are simple to implement and I will continue to do so until I can't find hardware to install on.
Unfortunately, I can't use OS/2 as a client. I use Windows
I honestly haven't used OS/2 as a primary client for a few years now
What's my point in all of this?
I really don't know, I felt I had to offer my situation with OS/2, an OS that I enjoy using. It absolutely is the best at what it does hands-down! It doesn't really answer my client needs though these days, and I wish it did. Windows does better at this, but only because most everyone else uses it. I wish I had a better client choice, and believe me, if I had the skills to write my own OS I would, but I don't
I still consider going back to OS/2 as a client though as of late with all of the fixes, additions, and applications that have been released as of late. And holy shit, even more so since I got a chance to spend some time playing around with the newer Domino Notes Server and Clients... wow... It was never before so clear to me what a piece of shit MS Exchange/Outlook was until after using a real workplace colaboration product.
Oh well... I don't know if I feel any better having said all that... maybe some will have enjoyed reading it...
Cheers...
BeOS advocates.
stable than any but the most rarified NT box.
It would even give my solaris a run for the money.. What about 3d support..NO GAMES NO REASON to switch...is the same reason I don't run a dedicated solaris or linux box.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
and you will own the market...
Make my games play and THEY will come
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
That was almost a really interesting, informed comment but unfortunately it was only about 75% coherent. Your english is killing you. Or else you're wasted right now. Sorry. (not that mine's much better...)
Errr, or you don't know what the heck your talking about... Try this or google
I'm pretty sure you could boot to a command prompt in version 2.1 without a floppy. By using Alt-F1 and then the F2 switch if I'm not mistaken.
Many didn't know there was a utility which could make a single diskette boot system, called "bootos2", and if I had to boot from the 2 or 3 floppies more then a couple of times I would have thrown the thing out too. Look what StarDock did with the WPS by extending its features. The OO in SOM ( System Object Model ) was amazingly powerful though somewhat fragile at times. The fact that almost every aspect of the desktop and OS could be scripted with REXX was a boon for admins and weekend hackers. VxRexx blew VisualBasic away but who saw it or used it?
IBM built a really flexible system and it's power was in its flexability. The fact that Microsoft had a rope around the neck of every OEM prevented that flexibility from being excercised by the OEM so the customers has as much power exposed to them as the OEM's saw fit. It was like dropping a box of motorcycle parts in front of mom and saying "let's go for a ride this weekend".
I think it was 3 OEM's in Germany who fought Microsoft and pre-installed OS/2 for one year and in that year it gained an incredible 25% marketshare.
The flexability of OS/2 was amazing. With some simple scripts you could make OS/2 a pseudo multi-user system by moving OS2.ini and os2sys.ini files around. The desktop was amazing but without a "File Manager" familiar to Win3.x users they were lost and would use the WinOS2 "File Manager" if they found it. Only businesses with vision could really put OS/2 through it's paces and with the OEM's locked out by Microsoft, Joe Public hardly had a chance figuring out even 10% of OS/2 capabilities.
Just my thoughts....
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Dang, I thought they put up a good fight. No OEM would pre-install OS/2 because Microsoft would pull the plug on their DOS and Windows licenses so all IBM could do was sell at retail and they sold quite well there too. Then IBM fought Microsoft up until the last day, the day Windows 95 was released, before caving in. After all, Microsoft would have shut down IBM's PC division. In late 1994 and early 1995, IBM was selling 1 million copies of OS/2 a month and had TV ads all over the world. Something happened in around the March 1995 timeframe because IBM pulled all ads and stopped publicly pushing OS/2. From the DOJ VS MSFT case, I think the threats from Microsoft were sinking in and the PowerPC platform had failed...
We won't even get into all the pressure put on 3rd party developers to ONLY develope for Windows. IBM put up a damn good fight againt the Microsoft monopoly. IMHO.
Lob
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
While most operating system bigots stick with what they know and want, I'll try to not do that too much. Well, a little bit.
So I heard from a friend of mine that BeOS is the next best thing since sliced bread. I am uncertain as to if I can agree with that. I understand that most of the GNU suite of software compiles on BeOS and is directly usable, but there are other things that people use that don't work with BeOS. I am talking about using it as a server. Linux has LVS, which works somewhat good in lieu of a rather nasty ARP bug which exists in the Linux kernel. Does BeOS support cheap load balancing a'la Linux? I sure haven't seen that. Why spend $69.00 or whatever BeOS costs, to do the same thing, or less than a $5.00 Linux CD?
So how does somebody think that taking over a relic such as OS/2 (which has been funded for a long time by IBM, past its expiration date) is going to generate revenue? Especially with that type of price tag. They most likely will not be able to sell to pointy-haired bosses who like Windows(R) or Solaris(R). And they most likely will not be able to sell to Open Source people who like to get stuff for free and with source code. So this leaves them to sell to Joe Bloe and his Compaq Presario, well short of a select few that still use OS/2 and find it useful. Well let's assume that there are a few people who actually buy this for the hell of it.
So how this company will successfully have Joe purchase this product ($279.00) will be interesting. Especially since he already got Windows with his computer and if he is savvy enough, he might install one of those Linux distributions he got with his PCWorld magazine. To add to it all we have the infamous driver issue. Will eComStation actually have support for that pesky Presario CD-ROM controller, which doesn't work with anything short of Compaq's Windows drivers?
Or are they going to try to not concentrate too much on retail and go after OEM deals?
Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think. -Ayn Rand
You convinced me. I just ran my Atari ST over with a truck. I haven't felt this good since 1985!
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
I think your comments on the UI aren't fair. Personally, I find the Workplace Shell to be the most powerful UI so far of about a dozen OSes I have used. There is nothing unintuitive about the right mouse button, it's just the OS/2 way, not the same as everybody else, but not inherently any less intuitive. Personally I find it more powerful since you get more functionality out of it. The right mouse button in the object-oriented Workplace shell of OS/2 means "show me the list of all possible actions on this object". It's very logical and simple to understand and use IMHO.
I still use OS/2 at home but I miss some of the apps that are available on other platforms. I'd like to have something as reliable as Solaris with as many desktop applications as Linux has today, and an OS/2 UI. Then I would be really happy.
I'm afraid it's not going to happen so I'll stick with OS/2 for some more time.
-- Julien Pierre http://www.madbrain.com/blog
The import/export filters in Staroffice have been working well and I can send people XLS or DOS files created with Staroffice without any problems. I read the ones they send me too using Staroffice.
Incredible, isn't it ?
-- Julien Pierre http://www.madbrain.com/blog
OS/2 does not run Win9x 32-bit windows applications. There were both technical and legal reasons for that. IBM had a source code license for Windows 3.x, and basically recompiled it as Win-OS/2 as a subsystem. They did not have the same license for Windows9x and would have needed to reverse engineer things to run those apps. An independent group of people are doing that, it's called Project odin. See http://odin.netlabs.org . I would not call it reliable though and wouldn't use it for anything production. But there are a few apps that run under it.
...
Personally, I love Staroffice for OS/2 very much. In fact even on NT at work I prefer to use Staroffice over MS Office
It's too bad Sun killed the OS/2 support for Staroffice but it's hard to blame them given IBM has dropped the ball on the OS.
-- Julien Pierre http://www.madbrain.com/blog
No, it's always been that way in the Workplace shell since OS/2 2.0 in 1992. The changes in Warp 3 and 4 are cosmetic, mostly the color schemes, wallpapers and prettier icons to make it attractive, but it's basically been the same UI for 9 years. The right mouse button also lets you drag objects, if you hold it down and move the pointer. But its primary function is for context options. Whereas the left button is for clicking/opening/selecting. It does take some getting used to if you come from another GUI. I went straight from DOS to OS/2 and had seldom used GUIs before the Workplace Shell - I tried Windows 3.0 but it was never of any use to me because it was too unstable. So perhaps because I didn't have any other habits from other GUIs, I found the OS/2 shell very easy to learn. I miss its ease of use and functionality a lot in the other GUIs I use today - the NT shell and CDE under X primarily. I wonder how long it will be before somebody comes up with a UI as useful as the OS/2 one on the other platforms.
-- Julien Pierre http://www.madbrain.com/blog
Two things, (1) OS/2 is the only operating system that can IPL (boot) an s/390 mainframe and (2) if you think Linux is anywhere near usurping OS/390 then you need to do more research on OS/390. While I love Linux, it doesn't even approach OS/390 in terms of reliability, IO speed (meaning it doesn't make full use of the hardware, this will probably change eventually), fault tolerance, and batch processing.
