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OS/2 Going, Going... Gone
An anonymous submitter writes "IBM has posted a Software Withdrawal notice on their web site announcing that the OS/2 operating system, in all its forms, will cease to be available for purchase from IBM as of March 12, 2003. For users who have purchased the two year OS/2 Software Choice subscriptions, service will continue until December 31, 2004." We posted a pretty good story about the history of OS/2 earlier this year.
Check out eComStation (www.ecomstation.com), which is a beefed up OS/2 distribution. You get lots of neat goodies like SMP support, new filesystems, better driver support, X-Windows, and all sorts of other stuff.
Well... depends. There's probably a good bit of MS code lurking around in utilities, and certainly most of HPFS is from MS, but the last bit of MS code was excised from the kernel and UI in the Warp (3.0) days.
As I recall, there was a party thrown down in Boca Raton when the last bit of MS code was removed. Warp was also much more stable than previous versions of the OS.
I'm sure there are bits and pieces of the OS that could be of use to the open source community, but I think that by and large you're correct about code age.
The bits that would be of the most use are probably of mixed copyright and thus unreleaseable.
First, remember when OS/2 came out and compare it to the Windows offering at that point in time.
Now, the features of OS/2:
- a flexible object-oriented graphic user interface
- the ability to multi-task applications and to allow multi-threading within applications
- support for most DOS and Windows 3.1 software in addition to native OS/2 applications
- WARP 4 includes in its basic package a voice type dictation facility that not only allows a user to navigate an OS/2 system using voice commands, but also allows dictation of text into documents--truly hands-free computing!
- WARP 4 includes built-in support for JAVA.
- OS/2 has included a web browser since version 3, and new browsers continue to be developed
- The Mozila open source group offers an OS/2 version code named Warpzilla. Warpzilla is very modern, standards compliant, and very usable. Major bugs are addressed in a day or two and milestone builds are released regularly. Warpzilla grows stronger every day.
- There is an OS/2 version of Adobe Acrobat which can be configured as a helper application with Netscape Navigator.
This info and more is available at this computer society's Web site.
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
OS/2 used preemptive multitasking when windows was still using cooperative multitasking.
OS/2 included things like REXX and a couple useful editors, when Windows included solitaire. (Yeah, OS/2 had a solitaire game, too.)
OS/2 included the Internet Access Kit (or some such), including the WebExplorer browser, a news reader, a mail reader, etc. when MS still considered the Web a dying fad.
Later, OS/2 included the IBM Voice recognition software in the box. Windows NT included the BSOD.
The list goes on and on. Like the previous poster said, search the web. The OS/2 Fido groups on old fashioned bulletine board systems were great technical resources, unlike the AOL polluted usenet of today.
Check out www.ecomstation.com :)
This is essentially OS/2. I checked up on some usenet groups discussing IBM's announcement, and it seems clear that the eCS folks knew about this when they started eCS, so OS/2 (in the form of eCS) should be around much much longer than 2004!
-Dave
moo
Wrong.
IBM developed and released (in a very limited release) a microkernel-based OS/2 Warp (PowerPC Edition) in 1995.
More information about this is available here:
Highly Unofficial IBM OS/2 Beta FAQ
At a trade show, he went to the Microsoft booth, and asked what he had to do to get started with Windows development. They handed him a developers kit right there.
He went to the IBM booth, and asked then what he had to do to get started with OS/2 development. They handed him an application to their developer program so he could ask for permission to develop for OS/2 (for a large fee, of course).
I realized OS/2 was truly doomed about a year later, when I went into Egghead, and saw MSDN Library subscriptions for sale. The only OS/2 development tool I saw at Egghead was the Watcom C/C++ compiler.
Another thing that hurt OS/2 was the lack of good third-party documentation. Where was the equivalent of Petzold's wonderful Windows books, that got so many of us started on Windows programming? There IS a book on OS/2 programming by Petzold, but it was often out of print. I'm sure IBM could have managed to get it back into print if they'd wanted.