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

Won't somebody please think of the ATM machines?

[John Harrison]

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.

Open Source OS/2

[katana]

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.

I wonder what will happen to some things....

[tu_holmes]

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...

Open the Workplace Shell

[PingXao]

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.

Re:Open the Workplace Shell

[Losat]

Hear hear! I love the WPS!
It's been so long since I used OS/2 that I'd forgotten about dragging colors and fonts from the palettes and such, until I went and checked out eComStation a few moments ago. I remembered that WPS rocked, but I'd forgottem some of the coolness.
BTW, I liked the old settings notebooks better than the later tabbed dialogs. I especially liked notebooks with both horizonatal and vertical tabs (when appropriate).
And my favorite UI feature missing in other systems: the Conditional Cascade Menu!

Hmm...

[Greyfox]

Where do I go to turn in my OS/2 Certified Engineer card? OS/2 was a great OS and as far as I know there's still nothing out there that talk to IBM big iron like it does. The last big user I saw who was using it were Bank of Austria back around '99. I had to go over there and sort some driver issues out for them.

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.

Actually...

[eno2001]

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.