:)
I wouldn't doubt that IBM someday might put out their own distro, but in the mean time they have a nice potential revenue stream selling support contracts to mainframe shops who want to use it to replace existing unix and NT servers. Keep in mind these are customers who think nothing of dropping $500,000 a year on OS or application support. Linux has a shot at some success on the s/390, but it needs to become a bit more reliable to win over people who measure uptime in decades rather than years
Finkployd
Unless you want to use a network card, SCSI card, IDE controller, sound card, CD or DVD drive, floppy drive, internal hard drive, external hard drive, modem, external FPU, RAM, or that light on the front of the case that tells you when you're accessing the hard drive (that isn't supported anyway).
Sounds like Linux -- except for the $279 price tag!
(please note: this is not flamebait, this is humor (and a little truth, admit it!))
---------------------------------------------
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
Well, the Amiga *was* cool, except for
AAH! BPTRS! Look what you've done! BPTRS!! There crawling down the walls!! Blblflblmblrgrfp
But you must be thinking of Mac advocates.
--
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"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
NASA did the math, using two separate groups to work out the Warp number and the build number. Both groups were firmly cautioned to decide amongst themselves on whether to use Metric or Imperial units for their calculations.
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"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
So can a Universal Turing Machine. Your point?
Glückwünsche, haben Sie Slashdot ermordet, indem Sie zum korporativen Druck beugten und Subskriptionen einlei
If eComStation is such a great OS, then why is www.ecomstation.nl using Tru64?
= www.ecomstation.nl&find_site=Scan
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?display=&site
cpeterso
Why don't they make a linux distro that is specifically for installing Oracle on top of?
:)
That, is a great idea. How bloody simple would that be - a CD that turns a big x86 box into an Oracle server.
Blimey.
Dave
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
What's really funny, is that for a while (until they renumbered it) the successor to Mac OS X Server 1.2 was going to be Mac OS X Server 1.0. As it is, we're going to have Mac OS X Server 2.0 that has as its core Mac OS X 10.x. I want to know what comes next, Max OS X 11?
-- It only takes 20 minutes for a liberal to become a conservative thanks to our new outpatient surgical procedure!
Linux/*BSD is to frightening (Distributions like Mandrake and SuSE (well IMO is just as userfriendly as W2K..and you're able to change the default settings) for many people and that is the reason for them to use MS-Windows, though they're unsatisfied with its performance. What they need is an Operating System that has got the best of both worlds. :o( That is a bit of a problem!
eCS/OS2 has got the best of both worlds....It is polished, yet versatile (I'm thinking of the WorkPlace Shell here)...stable, great performance and it has got power applications for most office-work. The Java support is superb, and actually some Win32 support is present (via Odin, which uses Open32 and a partly implementation of WINE for this job).
But it is not a gaming platform
Live long and prosper...
No actually eCS 1.0 = OS/2 Warp MCP 4.51, not 5.0. And nope, it is not P6 optimized, it uses the i486 instruction set.
Live long and prosper...
No, you're quite right...it wasn't lack of hardware support that killed OS/2....it is certain divisions inside IBM that is trying to kill OS/2....
But actually I have had little problems with hardware support...Even the GeForce2 is supported...the only area where there's a problem is with SCSI controllers (Funny since IBM for quite some time has been trying to push OS/2 into a server-role) and until recently soundcards (SBLive is now supported through a port of the OpenSource driver)...By this I mean, unless you want to use some exotic hardware, then there's no real problem finding hardware....
Live long and prosper...
Live long and prosper...
Diebold, NCR, Wincor-Nixdorf, etc. still have a lot of hardware around the world at the various Banks that's deployed running OS/2. Banks also expect to keep their systems running with suported software for many years after a product has been witthdrawn from service (5-10+ years in some cases).
Banks are some of the slowest organizations to switch to new technologies, there is a market for this type of product.
Only now are some of the manufacturers getting to install NT-based systems (Yes, NT - not 2000).
Support of Win32s programs (i.e. win9x) was a problem from the beginning. OS/2 could not get native win32s applications to run, and they could not licence the API from Microsoft. the closest thing they got was a win32 extension from win3.11, and that was a whole other purchase (Warp! fans will remember the Blue os/2 box that came with win 3.11).
it's too bad in five years they never solved that incompatability issue.
aha! i was very very right! when OS/2 came out, ATAPI interface drives were just coming out on the market. This was exactly the CD-ROM situation when warp! hit the market, and that was a holy terror. Do you remember remember that warp! came on 32 disks too? Those came in handy when certain motherboards had EIDE interfaces that were out of spec.
I'm not arguing about the benefits of the WPS. (i have not used/installed/touched os2 for about 5 years, give me a break here) i am also not going to tell you about the IBM(!), 3com 10base2 adaptors that refused to function under OS/2, and the xircom pcmcia cards that would not hot-swap. IBM and toshiba were the only laptop companies that i remember that came out with with , current warp drivers.
what were your experiences getting Aptiva systems to work with OS/2? now, i'm talking about ACTUAL IBM computers. how about Aptivas with an mWave telephony card? How about AST's with riser cards? there were certain models of Aptiva that did come with os/2 installed, true, but on other models i was told by IBM reps that OS/2 was incompatible.
my post is not akin to, but is actually saying that "i ran OS/2 warp and it was a pain in the ass, especially for multiple hardware configurations". anyone who built a variety hardware boxes for use in a Warp! environment knew that the Warp! installation was lacking, and improvements were overdue. Even the wildest OS/2 fantatic could not honestly dismiss this.
lastly, unless you have actually used eComStation and seen "NT3.5->2000" type improvements, i doubt you are in a better position to distill and my post to a single sentence!
a popular musing was that if IBM marketed sushi, they would have called it "Dead, Raw Fish!" in the press pack.
That depends on your own specific needs. .... That should answer your own question.
:)
If you can download and compile your own Linux distro for free, why would anyone pay for a copy of RedHat or Slackware or
If you are using BeOS, one reason to switch is that OS/2 or eComstation is _alive_, the company isn't looking for a buyout like Be, Inc. is. Another reason is that you can get productive on OS/2 or eCS. On top of big office suites like Lotus Smartsuite or StarOffice, there are many individual apps that are as good or better! Out of all the "alternative" OS, OS/2 has probably one of the hugest software bases of them. (Does Linux count as "alternative" any more?
I think same argument could be made for *BSD! Drivers are pretty darn good for OS/2 | eCS too. How many "alternative" OS have support for the DVD, USB including USB CD-RW's?
As for Linux, that's up to you. Some people like fiddling around and re-compiling their kernels and mussing around with LIB hell. Some don't, I tried and I don't. I just use OS/2 and keep on using and using and using...To me, Linux is not ready yet.
If you are running a big web server farm like Google, OS/2 is probably not your best choice. If you want to play games, OS/2 is probably not your best choice, due to lack of games. If you consider yourself a "power" user, but are not a "hacker" type and you're sick of Windows crap, OS/2 is a good choice.
Look around, compare the offerings and pick the one that is best for your job.
KEEP AN OPEN MIND!
And to those of you who think OS/2 is dead... you should keep up with the times. IBM is still spending $$$ on programmers to update and bug fix OS/2. Do you think they blow money just for the heck of it? They do it because they have many, many paying customers that justify the expense.
Actually, the single input queue fix was included in Warp 3 FixPack 17, and warp 4 fixpack 5 (I think).
I'm not sure what you mean by a "console" lockup though. I've had the system freeze and applications become unresponsive.
The SIQ fix was to end that. You have to try to bring up the task list (Control + Escape key) twice, and then you get a little "application name is not responding. Press Enter to end it, changes will not be saved." dialog box.
1. eComStation is not developed or distributed by IBM. It is built on OS/2, but it was and is being developed by Serenety Systems, and distributed by Mensys and Indelible Blue and a few other vendors who escape me. Visit http://www.ecomstation.com/ for more information.
2. IBM, as far as I know, has little to do with this effort. Interface overhauls, etc. are being handled by people who developed 3rd party apps for OS/2.
3. Win 32 compatibility is being provided by the Odin project (formerly win32-os2 project). http://odin.netlabs.com/ I think.
4. Xfree86 has been ported to OS/2 by Holger Viet. I don't remember his website, but there is plenty of information about how to do that.
5. Both software packages mentioned in 3 & 4 are addons, and you do have to go out and get them, but they are also free. Source available in many cases also. (This does not sound all that different from apt-get or RPM does it?)
6. For the person who said the mouse is confusing, Go to "System" double click on the mouse object, and then select "Mappings" from the properties/settings notebook. You should be able to reassign functions there. (those other posts that responded to you were, uh, uninformative.)
7. As for IBM open sourcing the WorkPlace Shell, forget it. Parts of WPS are owned by Microsoft, as parts of OLE are owned by IBM. IBM can't open it up due to contractual obligations (We saw the same argument when Ralph Nader asked IBM to open up the source of OS/2 in the antitrust trial).
8. It's probably already been said, but eCS != OS/2. This is the reason that you have a version number of 1.
9. I prefer it because all the hardware I've purchased for my machines is OS/2 compatible. That is a little more work, but not as much as you might think. Besides, haven't Linux users had to do the same thing?
