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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."
Last time I checked, large numbers of ATM machines ran OS2, which is why you don't see the BSOD when you go to grab some cash.
Lasers Controlled Games!
It's too bad that Microsoft owns so much of OS/2. It would be great to see it released as Open Source. The Open Source OS/2 Petition is a good start.
From IBM's "migration page"...
"There are no replacement products from IBM. IBM suggests that OS/2 customers consider Linux as an alternative operating system for OS/2 client and server environments."
They aren't helping anyone switch. They're just saying people should use linux since OS/2 won't be supported.
SHAMELESS plug for MOD INFORMATIVE But this site claims to have the un official counts of OS/2 licenses world wide. http://rover.wiesbaden.netsurf.de/~meile/los2cl.ht ml
Discounting the 500,000 set top boxes, apparently their are about 65,535 licensed installations out their. Hmm, maybe this is why os/2 blew its marketing stack.
Steve would love to axe the whole Mac/OS X stuff and go on to focus Apple on trying to expand out from the iPod fad.
After that Windows.
And we will be left with Linux/open source unix implementions as the era of desktop/workstations come to an end.
Good luck with that. Microsoft helped IBM develop OS/2; how do you think it ran Windows stuff so well? Since Microsoft probably still owns a good chunk of the copyrights, I sincerely doubt you'll ever see it opened
I'd much rather see IBM release their Lotus suite as Open Source - there's still lots of things there that can be of tremendous use to the OSS community (Lotus Notes especially).
OS/2 never had the visibility of having must-be-there business applications.
Ah,... Microsoft Lan Manager. Problem was that a PS/2 90 running MS Lan manager server was easy to administer cost about $10k and could replace a $200k AS/400. Had IBM gone for it they could have basically had hte move from expensive servers to cheap servers 5 years earlier and on their OS.
Last time I checked, large numbers of ATM machines ran OS2, which is why you don't see the BSOD when you go to grab some cash.
And i'm sure they'll still be running OS/2 even after IBM stops selling it.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
What will happen to some mainframes and tape libraries?
OS/2 is still the predominant OS for managing MVS systems (even the new Z series) as well as tape libraries.
Will they be migrating all current environments into Linux as part of this? Or will they just leave those alone?
I wonder...
Er, and they'll keep running exactly as they are doing today until 2045, when BoFA finally replaces the "Watch an ad while we fleece you because you are self employed and have no direct deposit" terminals.
Anyone else use BofA? I personally enjoy having to select Espanol or English every time I use a terminal...even though I've been an English-only customer since 1990 or so.
Thanks, BofA, for making my life easier!
With what, a friggin' press release?
Say what you will about Apple, but they sure do know how to kill an OS with panache.
I'm using an OS/2 right now to write this message at work which happens to be at IBM. Luckly this machine has a Java Citrix client to connect to a Windows desktop so I can do some work in OS/2...sort of.
Will they finally open the Workplace Shell? It's a truly object-oriented desktop design that's still superior - a decade later - to anything Windows has to offer. Looking back it's hard to believe a lot of the early FUD from MS against OS/2 was aimed at scaring people away because, hey, 2 megabytes of memory was just an absurd requiremet! They also claimed multithreaded programming was no big deal. If they open up the Workplace Shell maybe OS/2 could preserve some of its legacy. It would rock on Linux.
Our phone system's voice mail processor used to be on an OS/2 Warp 3.x box (with the GUI disabled). Thing was stable as hell, ran for years without being touched.
When we "upgraded" the phone system, it got replaced with one that runs on NT. It came preloaded with an 'at' job to reboot it nightly...
OS/2 was out at least a year before Windows 95, and IBM couldn't market their way out of a wet paper bag with it back then. They went with an "it's a sophisticated OS" approach using foreign language (with subtitles) commercials. They were aiming at the educated IT professionals who were probably too busy playing Wolfenstein and eating Doritoes to bother reading the subtitles... I know I was... mind you, we were using OS/2 at work anyway. What IBM should have done is what Microsoft (a marketing machine) did: use rock and roll, Rolling Stones, etc... market it to the masses. If the pointy haired boss has it at home, he'll use it at work (meaning he'll sign the cheque to have the IT department install it at work) because he knows how to use it already. When IBM screwed up that marketing campaign, it was over since M$ had a lock on OEM installs and nobody and no business had already committed to IBM's 32 bit OS/2.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
Bah.
A real ATM should run a real Operating system.
