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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.
Or rather, OS/2 is dead.
Rest in peace.
OS/2 was an excellent system, technically. Certainly far better than Windows. Trouble was, DOS+Windows was Good Enough and cost about 1/5th as much. IBM, at that time, couldn't market space heaters in Nome Alaska in January.
Best Slashdot Co
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. ;-)
Not dead, OS/2 lives on in Windows NT/2K/XP/.NET
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.
Before you all go posting requests to IBM to open source OS/2, just remember whose code is in there: Microsoft. Remember, it was a joint venture between the two companies. Do you think that Microsoft would allow it to be open sourced? Anyway, it's technologically behind all the free Unixes, so what possibly could one learn from it, other than what was actually possible 10 years (or more) ago on realtively low-specced machines.
Stick Men
OS/2 is heavily used in ATM (bancomates) machines.
What happens with support for that stuff?
Switching to Linux?
A moment of silence for the Little Operating System That Could Have Been.
Now it's just another corpse on the bloody trail of the rampaging Alternative PC OS Killer that is Micro$oft.
Rest in peace, OS/2
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." -- Linus Torvalds
Eveyone always says OS/2 was great technically, and that it was far better than Windows. Can someone give those who aren't in the know more details about how OS/2 was better than windows?
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
My company still uses OS/2 for some functions and they rarely fall down in the way that say NT 4.0 would however NT 2000 seems just as stable it took Windows awhile to reach that point.
I always thought the interface felt very CDE-like and had some interesting features. It is a shame but pricing+bad marketting did them in. I remember when Warp reached the market place before Win95. People at that time were still more worried about Big-bad Blue than Microsoft.
I know there was a theater company that used OS/2 for their platform in some ticketing devices. I remember going by the box and thnking how weird that is.
Where have you seen OS/2 still lingering in IT?
_______________________________
ACK
Microsoft's actions to kill OS/2 are well documented and need not be repeated here, except to say that they did a good job making it look like IBM's fault - MS basically told IBM if they distributed it with their own machines or continued to market it (and Lotus Smartsuite which died under similar circumstances) MS would do everything to prevent IBM from having access to Windows 95 in any sane way short of refusing to sell it to them. IBM capitulated, and the rest is history. For more details, the entire story is documented in the Findings of Fact in the Microsoft trial.
OS/2 follows BeOS, not to mention half a dozen other upstarts, in disappearing. I could say it's another nail in the coffin for choice, but I guess that nail was driven into OS/2's coffin in 1995. Right now the free software community seems to be the only place where choice may stay alive - by keeping platforms open, and by making source available allowing for the possibility of porting almost any open application to any open platform, choice has a chance, and probably the first chance it's had in several years. Vendors like Sun and RedHat have become a part of this (despite the constant protests about Sun, I think they're one of the good guys, NIS, NFS, OpenLook, OpenOffice, and many other innovations and applications have been given to the community over the years, and while Java isn't open source or free, it is source available, and the restrictions - given the 500lb gorilla that stands against Sun - are rational if disappointing.)
Linux, the BSDs, Atheos, and the upcoming BeOS clones, are only viable though because of this base of software that can either run on them now, or can be made to run on them. That means constant work keeping the base of free and open software relevent.
Making the alternatives stay sensible and rational will not happen by itself. Resources need to be devoted, and unless people are prepared to actually act, not just talk about it on Slashdot, nothing will ever get done. Apathy is not an option.
You can help by getting off your rear and writing to your congressman [house.gov] or senator [senate.gov]. Tell them that choice is important to you, and that it's important that the base of open, free, software available with source is constantly kept up to date, viable, and relevent to today's needs. Tell them that you appreciate the efforts of free and open software producers, but if one day those applications ceased to be updated in line with modern needs, you would be forced to find less secure and intelligent alternatives. Let them know that SMP may make or break whether you can efficiently deploy OpenBSD on your workstations and servers. Explain the concerns you have about freedom, openness, and choice, and how monopolies and a failure to keep the alternatives relevent destroys all three. Let them know that this is an issue that effects YOU directly, that YOU vote, and that your vote will be influenced, indeed dependent, on his or her policy on choices, on relevence, and keeping the free and open software base relevent.