10. Yes, I have tried linux. Linux Mandrake 7.0, Redhat 5.2 and 6.0. To be honest, they were cool. But I don't like to spend all that time fiddling around with configuring the computer. Some of that is fine, but too much is a pain in the neck. So I don't do it. (Case sensitivity was the thing that really turned me off. Just doesn't seem to matter all that much.)
Unless you want to use a network card, SCSI card, IDE controller, sound card, CD or DVD drive, floppy drive, internal hard drive, external hard drive, modem, external FPU, RAM, or that light on the front of the case that tells you when you're accessing the hard drive (that isn't supported anyway).
I'm sure that this is intended to be humor, but the fact that it's been modded up at least once as "Interesting" means that some people are bound to be confused. Half of the stuff on that list either relies on age-old standards (hence requiring only a generic driver) or has nothing to do with the specific OS (the RAM and das blinkenlights come to mind).
Cheers,
IT
Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.
an AHA2940 w/CDW
is that a write-only CD?
we are all different, thank goodness !
I'm not!
They're already risking having a competitor do better than they. They are porting Linux to just about everything with a CPU that they manufacture. What is going to happen when 51% of S/390 (or whatever the heck they're called now) orders request Linux instead of OS/390? I'd call that an embarrasment.
I also think they've prolly spent more money on a new version of O/S2 than they would have with making their own Linux distro. But that is strictly an opinion...
Why does everybody keep on insisting on keeping dead operating systems lying around? I mean, aside for the fact that I can get a little nostalgic about my Commodore 64 emulator, it doesn't do a wholehelluvalot for me. Just the statement about the lack of driver support should preclude IBM from wasting money on this venture.
Now that I'm done ranting, I'll say something (I hope) semi-intelligent. IBM could have easily used Linux for something like this. They could have even used a flavor of BSD. Either way that would be better in the driver department.
In fact, when is IBM going to get around to publishing their own Linux distro? Are they even thinking about something like this? Why not, Linux is halfway to usurping OS/390 and AIX (not to mention Solaris, Winblowz, IRIX, et al.)?
I would certainly love to see big blue put the moves on a Linux distro. Not only would that give IBM a good reason to start putting a lot of effort into driver creation for Linux, but it would also give their Linux initiative a lot more clout, and it would allow IBM to take Microsoft on directly with a quality and widely used operating system.
I'm surprised that more big software companies haven't put out their own distros. Oracle comes to mind. Why don't they make a linux distro that is specifically for installing Oracle on top of? I think it would be great if I no longer had to deal with all the crap that Redhat introduces into their distro that effectively breaks Oracle. Ugh....
Obviously not, unfortunately.
Typical... of the lame marketing back-seat-driving
that was the most memorable feature of the OS/2,
Amiga, and Atari ST communities.
So, OS/2 Warp 5 is at version 1.0.0? Sounds very powerful...surely a scientist is behind this.
If it's enhanced for Pentium III, I am so there, dude.
< tofuhead >
--
It is still the dark of night.
eComStation is brought to you by your turnkey eCommerce B2B P2P bluetooth solutions partner. Thinking different, one customer at a time, because it's your e-internet.
IBM...for great justice.
[fade out from uplifting Moby track...now]
< tofuhead >
--
It is still the dark of night.
But if you want to write app code for their OS, they won't stand in your way, at least not initially. They may crush you out of existence later, but they make it easy to write apps for their platforms. IBM, on the other hand, made it hard. And MS had a head start on cultivating developer mindshare. That and the fact that IBM was slower to respond to changing stimuli pretty much sealed the fate of OS/2.
But of course nothing compares to linux, linux may be hard to configure for the average luser, but it's a developer's delight - all the tools are mostly there, and they're all free. Now if linux was easy enough for the average luser to install, there might be a market for 3rd party apps, but I'm not holding my breath.
Personally, I like the term "E-tard". Used properly, a single word can speak volumes...
A dingo ate my sig...
Your post is akin to saying, "Well, I don't want to run Windows 2000 because I tried to run Windows NT 3.1 and it sux0r3d."
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
1. Open the Drives object.
2. Right click the "dirty" drive.
3. Choose "check disk".
4. Choose to correct errors.
Or, open a command window and run:
chkdsk d: /f:2
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
If IBM would spend the massive money needed, and release OS/2 opensource they could TRULY speed linux adoption. Better, to save money, they could just make a window manager (with *REAL* fonts dear god..) that works like OS/2 does for X windows.
With the release of a prominent, visible, powerful desktop operating system that WAS proven to be powerful, they could change the game in a big way.
I can hear all the arguments saying "Well, they lost the first time on their NATIVE system". And its a valid point.
However, it is an entirely different fight. IBM would be ADDING what they have (a working desktop paradigm/technology), and using what linux has (GREAT device drivers and solid support in 2.4 for the latest technology).
In short, since IBM is investing so much money in linux, mostly as a server solution, why not go for the long shot and invest in the biggest battle of them all. The desktop.
GPL'd web-based tradewars themed space game
> P.S. What the hell is an external FPU?!
Hehe. Lil'guy. In the old times we had: 8088, 8086, 80286, 386, 486sx, 486slc, 486dlc and NexGen which didn't had an internal Floating Point Unit. You had to buy an external one (8087, 80287, 387 and 487(a 387 for the 486dlc and slc).
Anyone remember the Weitek FPU's ? They were from 200 to 800% faster than the intel x87 counterparts. I still have two working motherboards with a Weitek slot on them. Does Linux make use of it ?
--
1% APY, No fees, Online Bank https://captl1.co/2uIErYq Don't let your $$$ sit in a no-interest acct.
IIRC, Apple got tired of waiting for Pink, and decided to start development of Coupland. In the mean time, Java came out, and since Apple wasn't giving their best effort, Taligent was reabsorbed into IBM. A lot of what was to be Pink eventually found it's way into the joint Sun/IBM JavaOS effort, but that was eventually shelved. By this time, Apple's Coupland effort had stalled, Jobs was back into the fray, and OpenSTEP (now MacOS X) is the successor to the traditional MacOS product line. I don't think that there's really anything left of Taligent... The JavaOS would have been the closest thing, though. Java is the spiritual successor to the platform agnostic execution environment that Taligent offered, though.
Do some research. OS/2 driver support has spanked Linux for some time now. Only now is it catching up. Halfway to usurping OS/390, AIX, Solaris, Winblowz, IRIX, indeed. Apparently since Linux stuff is free, this leaves more money for hallucinogens.
I went into an Egghead store once to buy an OS/2 magazine. They sold OS/2 Warp 4, so I asked the salesman if they thought they might sell more of it if they carried some of the applications. He told me there were none. I guess the software buyers guide attached to the magazine must have been imaginary. I guess the fact that the POS system that rang up my purchase was running OS/2 was just another sign it was fading.
It was there in 3.0 and probably in 2.0. Just because your rotten memory can't recall it or you didn't RTFM long ago, doesn't mean it didn't exist. I suppose you enjoy system where the same button selects and moves so that you are always moving things when you meant to select them. ENTIRE DIRECTORY TREES vanishing on a network volume from people using Windows Explorer comes to mind. Countless hours re-aligning controls on a form after trying to select them instead. More hours spent locking and unlocking same controls in an attempt to keep them in place.
Oh yeah, the name "Warp" is soooooo much lamer than "Linux". I mean, I started using Linux because it had such a cool name - it was so cool it made up for all its other lameness.
OS/2 System folder, System Setup folder, Mouse object, open it, Mappings tab. Change "Dragging objects" from "Button 2" to "Button 1".
As for the documentation, the online documentation is very good. RTFM also means reading/searching that too. I just right clicked on the desktop, selected help->index, scrolled down to "Mouse", selected that, then selected "Setting button+key combinations". It said:
Use Mouse - Properties Mappings page to customize
the Alt, Shift, and Ctrl key combinations.
For a detailed explanation of each field, select from
the list below:
Dragging objects
Displaying Window List
Displaying pop-up menus
Editing title text
Undo
Default
That wasn't a fix, it was a work-around. It doesn't solve all the issues. And the reason why isn't wasn't "properly fixed" was because it would break compatibility. Yes, there are some apps out there that depend on the SIQ to function. I think VoiceType is one of them.
--
Lord Nimon
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
When did you first think OS/2 was a "superior" operating sysem? The day I tried the first beta of OS/2 2.0. I had used OS/2 1.x before, and although I could see the potential, I really couldn't use it.
Have you ever tried using another operating system? Yes, pretty much every other major PC OS except *BSD, including BeOS.
Have you tried different other operating systems? Huh?
Is anyone else in your family an OS/2 user? My father uses it every now and then, but he rarely uses a computer nowadays.
Did you have OS/2 experiences as a child? Heh. Sorry, I was in college when OS/2 1.0 came out.