Sometimes I wish it had died. The post-Commodore times were horrible - all that fighting, failed next gen machines, broken promises, missed deadlines, successor confusion.
I still would have liked to see a AAA based system with a fully functional OS, or Phase5's design in action. Think of a GUI designed for advanced hardware overlays instead of layers...
I wonder if a new system could be built around AMD/EMT64 .. the 16 multipurpose registers are very much like the 68K's 16 multipurpose registers... naah, too costly.
Yes, I've had this happen to me, although it was probably more of an application fault:
I inserted my card, pressed one of the context buttons on side of the screen to choose language, and when PIN prompt screen appeared, I pressed the same button again. Poof, screen went dark, and next thing I saw on screen was a nice, shiny OS/2 logo.
Fortunately, after two or three(!) reboots, the ATM software started up properly, and the machine spat out my card.
There were really only 1 or 2 really major bugs that I feel really hurt OS/2's chances. IBM was never keen on fixing them no matter how many users complained. I also don't recall a single native OS/2 program that used threads as effectively as they could have been used. The workplace shell was easily corrupted and God help you if you managed to trash your desktop with all the objects that they liked to register everywhere.
Oh well. It was fun while it lasted. It paid the bills for me throughout the '90's and I'll fondly remember doing the '95 Comdex in Atlanta with Team OS/2 (That's where I got certified) and threatening to mug "Team Microsoft" (A buch of MS employees MS brought with them so they could pretend they had a grass roots movement too) and leave them duct taped in one of the back booths that no one ever goes to.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I programmed ATMs in my last job, and
actually, the ATM OSes are usually not stripped of anything but quite complete, at least when it's Windows. They just have a lot of functions disabled via registry. However, you're right in that the biggest source of problems are the drivers for the special hardware - or the interaction between the drivers and the ATM app. There is a standard for these things (WOSA XFS), but it's the most badly-defined and badly-supported standard I've ever seen.
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
--Henry Kissinger
I'm having a nasty time with kernel 2.6.X linux and udev at the moment (rant a few topics back) but, in general, I would say many linuxes are much easier to set up than OS/2. The install process was about as friendly as a Debian Woody (albeit with graphics). And a bunch of driver issues. AFAIK they never got rid of the blue tint on the WinTV driver and the zombies caused by sound clashes when you were multitasking stuff like streaming music and accidently caused another sound request could be nasty. And no file system/admin security, right?
Nonetheless, it was a beautiful OS for its time in comparison to the Win9Xes. Another vote here for anyone resurrecting the Workplace Shell -- particularly augmented with Object Desktop.
Why it never took off:
1. IBM wasn't selling to the home market. Probably smart. As I say, it wasn't a pretty install and, argue all you want about how well Quake ran, it didn't run Active X games or even do sound for DOS games like Doom beyond the arcade beeps.
2. IBM marketed stupidly. Dvorak ranted on a billboard at an airport he saw that promised "OS/2 will obliterate your hard drive!" What was that supposed to mean? They marketed a version of "Warp _FOR_ (emphasis mine) Windows". What did that mean -- OS/2 was an add-on like Microsoft Bob?
3. When Windows 3.1 was coming out it promised to run OK on 4 meg of RAM. OS/2 needed 8 meg to run decently. At that moment, Ronald Reagan decided to teach the Japanese a thing or two about dumping RAM and nearly doubled ram prices.
4. Microsoft was found guilty of monopolistically intimidating PC distributors from providing OS alternatives.
Some of the blame IBM, some MS, some other factors.
FWIW, I'm posting this on my OS/2 machine. It's an Athlon 3000 with 1GB ram and over 1TB of RAID5 storage. It still has all the apps most people need (firefox, thunderbird, office suite, cd burning, irc, bittorrent, ftpd, httpd, smbd, etc)... I do have a seperate box for games (winxp)... but that's pretty much all it does...
;)
Yeah, I'll probably switch to some flavor of linux in the next year or two... or maybe OSX on intel... mmm... But OS/2 works today, and it'll probably work equally well tomorrow... and I'll reevaluate the situation tomorrow
moo
I used OS/2 for 3 years. It was MUCH better than DOS/Windows 3.X. Hell, it was better than Win95/98/ME! But I switched back to W95 because if IBM couldn't sell OS/2 for 3 years against Win3.1, it sure wasn't going to sell against W95! :(
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
I used OS/2 after I got fed up with DOS/Win3.1 crashing all the time. I was amazed at how much better of a desktop experience it provided in 1994 than Win3.1. It didn't have the slickness of Mac OS at the time, but it had a lot of things that went beyond Mac OS and were alsmot more NeXT-like. I used it for about a year, then Win95 came out and since I was into certain games that the OS/2 Windows subsystem didn't run well I moved to it.