You CAN make a difference. Don't treat voting as a right, treat it as a duty. Keep informed, keep your political representatives informed on how you feel. And, most importantly of all, vote.
KMSMA (WWBD?)
Cool, now the way is paved for OS/3! I'm holding my breath!
I worked for a while, in '97-'98, as a systems engineer at the University of Virginia as a technician and systems engineer. I would get "Rock" duty (round the clock) every month or so and one of the systems I had to support was a patient tracking system for the UVA Hospital. It had a graphical user interface showing the floors of the hospital and what patient was where. It was an OS/2 Warp 3 system. Quite nice. It was the HARDWARE that kept glitching, making me aware of this system at 3am in the morning, sadly...
I tried to run Warp 3 a few years before but it did not work out. I really found the interface unattractive and the lack of apps difficult. I kept running Windows 3.1 sessions under it to the point that I just started using Windows 3.1. Sad.
A nice os. I also tried to run NeXTSTEP but had to take that offline for lack of app reasons (the interface was wonderful). Happily I run NeXTSTEP today and there is no lack of apps...well, it's actually OS X I am running -- but same difference.
blakespot
-- Heisenberg may have slept here.
iPod Hacks.com
I am still running OS/2 on my main system. I have been running Post Road Mailer 3.0. I still have not been infected by any virus. When people say, I might have sent out email because I have contracted another outlook virus, I laugh.
You are still running OS/2. Many ATMs and cash registers still run OS/2.
Fight Spammers!
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
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered OS/2 community when CmdrTaco confirmed that OS/2 market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming close on the heels of a recent Slashdot survey which plainly states that OS/2 has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. OS/2 is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict OS/2's future. The hand writing is on the wall: OS/2 faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for OS/2 because OS/2 is dead. Things are looking very bad for OS/2. As many of us are already aware, OS/2 continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
etc.etc.etc. You get the idea :o)
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
If I recall, I read that many ATMs (automated teller machines, not asynchronous transfer mode) use(d) OS/2 as their software. Don't know why. Don't know if they still do. Don't really care.
Overrated / Underrated : Moderation
At the time, OS/2 had extremely heavy system requirements compared to Win 3.x. In particular, I recall that it required an enormous amount of memory to run comfortably by comparison to Windows. This was at a time where memory was running at probably $100 or more per 4 MB (my own memory is failing), and at the time, it was just really difficult to justify for many people. Towards the latter part of the '90s, its requirements didn't seem so onerous, but by then Windows had become too entrenched and Win95 was on its way.
I also strongly believe Win/OS2 killed any incentive to write native OS/2 apps.
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
Release it's source code under GPL?
This would be a great opportunity for IBM to show it's Cluefull....
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
Well, the NatWest ATM on Piccadilly that ate my card a few weeks back was running Win2K, as I found out when it crashed and rebooted...
Why can't they just sell it without support? If I were an IBM shareholder, I'd want to know why they are just throwing away money, even if it's not very much. If reproducing the CD-ROMs isn't economical, they could estimate their annual sales and auction off the rights to distribute that number of CD-ROMs to somebody like Cheapbytes. I don't see why *any* software package has to "just disappear".
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Excellent as it was, OS/2 was also hopelessly tied to the i386 architecture
:)
:)
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.
Imagine you are a PC maker, what operating system would you prefer: An OS made by some evil corporation or an OS made by some evil corporation which is also your competitor?
Compaq/HP/Dell whoever will never use an OS controlled by IBM and IBM will never use an OS controlled by Compaq/HP/Dell/someotherPCmaker.
BeOS had bigger chances of succeeding than OS/2...
Actually I think this is rather obvious. Why there are so many people crawling around claiming OS/2 failed because of poor marketing or too good Windows compatibility is beyound me.
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 ?
IBM: It's a good machine. What model would you like?
IBM: We don't sell ThinkPads with OS/2.
IBM: Yes, but we don't sell ThinkPads with OS/2.