Are you a 100% OS/2 user, or do you occasionally use other operatings sytems? My day job is a Linux driver programmer, and I use my wife's Mac for playing games and a few other things that I could do on my OS/2 PC if I weren't too cheap to buy more hardware. Why buy a second CDR drive when I can make an ISO image and ftp it to the Mac?
Do you consider using OS/2 normal? As normal as using any "alternative" OS.
When did you first 'come out' and tell your friends and family that you were an OS/2 user? Back when I started using OS/2, everyone thought it would be the future, even Bill Gates.
Have you been critized because of your OS orientation? Sure, but these people have never been able to explain to me why I should switch. They make it sound as if I'm missing out on something, but they never tell me exactly what that is.
--
Lord Nimon
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
Hi,
n qu iry.asp?userid=2UCMDG5IRA&mscssid=RKSJM7VB13AV9MQV BTSHAQRMMSG99J57&isbn=0812927168
Actually I bought this book from Amazon (my first and last one) but as I see OneClick boycott is still on, here is the same book from Barnes&Noble.
I have read the book and well, was really amazed. That can be your "point of view" for ALL ms happenings, their tactics etc.
Book is named "The Microsoft File" and is written by Wired author "Wendy Goldman Rohm". If you only read the "preview", I hope you will get me...
http://shop.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnI
Great stable operating system with acceptable driver support and a decent GUI would *really* have been successful.
well you're in luck, as the operating system you describe exists and it's called MacOS X! :P
- j
Come ON! It's DEAD! I did the OS/2 thing when it was viable, but it was time to let go 3 years ago! Linux brings the same degree of stability that attracted me to OS/2 without the desktop that corrupts itself at the drop of a hat or the single system input queue that was always everyone's biggest problem with OS/2. What are you going to do with this? Break out that old copy of Galactic Civilizations and go a few rounds?
Install Windows or install UNIX. There's a tool for the job, and this ain't it!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
You can run Sidekick on it in the DOS mode...
http://www.millnet.se/ GO/U d- s+:+ a C++ UL++++ P- L+++ E W+++ N+ w++ M-- PE+ t+ X++
-Begin Rant-
Well yeah... When you're running your Proprietary Mitsumi CD ROM off your proprietary Mitsumi Interface on your SB16 card. How many of those 4 plugs did you try before you got the right one?
Oh yeah, your Packard Bell PB100 came with all that already installed.
Why did Win95 work when you first installed it? Because it just Dos 7, and Windows 4. So you used your DOS drivers to access proprietary CD from within Windows 4.
-End rant-
FYI, my Cheapo ATA-66 PCI card works better in OS/2 (and Linux) than it does in Win2k. (IRQL Less or not Equal? WTF?)
With EMX support on OS/2, you can build a lot of your Linux apps on OS/2, and run them in an X Session, or on the command line. Yes, you can get XFree86 for OS/2. You can also get Wine for OS/2.
I don't run OS/2 regularly for the same reasons I don't run Linux regularly. In fact, for my uses (Netware admin) OS/2 has worked better. Better Windows support with Netware shell support, and DOS sessions that run Netware DOS utils. (VMWare WORKS for that on Linux, but a Bicycle would WORK as transportation to get me 50 miles to work too...)
I don't doubt Linux can do more of that now than last time I tried, but some of you wanted an example of why you'd run OS/2 instead of Linux.
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
There was a fixpack out long ago to fix that..
Another thing to keep in mind was OS/2's timeouts when it came to an application not responding. IIRC, there was a timeout of at least 60 seconds before your 'End Task' dialog box would show.
Doesn't sound like a long time, but when you sit and wait for the PC to do something, it can appear that the system has locked up.
There was also a config.sys setting to change that timeout.
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
As in the Numlock always being off at boot up?
Theres a driver for that.
IIRC, Numlock status is also 'bonded' to each session, so if you have numlock on in one console window, it might be off in another.. Load the driver, and it should be on all the time (until you turn it off in an individual session...
try hobbes.nmsu.edu
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
I agree with the variable tuning... Always had to adjust the cache size.. that made no sense, but wasn't a big deal.
:), I played Descent. I also had a PAS 16 (you know the REAL 16 bit sound card :).
I never was a Doom fan (took over #doom once
Never had a problem with sound. I thought the coolest thing was having 4 copies of Descent running simultaniously on a P75 with 16MB.
And a 320x200 DOS game, was actually a 320x200 window when not full-screen... can Win2k even do that yet?
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
Having visited the EComstation site, I don't understand what the 'hardware support' issue is. There appears to be just as much USB support in OS/2 as there is in Linux.
:)
Here's the difference:
When I used OS/2 extensively, and you needed a driver, or some 3rd party app, you went to Hobbes.
Maybe IBM, if you wanted a FixPack, but more often than Not, Hobbes.nmsu.edu was the place to go.
Look at Linux Support. Freshmeat, sourceforce, cdrom.com mirrors... I think if anything has forked, it's where to find 3rd party applications.
How many times have you seen an Ask Slashdot, where the question is related to a type of app, only to get a million links to a bunch of different applications that were mostly 'discovered', rather than organized in a central repository.
True, Google/Deja(sniff) are definately helping with 3rd party support, but it would make thngs much easier if everything were centralized.
It seems to me, that any existing repositories each have their own lists. There's still too much searching.. We're networked people, lets combine them using SQL on FreeNet..
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
I see a lot of OS2/BeOS/Amiga/Commodore bashing going on here. As a former long-time BeOS user, I know how it feels to use a so-called "Legacy" operating system. It takes more love and dedication, more compromise, and more cojones to run an operating system like Be or OS2 than it takes to run even Linux. There are so many technical advances and unrealized potential in systems like BeOS that we all can learn from. If Linux developers can open their minds to the advances made by other operating systems, and not allow those advances to fade into the past with a "legacy" OS, the entire computing community would be better off. Yes, there are features in BeOS that even *gasp* our treasured Linux can't touch. My BeOS laptop boots in half the time of my Linux desktop despite the fact that its only a quarter of the speeed. The BeOS programming experience is amaizing; after only my 100-level college C++ class I was able to code my first GUI BeOS programs, with no experiance whatsoever. The file system is simple and stable, the GUI is sexy and uncluttered, and the "media kit", although crippled, is ingeneous and unmatched in any other operating system.
So why are Be and BeOS dying despite all these advances? If BeOS is so awesome, why don't we all use it? I can give lots of reasons, but thats not the point. Lack of "killer apps". Lack of driver support for a lot of newer hardware. Be's abandonment of BeOS for BeIA. I could claim a great Microsoft conspiracy, but I know that wasn't a factor... BeOS never even got big enough to show up on Microsoft's radar screen, so they had no reason to shoot us down. So why didn't it work out? Lack of users. Without people dedicated enough to put up with the few compromises for the many advances, Be simply didn't have the userbase to keep a closed source operating system alive.
But what a "minor-league" OS like BeOS does manage to do is create a very dedicated community. Not the evangelical, Linus is god mentality that much of the Linux community shares, but a very dedicated, down to earth mentality that is pleasant to be a part of. BeOS users hang on every word to come out of JLG's mouth, every tidbit of info we can find. "If we could just get X patch, or a driver for Y, or that OpenGL beta, we could own the world". The un-ending optimism, even as it seems that Be itself is spiralling towards the ground hoping for a big-money corporation to buy them out before they die, is amazing, and shows great dedication.
There are a lot of comments in this thread that say things like "BeOS/OS2/Amiga users are so shallow" for using an "outdated" operating system. I belive that the Linux community needs to stop being so short sighted, and embrace the advances made by these other operating systems. I'm not saying we shoud all go wipe our precious Linux installs off our hard drives and go buy BeOS Pro, but we should open our eyes and not let their potential die. We should look deeper into these OSes and say "wow... feature X is really cool, maybe we should find a way to build that into Linux". Maybe Be will die, maybe the BeOS user-base will shrink even further. But don't let great ideas die. If we do, we should all be ashamed.
As I write this using Netscape under Mandrake, I can't help but feel nostalgic. I just went and downloaded BeOS5 PE (http://free.beos.com). Even if Be dies, the OS it created will never dissapear. Don't let its potential be frozen in time.
Krezel
http://chrismetcalf.net
You Linux zealots consider yourselves "open-minded" and "worldly" about computer technology, and bash "ancient" OSes like OS/2 and AmigaOS. Like others point out, many of the same people who criticize Microsoft for spreading FUD about Linux have never used any of the non-MS OSes they themselves criticize as being "not as good as Linux."
While Linux is a great operating system in a myriad of ways, it is not yet the end-all OS that solves every problem that people like to say it is. Right now, it is most useful for people that have lots of time to spend "tweaking" their computer. Yes, it's stable and yes, it's fast, but it's not nearly the "complete experience" OS/2 was (is).
