Slashdot Mirror
Review of eComStation OS/2 1.0
JigSaw writes: "OSNews features a long and in-depth article about the latest version of eComStation OS/2 1.0. eCS 1.0 is developed by Serenity Systems after they licensed the technology from IBM when the latter had abandoned any hope for the success of OS/2. The article also has information about the future version of eCS, 1.10, which it will be branded as Entry level, Upgrade and WorkPlace. The Workplace version will include all the software one needs to run Java2, Win16 & DOS applications 'natively', and it also includes an X11 server plus a full copy of Connectix's Virtual PC that can run any flavour of Windows and Linux. In fact, eCS OS/2 Workplace will include a full Linux distribution as part of its VirtualPC package."
Hmmm. I always did like the workplace shell and SOM. Maybe it's time I pulled my copy of Visual Age C++ out of it's hiding place.
Chip H.
It has lots of interesting things in it, handled through an integrated but separate installer. I like that. The installation stuff is not kept in memory every time the system boots, as is it in the Registry.
It looks cool, even. Boots off a cdrom to a GUI. Like that.
What I find distressing is that while the distro has a lot in it, it sends out a disinsentive to ISVs to compete with it. I suspect that the inclusion of IBM Works and Win-OS/2 gave OS/2 users access to word processors that ended up driving the market away from the OS/2 word processors like Describe.
What is really needed, in both the OS/2 and Windows worlds, is competing Distros. Wouldn't that be just grand. :)
OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.
heck, I feel like a rant tonight.
Yep, unfortunately, MS quality control seems to have been aimed at the level of how many things we can we get away breaking ( like Lotius, etc) without people running away in terror.
right now, they could put out complete crap, and people would still buy it because they have to, not because of any apparent merit. Marketing and accounting love it, but it is a complete insult to the engineers, not that account or marketing would care much.
It is like engineering a new hardware widget. Some cool engineer invents something and does a damn good job. the prototype is excellent. it then gets fed to the production engineer, who work damn hard at trying to produce the widget as cheaply as possible, and still have it work.
MS engineers probably produce great shit, then it hits the marketing integration tem, and the result is crap. It doesn't survive well being integrated with the Microsft marketing vision.
It would be like seeing borgified art.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I always thought the OS/2 (warp onwards) kernel sounded good, purely from the idea of a fully re-entrant kernel that booted (including GUI) in 4Mb. So, this came as a pleasant surprise:
Another cool trick you can do with OS/2 is that you can turn off and on any additional CPUs you may have, on the fly.
Holy shit. And....
OS/2 (reportedly) scales wonderfully on machines up to 64 CPUs.
And so runs a good chance of being a kick arse server kernel. Are we going to see Debian/OS2?
With a price of $299 for the normal version and $399 for the version that supports SMP
So that's a no then. Oh well.
Dave
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
Ahh. Reminiscing. My first job out of college was working for IBM Personal Software Products writing OS/2 Success Stories. There weren't many, I think Traveller's insurance was like the only real one that we didn't have to massage.
Does anyone remember when OS/2 Warp was going to come out at around the same time as Windows 95 and there was a shortage of floppies because Windows needed like 40 and OS/2 needed 70 or so? Those were the good ol' days. When a re-install meant sitting in front of your computer for hours like a trained dog waiting for the beep so you could flip another disk in...
Someone mentioned the UI and how ugly it is... Man, remember the tabs for the options? They were on the side and hideous. And the folders? And the icons? God. The whole thing was horrible. Just thinking about the billions of dollars spent on OS/2 in it's lifetime makes me want to weep.
-Russ
Me
Seriously.
OS/2 is what the supervisor PC's that control the zSeries mainframes run!
Open up a mainframe and inside is a Thinkpad running OS/2 to control it...
It's not going anywhere anytime soon...
--NBVB
OS/2 was cool because you could run OS/2 native applications (there were not many) and you could run Windows applications. Why didn't OS/2 specific applications take off? Because it was stupid to write OS/2 applications if you could get by with the inferior multitasking of Win 3.1.
... slowly with vestiges kept alive for a while by islands of hobbyists that appreciate it or keep it for snob appeal. The market is not big enough to sustain an OS development and support effort without users that must have THAT OS to run their critical apps.
Think about it (back in the early 90's): Write a program in Windows and all the OS/2 & Warp users can run it AND all the Windows 3.1 users can too. Write a native application for OS/2 and you will see the difference in sales pretty quick.
Producing an OS/2 that runs native Windows + Linux ironically makes their previous business model flaw larger in that there is NO incentive for developers to write native OS/2 applications.
Sorry, this one is destined to die again
--- -- - -
Give me LIBERTY, or give me a check.
He used to talk about it *a lot* and the alt.fan.howard-stern newsgroup actually turned into on OS/2 advocacy group for quite some time. Howard saying "Jeff Schick from IBM" 1,000x is burned into my mind permanently. I got into OS/2 around 1994/1995 because of Howard Stern. I even called into his show as "King of All OS/2 Users" and talked about the OS/2 command prompt. Howard described me as "another geek who can't get laid." For several years after that, he was right.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
I have a boxed set of OS/2 Warp Connect, and VA C++ Pro 4.0, but boy is documentation of the OS/2 API hard to come by. Not much on the web, either. If I wanted to write an app for OS/2, where the heck would I find any documentation, hints, FAQs, etc.?
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!