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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.
It seems that IBM will support the mentioned part numbers until December31,2004. Over 2 years of support on a discontinued product? If only other companies would have the same ideas. ;-)
It was quite nifty. It was running a 486DX25 with 16 MB of RAM and a 1M video card. For its OS it was running OS/2, as opposed to MS/DOS, which made me feel much safer. One wonders what they will run ATMs on in the future. And NO, I don't really think Linux is ready for that sort of thing. Hrrmmm... mabye QNX?
Quando Omni Flunkus Moritati
It depends when it cost a 1/5th as much. IBM was all over the place on pricing for OS/2. At the start it was a few hundred dollars. Then they had a promotion for OS/2 1.3.1 for $99 which included a free upgrade to 2.0. Lots of people got 2.0 final beta for free.
2.0, 2.1, 3.0 were all under $89-129 retail sometimes with $89-99 upgrade offers. Then they jacked the price up again.
As for the marketing it went deeper. IBM couldn't decide what they wanted to do.
Excellent as it was, OS/2 was also hopelessly tied to the i386 architecture. Not that it would likely have mattered, M$ dropped their alpha-version of NT and it didn't seem to hit their sales very much (not so sure about alphas sales, though). The problem with OS/2 (I used it for about 2 years) was the lack of productivity and entertainment apps. Actually it was the lack of variety in said types of apps. IBM made a good java implementation, but java didn't take off fast enough on the desktop (some might argue it still hasn't, even though there are some nice java apps available today) so the risk they took by putting their money on java didn't pay off.
IBM marketed OS/2 Warp 3 very agressively, but it seemed that once Windows 95 was out, they forgot to market OS/2 Warp 4. I think this was one of the reasons it died.
It's not in Windows. NT prior to 2k had a 16-bit OS/2 API module and would run 16-bit OS/2 console programs, and there was actually a 32-bit Presentation Manager for NT available for purchase from Microsoft, but NTOSKRNL was an entirely new development.
.sig: be the majority of voters.
OTOH, what became Windows NT was originally intended to be OS/2 NT, but when OS/2 sold poorly and MS and IBM broke up, MS made Win32 rather than the OS/2 API the default persona for NT and the rest is history.
Remainder of my
Save Maine's economy: write stuff down. All comments are exclusively my own, not my employer.
OS/2 also was able to alienate many power users because of the install process. It was FAR worse than Debian, and we all know how many people complain about that. I was a very competant OS/2 user (and DOS/ Win3.11 for that matter). When I went to install my CD-ROM drive on a stable OS/2 Warp (that's 3.0 unless otherwise specificed, for you younguns), the OS ended up formatting my hard drive and doing a fresh install -- WITHOUT MY CONSENT! My backups were as good as my temper was short. I took my backups, good all the data I needed, and went to DOS/Win3.11 until I could get NT 3.51.
This is complete utter nonsense. By late 1994 early 1995, almost all cdroms were IDE. IDE cdroms did not require special installation, and were recognized by the base IDE device driver that runs your hard drive. Not only that, formatting the boot partition, like in any other operating system, cannot occur. Not only that, but OS/2 never had a bootable cdrom, so you would have had to boot from disk in order to format your boot partition.
The installation program was very weak when supporting proprietary hardware, but the base install was cake. Remember, because OS/2 supported FAT AND HPFS, the installer would ask you if you want to format it FAT, HPFS, or not at all. To suggest it just formatted your drive is insane.
I ran OS/2 from 1991 until 1998, even had a 3 note BBS running on an OS/2 box for four years. The installer was cumbersome, but it was ahead of what was in Windows 3.1. Should it have come with more drivers? Yes. Was it bad because it didn't? Of course not. You simply had to use a 80 line config.sys file.
I don't read or respond to AC posts
Excellent as it was, OS/2 was also hopelessly tied to the i386 architecture
:)
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AMEN! I wrote device drivers (in what seems like a previous life) for OS/2, Windows, etc. and if you let your assembly-level debugger* wander through the OS/2 kernel there was absolutely no doubt that this was hand-coded assembly. It was beautiful assembly code, but I remember one day, in the midst of debugging, realizing "They'll never port this to another chip...ever!" The entire kernel was designed around how the 386 was designed....to the point where we kept Intel chip specs in our library. SWe had a good laugh when they announced they were going to port OS/2 to PPC.
* Yes, in those days we didn't have fancy, schmancy source-level debuggers, at least not for kernel/driver work. WinICE was like crack when it came out - everyone doing DD work HAD to have it.....and now I write Java and I don't even produce real assembly anymore. Oh, the good old days.
and will continue to be supported on enterprise contracts by IBM. It is used in financial applications extensively and is STILL more solid than any windows app. They use it because of legacy applications that connect to mainframe computers via SNA with M$ won't or can't support but OS2 does nicely. It will be a LOOOONNNNG time before they find anything else. The large financial institution I work for has gone so far as to purchase and store source code with IBM's blessing for use in the future, under license of course....
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?