I ran OS/2 for years; mainly because I was constantly searching for a way to multitask my BBS on my 386sx-16. I ran OS/2 2.0 with 6 megs of RAM and was able to multitask beautifully--the system was more stable than ANY OS I have used since then (Linux is coming close to meeting these stability levels, but you still need to throw far more hardware at it.) But the greatest thing about OS/2 that is often overlooked was it's phenomenal GUI -the WorkPlace Shell. Everything was (is) an object; everything interacted with everything else. Everything was DESIGNED from the ground-up to be consistent and logical; things simply FLOWED from one place to another effortlessly. Programs written to take advantage of the WPS were SO unique in their design that I haven't seen anything on any other OS come close to their usability. You didn't launch monolithic applications or worry about file associations; everything just smoothly blended together... hard to explain to someone who HASN'T USED IT!
Instead of calling up antiquated library routines from DLLs, you could invoke methods from objects... the objects were all "self-aware." IBM was smart in choosing REXX as the scripting language to tie this together; completely backwards-compatible with the DOS batch language and a cinch to program in (and cross-platform). VB can't come close; even Perl/Python are more complex syntactically. Everything was really well thought-out.
Linux is a well-built kernal, but it can't match OS/2 for speed simply because it has heftier requirements. And you're at the mercy of your chosen distribution for "everything else." OS/2 did it right YEARS before any of the other OSes really got rolling - Windows 2000 FINALLY addresses some of the usability issues that OS/2 fixed a decade ago.
I think it would be really cool if more people tried more "ancient" OSes to see what things we could learn from them. I think the Linux development community could learn a lot from them...
I'm babbling... I think I need some more caffeine.
As for Egghead, they became real toads for Microsoft around the time Windows95 came out. Now they, like so many others who thought they could profit from an MS world, are all but gone.
sigh...I'm still wondering whatever happened to Taligent and "Pink".... Anyone remember that?...that at one point actually seemed like a MacOS-related thing I might actually use...heh.
I was asking myself the very same question when i wrote the story. Personally, IBM was stupid, didn't advertise, charged way too much for their software, and lost thier market entirely. It was way ahead of everything else for its time, but its time is over, I admit. Now its time to move to Linux and be happy.
-----------------------------------------
-----------------------------------------
Perversely greped and groped by PowerPenguin
OS/2's hardware support is just about on a par with Linux's. In some areas, it's no doubt weaker (multimedia, perhaps). In others, it's stronger. I'm sure it balances out...
OS/2 has had solid USB support, for instance, for at least two years. (True, it doesn't support OHCI, but most built-in controllers are UHCI.) Supported devices include modems, keyboards, mice, printers, speakers, USB-Ethernet and CD-RW devices.
Other recent technologies OS/2 includes are UDF (for DVD-ROM and DVD-RAM), I20 (Intelligent Input/Output), ATA-100, and even support for some WinModems. This doesn't strike me as the mark of an obsolete OS.
OS/2 supports Logical Volume Management, far more elegantly and transparently than Linux, for instance. The newest versions also come with JFS (journalled file system).
OS/2's multithreading, SMP support, TCP/IP stack and Java virtual machines are all generally considered just about the best of any x86 operating system. These are all up-to-date with current features.
In terms of everyday hardware, OS/2 supports almost all NICs, SCSI controllers, and video chipsets. (A special IBM version of Scitech Display Doctor supports almost all current video cards in a single driver.)
As for software support... well, OS/2 is in a transitional phase. Remember, OS/2 originated in the days when BBS shareware ruled the cheap software market, and three-figure industrial applications ruled the commercial market.
There are still big, commercial packages and small shareware packages (some extremely high-quality ones, at that), although admittedly the variety is shrinking rapidly.
But the open source model is rapidly picking up steam on OS/2. Some of the most promising application support under OS/2 is free or Free. Just take a look at OS/2 NetLabs for a quick sample of some of the projects underway. And that's just scratching the surface.
Most major Linux applications are also available on OS/2. XFree86, Samba, Perl, Apache, CDRecord, GIMP, GNOME, VIM, bash, gcc... I could go on.
The point is, OS/2 is far from obsolete and nowhere close to being a dead end. Give us some credit. We (OS/2 users) are not a bunch of sad relics from an ancient era who refuse to wake up and notice the world has moved on. We're moving with the world.
Some of us even hope to help move the world ourselves... and that, I think, is eComStation's goal.
ALT
actually, I saw a wells fargo ATM machine reboot a couple months ago. And yes it was running OS/2.
.
Get those games ported, drop the price and just maybe! Ok, so it won't happen - it was a nice thought!
I can't remember the exact phrasing or technical terms, but OS/2 has (had) only one keyboard (help me here) stream, so if an app blocked the stream, you couldn't regain control through the keyboard.
;)
I believe NT has multiple input streams, which for me was a major advantage over OS/2. I could be cynical and say that Microsoft designed OS/2 to only have one stream to somehow "cripple" OS/2, but I won't!
I've heard, however, that most are based on OS/2 running on old PS/2 hardware (think 55SX with a 386 processor).
OS/2 may not be on your Mom's PC or running the company website, but rest assured, it's alive and well doing stuff like ATM machines, retail systems, store kiosks (like those wedding registry things you see at Target) interfaces for complex machines (our tape jukebox has an OS/2 based controller), and other mundane things that you don't even realize have a computer inside of them because they're so stable.
Next time you go to the mall, count how many computers you see. I'd bet there's more than you think and some of them are running OS/2.
+++
+++
NO CARRIER
(Before anyone flames, yes, I know running on PowerPC vs. Intel is not a function of drivers, but if it doesn't run on your computer, the net result is the same)
The only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
How can you say that? Doesn't everyone watch movies on their production servers?
compuglobalhypermeganet... Now that's deserving company name to produce eComCyberStation2000i!
Buy 'em out boys...
-- Chris Martin, System Administrator
You'd have to ask the people involved, but perhaps they were considering the history of the infamous win32s.dll, which Microsoft kept "improving" in ways that would break OS/2 compatibility. They finally stopped when they came up with a call whose sole purpose in life was to allocate memory and that made a point of grabbing memory above the 512 Mbyte limit that OS/2 (up until pretty recently) imposed on DOS sessions, and hence on Windows. At that point, evidently, IBM realized that MS would keep playing such games as long as IBM tried to catch up, and gave up.
Well, I have a laptop with three hard drives using Linux for some stuff, windoze for other stuff and OS/2 for still more stuff....with ECS, I am hoping to be able to get all my apps under one OS - dunno if it will work, but its worth $139 for me to have a play with it.
Let's create an OS with great technology!
Then let's not market it!
IBM and Be, Inc. should get into bed sometime...
Peace,
Amit
ICQ 77863057
[o]_O
Update was released last week. Schmuck.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
Later, I heard that most of the ATMs now use QNX instead of OS/2. Well, actually I heard it from QNX fan, so I take it with a grain of salt.
So, could someone enlighten me - what's inside those ATM boxes now and why they are so stable and reliable? Hmm... Probably, I should install one at home :)
Seeing how the Win95 UI is a look-a-like-hack of the OS/2 Workplace shell, but without really copying the really advanced ideas.. So it's a little silly to say Windows UI is "still" not more advanced.
It's basically the same old thing as it was in Win95, 6 years later! Isn't monopoly great? Everyone pat themselves on the back for bashing OS/2 now.
Well, there's hoping for a good Gnome/KDE rip-off from microsoft.
Oh, I think the damn thing would've really needed a new kernel. At least NT could always kill unresponsive apps.
I think they should change their email listed from "heythere" to "heythereos-2isstillbarelyalive"
:)
...according to the price sheet eCS Standard is $279.00.
If I'm using Windows, or another "alternative" OS like BeOS, *BSD or *LINUX, why would I want to switch?
Can anybody explain why this would be of interest to anyone other than OS/2 people looking to upgrade?
Don't get me wrong. I'm happy for the OS/2 people, and I'm glad to see diversity in the OS market. I just don't see what the advantage is over another OS. Any OS/2 fans wanna pitch it?
