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

This may tick some off...

[suitepotato]

...and it isn't a troll. I used to support OS/2 and it sucked like an Electrolux. 2.1 and Warp 3. Some of the worst time of my professional life.

Firstly, it had an interface that was bass ackward on a level that no sadist Motif nutcase in Hell could have conceived and which made that of the Amiga look almost sane. It set out to not be Unix, DOS, Windows, or anything else that you could use without training and regular doses of crazy pills never mind headache meds. Those of my family working the insurance companies with massive IBM entrenchment agreed.

You want paradigm shifting without popping the clutch? I know of several companies which took people and gave them massive training just to make basic use of OS/2, threw them onto Windows 95 or NT without training, then put them back onto OS/2 until they could, in essence, deprogram their OS/2 users.

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.

Thirdly, the ONLY place it excelled was stable multitasking of DOS windows and even it was like dealing with Dirty Harry. Was it stable with seven or eight windows before another one crashed it? Well, do you feel luck, punk?

Like Token Ring it was stillborn and it would have been better had its authors been using intellectual protection and not conceived it in the first place, requiring this after the fact abortion. Strong wording I know, but I sacrificed sixty hours a week to that horrific demon spawn and would rather have never had to.

Thankfully, many IBM shops saw past the folly of single-sourcing everything to IBM, saw that IBM was rapidly becoming a corporation dedicated to whatever it was no matter the amount of idiocy involved, and that IBM could not do for them on the desktop what Windows could.

Rest In Deletion, OS/2.