IBM's OS/2 Strategy for 2003

Landreth writes "OS2World.com reports that IBM has released their OS/2 strategy for 2003. They appear to be pushing the WebSphere Software Platform as well as client and server upgrades to Warp 4. The report can be viewed at IBM's website."

Comments

Getting OS/2

[bjb]

I've been wondering for the last few years, who still uses OS/2? Forget companies who have legacy software running on it, I mean does anyone actually use it on their personal machine? I mean regularly; enough to validate upgrades.

The bigger question I have, however, is that I never really had a chance to play with OS/2, and I always wanted to see what it was like. Is it even publically (preferably freely) available for a weekend hobbyist like myself who just wants to kick the tires?

Re:who honestly cares

[reaper20]

On the otherhand if I was a past OS/2 customer I would be pretty happy with the length of support by IBM so far. You gotta hand it to IBM on this one, they supported the product as long as the customers needed, and that's pretty rare in this day and age of forced upgrades.

I mean, they even have OS/2 Mozilla - at least they weren't told their systems were out of date and force them to upgrade every 18 months. (Oracle/Microsoft).

Change of plans..

[Plutor]

I thought IBM's OS/2 plan for 2003 was kill it. Why has this changed?

Re:who honestly cares - apparently you

[pigfukr]

Apparently you, since you did make it a point to read the responses to the posting and post one yourself.

I am using OS/2 right now, the only thing I reboot to windows for is gaming. I am using the version of OS/2 that was released in 2002. As "obsolete" as you think it is, it is still a far better desktop OS than Linux. Linux is not ready to "take over the world" at all in that aspect.

OS/2 is still a fun OS to dink around with. If the linux open source community comes up with any nice software it's only a short time before the OS/2 guys port it over. We have almost everything that Linux has due to the simplicity of porting linux-->OS/2.

I save big bucks with OS/2

[Anonymous Coward]

all the desktops in my architecture practice run OS/2, the servers run linux, and we have one copy of windows running on VMWare. I set up the os/2 boxes when warp connect appeared on the scene, ('93?) and have never looked back. Other than updating Os/2 to warp 4 our software upgrade costs have been virtually zero. They are zero because we don't run windows programs. We are never forced into an upgrade situation.We use a mix of DOS (oh the horror!) OS/2 and linux GPL programs.The last versions of many DOS programs before the big switch to windows (word perfect, quattro pro, generic cadd etc) were really very good pieces of work. OS/2 allows perfectly stable multitasking of these programs.

We use HOBlink to add an X server to the OS/2 desktop, and now we can also use OS/2 as a thin client for various Linux programs.

Nothing crashes. we don't get viruses, nobody is playing games when they should be working, and picking up additional copies of programs we need is trivial on e-bay.

That being said, our backup plan is to migrate totaly to Linux if OS/2 ever really dies. The only thing keeping us from doing that now, is lack of a good Reasonably inexpensive CAD program that runs on Linux.

We are just going to skip the whole windows think

Re:who honestly cares - apparently you

[Greyfox]

Gnome's archetecture is very similar to the OS/2 workplace shell. The main advantage of the workplace shell over gnome right now are all the SOM objects that are implemented on it. OS/2's desktop is its greatest strength but also its greatest weakness -- it's very easy to corrupt (Some days it seemed like all you had to do was look at it funny) and then you'd lose all your object relationships that all your apps carefully installed.

It'd be interesting to implement clones of the OS/2 workplace objects for Gnome. I'm kind of surprised that someone hasn't. Personally though, I don't like icons on my desktop so I remove the file manager functionality from Gnome, and a lot of those objects only really make sense on the desktop.

When I was working on-site support, we had a very specific order in which you HAD to install the various OS/2 and Windows applications that the company needed on each desktop. If you didn't follow that order, you'd end up trashing something (usually the workplace shell) and having to start from scratch. Of course, my primary interaction with OS/2 was when someone was having a problem with it.

Re:Zope, Mailman, Apache/2, PHP-Nuke, Rsyncd

[benzapp]

Sheesh, the OS/2 GUI was great but not necessary. I ran a multinode BBS for years command line only. Especially in 1993 when 8 megs of ram cost some serious cash, using 2-3 megs for the GUI was unnecessary. Its funny you profess such knowledge because OS/2 had few GUI tools for administration. Almost all were command line and cable of being manipulated via REXX scripts. There were some GUI front ends, but most sucked and no one used them. As for the reboots, only Ring 0 drivers required a reboot, like Installable File System drivers. But, even Linux requires that. Oh wait, you need to recompile the kernel to that. *duh*

OS/2 SMP has always supported up to 1024 processors , and still is one of the best examples of multiprocessing today, better than Windows and Linux. You forget that IBM practically invented multiprocessing and in the early 90's with the slow advancement of CISC processors it really seemed like multiprocessing was the way for performance gains. I remember going to Comdex in 1994 seeing OS/2 2.1 SMP running on 128 processors. They ran this great image editing tool called Colorworks which was highly SMP enabled, the performance gains were amazing. Today however, the only amazing multiprocessing machines are IBM Power4 machines. Everything else is a toy. 2, 4 processors. BFD