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
>Looking around at all the biased, uninformed, >ignorant posts reminds me why FUD is such a good >marketing tool. As opposed to whatever the opposite of FUD is... excessively high expectations. It's what the pro-MS crowd has been chiming in about windows 9X, windows NT, 2k, XP and so on ever since everyone was still dealing with Dos and Win 3.X and annoyances like cd-roms that fail 50% of the time to work properly in Dos and windows, or sound cards that didn't work with your game unless you used the older soundblaster emulation of your card. And the OS/2 folks were just as guilty. Example: >How many of you that just bashed Os/2 have ever >ran it? For more then a day, and before it quote >unquote died? I have used os/2 warp for a year on a 486 computer. I started off with 4 megs of ram, eventually upgraded to 12. More stable and useable than windows 3.1 was, but then, win3.1 apps worked in os/2 for the most part and few of them were any good IMO. It wasn't until I installed win 95 when I realized there was nothing I could do in OS/2 that I could not also do in windows 95. And do so better. >How many are baseing your opinion on other FUD? >Have any of you ran a BBS and wheren't running >Os/2 or Linux? I never ran a BBS. I did use IBM's mediocre web browser, however. And the various, lame os/2 irc clients that were easily outdone by mirc. For most of my time in os/2, if I irc'ed I did so by telnetting into a shell. About the only app that os/2 had which was superior to anything in windows was ZOC. Not much of a surprise to learn that ZOC was ported to windows about a year or 2 after I abandoned os/2. >How often could you surf the web, play quake 1, Surf the web. Yeah great. With a shitty web browser (Netscape didn't exist for os/2 until 97 at the earliest). > and have 2 nodes with users actively doing >things without a slow down? On a NON-pentium On a 486/33? Hahahahaha Yeah sure. On a 486/100/133? Maybe. With 64 megs of ram. 32 perhaps. 16, no way. >computer? Ohh that's right you never could. >I'm not trying to flame here, but I'm tired of >people spreading FUD. Not just about Os/2, but >Linux, Windows, Mac's, anything that they >haven't experienced first hand but they still >shoot their mouths off because "everyone else" >says so.
So, I ended up just passing the CD off to a friend. Who had the same problem. I've heard many good things about OS/2. I just havn't been able to get that first hand experience. Maybe I can soon!
"Drug related crime" is a misnomer, "prohibition related crime" is the more accurate and correct phrase.
Is it just me, or does the name "eComStation" sound like the mother of all conference-room upper-management decisions?
OK, I think we need to put a 'Com' in there somewhere, since dotcoms are big nowadays and everyone wants the internet. How does ComStation sound?
And we need to make it sound more hip and high-tech. How about eComStation?
I guess we should be lucky it's not "eComCyberStation2000i."
Kinda reminds me of Cranky Kong. "We didn't have no games made on one of them SGI workthingys. We had a 2-frame walk and were happy with what we got, dagnabbit!"
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
For future reference though, I don't use Outlook on Windows, I use Mozilla on Linux.
I'm glaad you're proud to be an OS/2 user =)
Unless you want to use a network card, SCSI card, IDE controller, sound card, CD or DVD drive, floppy drive, internal hard drive, external hard drive, modem, external FPU, RAM, or that light on the front of the case that tells you when you're accessing the hard drive (that isn't supported anyway).
That hasn't been my experience. Many times an abnormal shutdown on OS/2 will result in "Drive x: is dirty. Run chkdsk /f" messages. Problem is you can't run chkdsk with the /f switch from the normal shell. You have to boot to FLOPPY. OMG that is horrible.
OS/2 is still big in the financial world.
The best thing about OS/2 always was the graphical user interface. Way ahead of their time with their object model and OpenDoc OLE concepts. Everything else (even KDE and M$ Windows) is still far behind. Would have been great to have it run on freeBSD or Linux. Great stable operating system with acceptable driver support and a decent GUI would *really* have been successful.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Well, I was trying to stick to cold, dead operating systems. BeOS is dead, but the body hasn't grown cold yet. :)
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Who has a shallower grip on reality... OS/2 advocates or Amiga advocates?
[shaking cane] Dang it, you kids don't know what you're missing! There ain't nuthin' that can touch (OS/2, AmigaOS), even today! (OS/2, AmigaOS) has [feature], [feature] and [feature], which these newfangled operating systems haven't gotten right yet! If it wasn't for (IBM/Commodore's) incompetence, and Microsoft's conspiracy, we would be 20 years farther ahead than we are now, instead of stuck with technology that is STILL behind what we were running years ago!
Dang it, where's my geritol....
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Hello??? Windows?
Of course it does!
I am become Troll, destroyer of threads
"... of the same marketing problems that killed OS/2. OS/2 Warp 3 and 4, for their times, "
They actually had a ton of marketting for OS/2 Warp... There were all sorts of "mainstream" ads with Pat Reilly, and other celebs, pontificating on how efficient OS/2 Warp made them...
*Shrug* They market-ed it as running windows/dos games/apps better than windows... which really wasn't 100% for a joe user.
*shrug*
e.
Build Your Own PVR/HTPC news, reviews, &
#include "rambling"
.. it should be dead. It's on life support because some fairly large customers still have it and need support. It is great at what it does, but it really has been eclipsed by Linux - Linux can provide all of the function of OS/2 (most of it at least), and IBM doesn't control Linux so IBM can't kill Linux by rolling over on it and playing dead. It's a shame that IBM rolled over and played dead a few years ago ... I'm still embarassed about IBM's unwillingness to show any backbone against Microsoft.
My first introduction to OS/2 was in 1994 when I bought a used 486/66 system with 16MB of RAM, a VL Bus SCSI card, 420MB SCSI hard drive, an ATI Graphics Ultra Pro (VLB), and a brand new IBM 17P monitor to go with it. This was a pretty bitchin setup in June of 1994, and of course, it came with a real operating system on it - OS/2 2.11.
I would blow people's minds with the machine. My father, a computer person with 20 years of experience at the time was in awe. The machine could compile C++ code, telnet (in and out), ftp (in and out), run WordPerfect 6.0 under DOS, and do all sorts of neat tricks - ALL AT THE SAME TIME. It did not thrash it's brain out - it had a real OS paging algorithm, not the nasty hack task switching that Windows 3.1 used. Oh yeah, I forgot that it also had an X-server and it was live on the internet through a SLIP connection.
I did a lot of great work on the machine while working towards my masters degree. OS/2 wasn't without faults, but it was damned good compared to Windows 3.1 Windows 95 was still way off in the future. I saw OS/2 as a personal version of unix; it had all of the libraries and tools that I needed. The compiler (C Set) was world class, and the graphical debugger & performance analysis tools were decent too.
In Dec 1995 I upgraded to Warp 3.0. That partition is still on my machine, one motherboard later, one video card later, two hard drives later, etc. The only thing that hasn't changed on the machine since I installed Warp 3.0 is the sheet metal on the case and the floppy drive. Every other component (including the power supply) has changed at least once. Show me a Windows partition that could survive all of that.
And of course I supported what I used. I worked for IBM which helped a lot, but I still bought the printer drivers for my Epson printer (from Germany), ImpOS/2 for graphics (also from Germany), BackAgain/2 for backup, and other goodies. I had to buy more expensive hardware to ensure that it was supported under OS/2, and I could never use the bundled software that came with my hardware. (SCSI HP 4C scanner, SCSI Zip, SCSI Tape, Matrox Video, etc.) That was a harsh tax to pay, but I believed in the product.
Buying the software that I should be getting for free was an uphill battle though. Eventually I had to install Windows 95 to use some Windows only software. For a long time I dual-booted between the two, usually preferring OS/2. On the same hardware it just seemed to respond much faster than Windows 95. Eventually I acquired more Windows software, and now I use OS/2 when I need to fall back to something old, like it's DOS support or those specific programs that I purchased.
I'm almost entirely on Win 98SE now. OS/2 is still on the machine, and it's up to Warp 3.0, Fixpack 40. I never bothered with 4.0 - IBM was very good about allowing Warp 3.0 users to patch their way into new functions, so I haven't needed to. It's in maintenance mode now - I'd never install something new there.
I can't complain about Win 98SE too much. It's what Windows 95 should have been. It doesn't crash often, and I can do almost anything I need to. But for code development, I avoid it like the plague and I go to Linux.
BTW, that 486/66 was re-incarnated as my Linux firewall box! Good hardware never dies. And thank goodness for Linux, which gave it a use again. It's not a barn burner, but with a 4GB hard drive and 32MB of RAM it's actually a pretty usable little box. I would never attempt that with Windows of any flavor. (I really love that little box.)
I've used every version of DOS from 2.1 up, OS/2, Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows 98 SE, Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2K Pro, AIX 3.x and 4.x, OS/400, and Linux in varying amounts over the last 15 years. (I'm not counting the stuff I've only just touched, like Solaris/SunOS, VMS, Ultrix, etc.) My favorite OSes are OS/2, Windows 98, and Linux. Linux has the lead at the moment.
Back to OS/2
If you work at IBM (as I once did) it's not spendy.
Not that that really makes a difference overall.
I wish they'd make a version for home users, though...
~sabine
I ran into this a couple times on the bank job; I believe support found it to be triggered by a certain sequence of toggling screens that led them to do further training. Anyway, if you hardboot out of it, you came back up clean, which is more than I can say for WIN98.
We have a situation on my current contract where we were locking up an app, and had to pull the laptop battery to reboot, and then of course scandisk would run...
Quit bashing something you don't understand.
