IBM Officially Kills OS/2

boarder8925 writes "'Big Blue has hammered the final nails into OS/2's coffin. It said that all sales of OS/2 will end on the 23rd of December this year, and support for the pre-emptive multitasking operating system will end on the 31st December 2006.' IBM has posted a migration page to help OS/2 users easily switch to Linux."

Comments

OS2?

[mutewinter]

OS/2 is still around? Thats news to me! I guess I'm not a real geek, but that last time I heard anyone used that operating system was in 1995.

So long!

[Losat]

I loved OS/2 back in its day! I first grew to hate Microsoft as I watched them try to kill it with "Chicago" vaporware and FUD.
I wonder how the 850M MS just paid IBM over it compares to the damage MS really did.

Why kill OS/2???

[G4from128k]

I've never used it (maybe it deserves to die) but I'm surprised IBM didn't spin-off OS/2 sales & support as a little services company (with an appropriate slice of the proceeds of the service contracts). If people want to use OS/2, why not sell it to them? If people need support for it, why not sell it to them?

I could understand a company killing a product that competes with its own more modern systems, but how do continued OS/2 sales hurt IBM more than orphaning some existing customers?

Re:Think of the marketing IBM wasted

[afidel]

OS/2 never had a chance, specifically because it came from IBM. No way in hell were the other major OEM's going to feed their biggest competitor by buying the OS from IBM.

Re:This may tick some off...

[marcosdumay]

"Secondly, it was supposed to be compatible with DOS and FAT16. In practice, it could write things to a FAT16 partition across a LAN on a DOS/Win machine that could not be read by DOS/Win and caused automated back-ups to fail and require someone to spend sixteen hours watching the machine to hit buttons and tell the backup software to ignore the problem. It behaved like an infertile virus that happened to double as an OS."

Blame that on Windows! You don't really think that OS2 can have raw access to the disks by lan, do you? Even if it can, double blame on Windows, because it shouldn't. Ok, you come with several non issues and a bug of Windows, a lot of reasons to hate OS2... Saying that it isn't a troll dont make it so.

Re:Think of the marketing IBM wasted

[MightyMartian]

I never had any problems with OS/2 drivers at all. I was running it on a 486SX-25mhz with 8mb of RAM with Waffle BBS answering a modem in a DOS VDM, while I ran Win3.1 apps. It was an incredible OS, and to this very day, even the latest, greatest Windows GUI is still just a fancied-up version of the original Chicago shell, which was a retarded rip-off of WPS. I have a feeling that a good many of the OS/2 users end up either going to Linux or MacOS.

Re:Open Source OS/2

[RAMMS EIN]

Nah, I have a copy of OS/2 at home, but I can't get it to work or even install on any of the PCs I have. The thing is just too bloody outdated. All the effort that would be required to get it to work, then fixing all the security holes that are bound to be there, would be much better spent developing another OS, IMO.

It's a shame OS/2 didn't beat the technologically inferior Windows 9x series. But on the other hand, a world in which it did would probably be a world in which IBM _and_ Microsoft dominated the OS market together. Thinking about it that way makes me prefer the way things happened in this world.