IBM: Yes; we wish they hadn't done that.
IBM: The Software Division. They have no say on hardware.
IBM: I'm sorry, sir. What model of ThinkPad would you like?
IBM: There isn't one.
IBM: It's not possible.
IMO, that attitude (IBM not supporting IBM) is what killed OS/2. The corporate decision not to market OS/2 to consumers, made the week before release of Win95, didn't help either.
-- Rich
- - -
"The sixth sick shiek's sixth sheep's sick."
Actaully IBM has been wanting to do this for a long-long time. But since a couple key customer was refusing to wean themselves off IBM hung in there.
I've had to develop for and support OS/2 and even work with IBM on projects. I can't stand OS/2 it had a poor architecture, inaccuracies in the API documentation, and I couldn't never see what people liked about the interface. The only thing it had going for it is it wasn't MS. It was the OS the "anything but MS" crowd until Linux caught on. Thank god its finally dead.
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.
...The genius running IBM at the same time OS/2 was doing well made some pretty stupid remarks about the internet as well.
:)
Doing well is a relative term, it was doing well as far as I was concerned because I used it
So far, I always seem to like the underdogs. OS/2, Linux, Mac OS X....
sigh.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
OS/2 may have the support cables pulled and IBM is pulling the sheet over it's head, but it's still in wide use in a lot of industries. It was a solid 32bit pre-emptive multi-tasking system for it's time (before Win95). The only other alternative at the time was real Unix systems but that was a huge cost for small businesses. OS/2 provided the reliability and stability that some businesses needed.
The majority of the current user base is banks. They have (or perhaps had?) a HUGE investment in OS/2. Most ATMs ran and are still running OS/2 for their operating system. The uptime is incredible so without support or the ability to continue the product, most businesses must get off of OS/2 asap. Of course we've known that it was a burning platform for years now but with such a large installed base and legacy applications running off it, who has the time or budget to move off.
We currently use OS/2 with our train control systems as well as a few other key safety systems. It's just as reliable as it was years ago and our plan to move to another platform doesn't manifest itself until the 2004-2005 timeframe.
In terms of ease of use on the whole I don't remember many people complaining about that. Configuring OS/2 to run a dos game inside of a window was much easier then configuring a Windows 3.0 .pif. Modifying icons and stuff was much easier. Certainly in the 1.0-1.2 days and the perhaps in the 4.0+ days; but from 1.3-3.0 it was no harder than windows for sure.
I remember people complaining about the OS/2 desktop being ugly. Which was weird because with the color coded folders and some neat icon effects OS/2 really could look quite modern (again much better than windows in its day); but the initial installed desktop.... blech. BTW you still hear this quite a bit about Linux apps.
To suggest it just formatted your drive is insane.
I wish you would have told that to my 3.0 installation which merrily formated some of my "extra" partitions for me without bothering to ask. It used that to delete an NT and a lunix installation.
The real travesty is that I continuined to try and use the OS for about 3 months after that foul up, despite IBM never being able to explain why it happened. Their best suggestion was that my partition table wasn't "standard".
--- I do not moderate.
...because you can still get PC-DOS.
This time-tested and useful operating system is now Y2K compliant and it supports the euro symbol.
That's the IBM experience - value and support.
And the best part? It's only a $50 download.
Do you guys remember seeing DOOM running full speed in a window on OS/2? What a crowd that generated at Comdex. Up until then, graphical action games/apps on the PC were only done in DOS. The OS/2 DIVE system allowed fullblown multimedia apps to run at very acceptable speeds in a window.
I heard that Microsoft saw what OS/2 could do( DOOM in a window ) and paid ID Software a ton of cash to some up with a way to do the same in MS Windows. The birth of MS DirectX maybe?
I think OS/2 was the first PC OS to ship with a multimedia subsystem and apps to use it( video player, videodisk controller, syncronized video/sound, sound player/recorder, etc ). Maybe the Amiga had this way before but no on the x86 PC hardware.
LoB
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Linux is IBM's new version of OS/2, in a way.
But far better supported by them than OS/2 ever was.
It has been freed.