With that said, the previous poster was wishing for something elegant as OS/2 on *Nix. I have found the combination of Windowmaker + ROX Filer to be quite nice.
http://rox.sourceforge.net
Windowmaker + ROX is quite elegant.
Still under development, but for something that runs Starcraft, WinAmp, RealPlayer, Quake 3 and much more, they're not doing half bad!
They're smoking crack if they think I'd pay for it though...
Anyone interested in using an alternative OS is already used to downloading one for free. The only OS/2 Warp 5ish buyers will be upgraders, and I hope for eComStation's sake, it will be enough.If you believe this is a simple repackaging ... either we failed or you haven't done any research of what eComStation is .. the concept of mobile managed clients, the WiseMachine component. For more info see http://www.serenity-systems.com/ecs/ecs-main.html
Nobody needed to go through this effort to repackage. There are good, new things to be had,
http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/opinions/32 52/1/
Regards,
Bob St.John
Serenity Systems
>a bunch of old browsers and office suites (har har).
And Har dee har harrrrr since several new browsers are being released for OS/2-eCS this year and the product comes with Smart Suite 1.6 for OS/2, which was also released this year.
But ... by calling it an OS ... I think you are demonstrating the challenge associated with eComStation (eCS), it is much more than an OS. More like an environment which comes with its own OS platform embedded into it.
With that in mind, you should hurry and get the $400 down (I'm assuming you are getting the SMP feature to get the price up to $400). It has a great deal of value associated with it.
Regards,
Bob St.John
Serenity Systems
Is this version better? I don't know. I know that > $250 is a hell of a lot to pay for an OS, especially when the source isn't available (which matters, to me at any rate, when it's software I'd be relying upon coming from a software company I have no reason to believe will exist in a year from now), and when I have to pay extra for compatability with Linux and Win32 apps (if I'm reading the price-list correctly.)
I don't necessarily agree with the trolls who think that any development of any OS other than Windows and my-favourate-Unix-varient is a waste of time, I love choice in operating systems. And if OS/2 5 is a real improvement, I'd be glad to see it. But the cost is absurd, 25-50% of the cost of the hardware it would run on. And having gotten used to having the source available after switching to Linux, and having been burnt twice before when the source wasn't (QL QDOS, C= AmigaOS, both excellent at the time, but both unsupported and with no way I can support myself), I'm not touching this with a 20' poll.
--
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
It's not really the OS/2 one, but at http://dfm.online.de/ you can find a file-manager which works just like the OS/2 WPS.
/usr/ports/x11-fm/dfm.
FreeBSD users, it's in
bash$
That was almost a really interesting, informed comment but unfortunately it was only about 75% coherent. Your english is killing you. Or else you're wasted right now. Sorry. (not that mine's much better...)
You are right, may be that's the reason why they fired me! XD
Well to be honest I might not remember every details very accurately, it's many years ago afterall; but one thing I've never forget is how they destoryed OS/2 - the original poster is right, the marketing killed it, but to kill a good product like that it needs more than marketing failure - say it needs at least one PHB region director, several imbecile third-line managers and a bunch of coward first-line project managers.
But IBM's failure to effectively market their superior product is what killed it, not Microsoft.
I think I can tell you why because I were there at time of OS/2 2.x. (well IBM dumped me like shit, they took my soul, my dignity; I wanted them die. So I'm biased, be prepare for flambait/troll. ^^)
You know, OS/2 2.0 was so good. It can run Windows 95, both windowed mode(multi-windows!) and full screen mode(in full speed!!), and have All the underlying protocols/interfaces you expect to interoperate with IBM's mid-range/mainframe systems. E.g. OS/2's scripting language is REXX (e.g. .cmd), and it's also 99% compatible with VM's REXX, which can be talked to each others. OS/2 has Visual REXX too! But I doubt anyone else other than IBM internal staffs has seen this great product.
The SOM(System Object Model) was so amazing. It's the first time in my life enjoy programming so much - true transparency, while be able to access to hardware/enterprise components with minimal effort! It also came with C set(C++set) which was very powerful at that time.(VC++ was nothing at all).
My job was finally bug fixing/reporting. My friends were luckier, they were responsible for games testing. YES! Game Testers! Played games on OS/2 everyday and got the same paid, can you believe it! Btw, my friend showed me running several windows of "Ultima 7" on the same desktop, I were stunned - not even Windows could do THAT!
Sound like a paradise, what's wrong with it then? Yes! You bet - Management! Those boneheads "see" the "opportunities" in "New Business Model"(don't ask me what the hell is that). Putting all the resources to promote the concept VisualAge, and how it worked with VB - yes, Visual Basic(those idiots....they seem to forgot our products). At the same time, they joint with Microsoft crashing us - first Microsoft filing lawsuit against us using Windows' code. Well we didn't, but the wimp management immediately yeilded to their supreme power and change the direction of OS/2 immediately, which took out a lot of functionalities out of OS/2 and caused the creation of orphan child like "OS/2 for Windows".
In order to meet with their promotion of VisualAge, and evaded the rage of Microsoft, they made a lot of changes after pre-decided shipping date, and rush to the production the ill-tested product. At the same time layoff/relocate a lot of technical staffs working on it. Game testers were first to be eliminated, and the management still don't understand why OS/2 2.0 has so many bugs and doesn't run games very well - Get A Clue! You fired the testers and ruined the final testing phase!
We faced thousand lawsuits every year, why should we be so fear of them and disrupted our production line so badly?
Enough of ranting....I just want to tell you, OS/2 was a great product, if only those clueless management could get away from us.
P.S. VisualAge is a great line of products nowaday. It wasn't started so well, but it's afterall a great concept.
Actually the reason why OS/2 supports Win 3.1 apps, and doesn't support Win 95 apps is quite simple. When IBM and M$ initially developed OS/2, there was an agreement between IBM and M$ which gave IBM access to Windows codebase. This agreement ran out before Win 95 was released!
I don't know much about eComStation, but I'll be sure to check it out. In the meantime, OS/2 still exists on thousands and thousands of corporate-drone desktops - so IBM is still making loadsadough of it. But I wish ta god they'd open-source the sucker.
CrazyLegs
"Pork!!" said the Fish, and we all laughed.
Does repackaging something with a silly name a product make?
Serenity Systems, not Mensys, are behind this version of OS/2 :)
http://www.ecomstation.com/
Then there was the issue of applications... a few bits of shareware, some mediocre stuff written with gpp, some *NIX ports - and a lot of really expensive business apps I didn't need. Its emulation was decent, but Doom without sound? Never!
Anyway, I switched to NT3.51 and never looked back. Nowadays its Win2k Professional and FreeBSD for me!
Lead developer, http://wisptools.net
First off, I really have to disagree with you. Mainly because you can't market something when there IS NO MARKET in the first place. Most consumers out there will default to the operating system their computer came with -- for lots of reasons, not just it being "easier and cheaper." One of those main reasons is compatibility with apps on the market. There has to be a pretty damn inspiring reason to ditch the ability to run stuff that "everyone else" is running and a non-free single-user/non UNIX OS doesn't really encompass much, IMO. OS/2 had a few good apps for it but by and by it was left out in the cold. You really aren't going to arouse any excitment in advertising when there isn't much to advertise in the first place -- that is certainly not to say OS/2 didn't have some unique high qualities to it, but how many of those qualities would appeal to most people?
Second, project ODIN or something along that general line of speak exists as a free project for OS/2 that enables it to run 32 bit Windows 95 compat binaries.
Lastly, OS/2/this new arguably stupid named incanation is really targeted to a niche market.
mwtr / THIS SIG HAS BEEN PRAYED OVER AND MAY BE USED AS A POINT OF CONTACT (ACTS 19:12)
the name... eComStation. Isn't that a bit dated already? eCommerce, eShopping, eThis, eThat...
that reminds me of that Dilbert cartoon where Wally says "I came up with a new name for the our marketing department, it would be called E-Marketing. I am also working on a similar project for Accounting, but I am not done yet."
OS2 Warp always had an excellent DOS support. You could tweak every option to make your DOS program compatible. It was more compatible than Windows! If a program breaks in a new Windows version it's a software problem, it it breaks in a no application OS, it's the OS problem.
OK, OS/2 is not Linux, is not Win2k and it's not MacOS X. And it's FreeBSD neither. It doesn't have all that much of a hardware support and maybe it doesn't have as many features as Win2k. But still, it has a right to exist! Are we to abandon any software that's not a number one candidate? How should anything evolve then?
Seriously, quote me on this, but I think it is just a clumsy attempt to let the system die. Even with a sizeable share in ATMs and IBM financial solutions, noone seriously expects OS/2 (or whatever they call it now) to survive a new price tag and incompatibility with anything else. I guess, IBM has just unloaded this burden without being accused of not supporting the customers.
That's it. Sorry for being hasty - gotta hurry to pay $400 for a O/S which only supports a bunch of old browsers and office suites (har har).
