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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.
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...
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.
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.
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 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
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..."