Interestingly enough, I tried OS/2 again after a few years just on a lark. By this time I'd gotten a job that introduced me to Windows NT4 and I'd been working with that for about 2 years. It really amazed me just how much OS/2 resembled NT4 in a lot of ways, only with a better GUI and much more reliable. The fact that a lot of banks used OS/2 for a long time, indicates just how well made OS/2 was at the time when compared to DOS/Win3.1, Win9x and early WinNT. I think Microsoft, kind of, caught up to OS/2 with Windows 2000 SP3 in terms of reliability. But MS still doesn't seem to "get" the concept of a proper Object Oriented desktop. OS/2 did. NeXTSTEP did. And of course, Mac OS X does.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
I, too, was a youngling when OS/2 was a popular alternative. A buddy and I ran BBSs and we liked OS/2 very much. The multitasking was much better than DESQview. We could run the BBS and *gasp* still actually use the computer ;)
Good times, good times...
OS/2 is still around. This post is being written on an OS/2 machine, in Firefox. (The company where I work uses OS/2 nearly exclusively for desktops, and whenever it can for servers.)
It has some advantages, but from a day-to-day use standpoint right now I feel it combines the worst of Windows and Linux: It doesn't have all the commercial support, and has a limited (MS-DOS like) comandline/compiler tools.
'Sensible' is a curse word.
It was stable. It had class. It was predictable in almost any environment. It scaled well between servers, ATMS, backend stuff and workstations. And, at least in the implementations I saw, it was efficient as hell.
I worked for Meridian Bank back in the early 90's as a simple integration tech. Everything was cool - then came the buyout. It's inevitable - every bank eventually gets bought by another bank, and it happened on my shift on fine day.
A lot of people lost their jobs, a lot of 'redundant' branches were closed. But for me, worse things happened. You see, Corestates was still using strung together DOS scripts and it was messy. User's workstations were downgraded to Novell/DOS/Win 3.11 with the OS loading on 4 or 16 Megabit Token Ring. On Audit Day (Wednesday), a user could expect to wait up to 15 minutes for their machine to boot into the network. It was ugly, the users hated us... Hell, I hated us! I didn't leave that job soon enough.
Everyone there missed their 32-bit OS and as this was one year before Windows 95, it would be several years before they started getting 95/NT on the desktop. The horror!
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
Maybe we finally see the OS/2 Presentation Manager going Open Source and be ported to *X?
Hmm, okay, yet another GUI framework. I guess IBM should've done this five years ago.
Use The Source, Luke!
A lot of us ran BBSs under OS/2. If you wanted to run multi node or do other things with your machine, it was the only thing that got the job done. Beat the hell out of Desqview. Had to suffer through that for a few years as well, learned pretty quick how to change my code to do fast DV screen writes without bleeding through. Loved using SIO for COM drivers and redirecting my BBS to telnet. I wish that trend would have taken off instead of Web boards.
And for my part, already went Linux. Although I have to keep Win machines too. Tried Mac (mini), found the OS annoying. At least I finally got a PPC, even if OS/2 didn't survive to support it.
It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit. -- Harry Truman
Banks still use OS/2 in lots of their infrastructure because it's fast and rock solid stable. It's well supported, in fact several very large banks still use os/2 as the backbone infrastructure for their ATM networks.
I wish IBM would port OS/2 to either Xen or build a compatibility layer to run on top of linux. Then os/2 customers could gradually move to Linux without having to recode their programs.
I use Os/2 2.11 desktops in 1992-1995 exclusively to run my IT department with Novell servers for filesharing. It was so FAR ahead of windows, it took M$ until 1997 to catch up with os/2 feature-wise and until 1999 to catch up stability-wise.
M$ only coded a small portion of OS/2, and they still retain rights to the core lanman networking components and parts of various subsystems. M$ consistently torpedoed IBMs' attempts to broaden interest or even opensource components because of the original ill fated deal. Too bad, Windows could have had a serious competitor. Instead thanks to intrigue, infighting and mishandling, OS/2 has been relegated to the dustbin. Sigh. Thanks Bill.