I don't know if this has been commented on yet, but, during my stint in MSDN Classes (VB and VC++) I saw the EXACT same modeling (diagram and all!) that is used in the IBM 2000 projection for OS/2... Kinda' scared me...
... of the same marketing problems that killed OS/2.
OS/2 Warp 3 and 4, for their times, were vastly superior to any comparably-priced microcomputer operating system. Remember that the competition, at the time, was Windows 3.1 and Windows 95.
But IBM's failure to effectively market their superior product is what killed it, not Microsoft.
The funny part is that in looking at the specifications for this product, I don't see that it will run applications designed for Win9x. Maybe I'm missing something here, but it looks like this runs DOS, Windows 16-bit, and OS/2 16- and 32-bit applications. All well and good, but I've got a lot of money invested in my 32-bit Windows applications, now, and even the availability of StarOffice for this platform isn't going to entice me into converting.
What that omission a marketing decision, or an engineering decision?
Remove the caps and hold to a mirror.
Ummm
Whats this got to do with eComStation, or OS/2 ??
Cheers
Ian Manners
Cheers Ian B Manners
Productivity !
Dependability !
Think of it as a fortified Linux with an excellent GUI.
Hey, I use Linux from RH, and SX but for my day to day needs, I'm still happy to pay for eComStation, or OS/2.
Cheers Ian B Manners
Me:-)
For my machines at work, that is, which still are running Warp4.
Cause privately I'm already using eCS. To be precise, it's running only on one of my five private PCs; three are still equipped with Warp4 and Warp Server and the fifth one is running Linux. (I want to remain in touch with what the rest of the world is doing:-)
Well, and I did get eCS for $140. (To put it with Gorbatchew: Who arrives late, will be punished by life:-)
Non, je ne regrette rien:-)
The thing you're referring to is the "single input queue" which indeed sometimes has been troublesome as it could be blocked by an ill behaving application.
In my experience (6 years intense use in several heterogeneous LANs) the main "bad boy" has been Netscape.
Fortunately, the actual Netscape version is a lot better; this year I didn't experience any SIQ blocking at all on any of my 10 OS/2 and eCS machines.
For other applications than Netscape there is a very useful utility named "watchcat" which helps effectively in dissolving SIQ blocking.
To say that Windows OS's have more drivers must be severely downplayed because the only way to get new drivers and more features is to buy a new version of an otherwise bad operating system. At least OS/2 or eCs is updated with features and drivers and the GUI isn't constantly being changed on the users. It was reported as bad when the OS/2 user interface, which is far superior to any Windows operating system, has to be learned. I didn't read about it being bad that new user interfaces for Windows operating systems were bad because users had to be retrained. It is true that Windows OS's have nice features. Now if the OS's worked and stayed up, then they would be worth something. I have used most of them, buying them just for hardware support and to run a few applications (non-Microsoft, I might add). As Microsoft keeps releasing operating systems which are never complete, never debugged, they are already being plagued by less driver support (some video cards I have purchased supposedly had NT support, not to be found on the CD-ROM or that didn't work) and less and less of the applications can be moved to the new operating system. Many of us will be glad when the ODIN project nears completion. Then OS/2 users around the world can run the many W95, W98,WNT, W2000 applications under OS/2 and eCs, most of which are non-Microsoft. Maybe the media in this country can fool everyone into believing the Windows is the way to go. They are going to find out that the Internet will enable users to find out that other, better operating systems are being used, especially in other countries. It is now Microsoft's turn to go downhill. Linux, eCs, and others will take over. Users will learn more and more about these operating systems because they will search the internet, no longer listening to just what the media here wants to report. The only thing good about Microsoft's OS's is their marketing. Even if these OS's don't dig deeply into Windows users and convert them to use something else, most of these other OS's are better and dependable than Windows. Great sales don't mean a product is good. Remember the Ford Pinto and the Firestone/Bridgestone epics? From someone who has been using OS/2 since version 2.0, I love it and am glad people all over the world are supporting it with enhancements, even through open-source. To those of you who are open-minded, not simple-mineded and brainwashed by Microsoft, look around the Web to see what is really going on, and then pick up an operating system that suits your needs, not what the news media in the US is telling you. Who knows, you may become an eCs user!
This is my meager attempt to set the record straight from a users perspective. If you have never used OS/2 it is very hard to get an honest review of it in the press and trades. I have used OS/2, Linux, NT, 95 and 98. I still like OS/2 best. eCS has the best chance of changing my loyalty from OS/2 of all the operating systems I have used. It's good to see that others enjoy using best of breed applications. I have found using OS/2 over the past 10+ years that it is more stable than MS operating systems and I don't have to buy a new version or replace my applications every time problems are fixed. The name has proven to be as stable as the product, how many Windows systems, any version, can claim to have been in constant operation for 6+ years without a reboot!!!! Well, I did lose power once. But I can not count that. eCS is based on an extremely stable platform and if you have not checked out the "Device driver Pak on line" lately you will find drivers for OS/2 that are not available of Windows 95, 98, NT, 2000, Millennium etc. they number in the thousands and most drivers are compatible with all 32 bit versions of OS/2, Server or client. I am very pleased to be able to make the choice of what applications I run on my systems, and I am not limited by a single vendor. To me choice and stability is what its all about. By the way, if you write code. You will find writing for OS/2 is considerably easier than Windows.
Laserpoint OS/2 Power User
I think this is IBM's fault as much as anyone else here. They could've done a better job but they decided to sell out to Mickeysoft for the longest time, and then in one of it's most ignorant moves it decided to cut support to OS/2 users to try to force us off onto Windows. Of course it was completely unsucessful, and even those of us who considered "The more viable platforms" that IBM refered to so graciously found ourselves on Linux,BSD, BeOS and Solaris.
So in other words IBM failed to force us over OS/2. Bottom line here is eComstation is the long awaited reality check for IBM and it's swarms of OS/2 followers. Nor only has OS/2 interest been reaffirmed but new interest in OS/2 has started to climb slowly but surely. As for OS/2 being dead, I'm just curious how many people here were forced to Beta Test the Windows XP. Because at latest it has one of the most severe application and driver shortages in Microsoft's history. Get I don't even use Windows and I realized after installing the Beta just how bad off it was. So if you think OS/2 or BeOS are dead boy just wait till you have to test XP.
Aggh, All and all though I think it goes a little like this. Look around and try everything. Find what you like. Then keep at it.
I've always had some other OS on my machine, because most of my favorite games needed direct hardware access to perform smoothly, so I chose OS/2 for the important stuff and MS-DOS (back then) for play.
Today the situation hasn't changed much, only MS-DOS has been substituted by Windows 98. I can afford it to crash almost regularly, because it isn't important for me; it's like resetting a Playstation, it doesn't matter.
Besides that, there is nothing I need. I've had my Linux experiences, and I still use it for educational purposes (to get used to the ***ix way of computing), because I need that knowledge, but if I had to rely on Linux the same way I rely on OS/2, I certainly would have returned to pencil and paper already.
I dont blame people for not using OS/2; as long as their need are met, that's fine. But if someone tries to convince me, that Linux or even Windows are so much better than OS/2, I tend to get angry because most of the arguments are simply drawn out of some marketing statements from Redmont or based on mere disinformation.
We've had stuff like that posted here, too, and replies that corrected some false assumptions.
If you don't LIKE OS/2, that's your personal opinion, but it surely isn't a good base for OS choice.
Neither is the fact, that (almost) everyone uses Windows. While a large user base certainly has its advantages, it doesn't impose some vital facts about the OS used (like being stable, scalable, or even reliable).
Many of those that posted things like 'OS with no apps' or 'lack of drivers' referred to OS/2 Warp 3.
But things have changed since then! When you compare OS/2 with other OSes, keep in mind that the version we are dealing with right know originated in 1996! Windows 2000 achieved some stability only recently, but it still needs much more ressources to run - exactly like in the first days of Windows NT.
Of course the variety of Windows apps is overwhelming, but there also is some OS/2 application for (well, I must admit ALMOST) any given need. Well, no single OS can serve every purpose, right?
The OS/2 driver scene has evolved rapidly since warp 3; today I can even pull the harddisk I boot from, put it into another pc and boot OS/2 there! No 1001 newly detected hardware features I need to reboot and/or insert my 'Original Windows CD' for! What a great option for constant availability!
Linux, on the other hand, also has its stability issues. As long as you install it as a server machine (just the necessary daemons, no gui), everything is fine. But try to use it as a workstation in a networked environment consisting of OS/2- and Windows 95-clients and NT servers... it can be hard to even set up a network connection to another machine. We've had uncounted crashes(!) with our Linux box caused by buggy x-servers...
My suggestion: Just compare eComStation, the OS/2 of today, to Windows or Linux - they'll be shipping eCs demos soon. Give it a try! What do you have to loose? You might even like it!
...still flying with OS/2...