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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."
It ain't dead until Netcraft confirms it!
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!
I heard OS/2 was big in banking, but I just assumed they had moved off of OS/2 some time ago.
Is the OS/2 ran on older hardware similiar to what ran Windows 3.1? Should those that run OS/2 just upgrade to 3.1?
It's a sure thing with all those OS/2 users coming over.
Only fair don't you think?
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.
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 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.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on Slashdot.
If they won't support it, why not open the source and release it as such?
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.
To help switch to Linux, they are assigning a different engineer to each of the 12 customers. Talk about service! :^)
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
Because linux is too mainstream now GOD even my mother can use it. To be a REAL geek now you have to use OS/2 and/or punchcards.
Which is worse: ignorance or apathy? Who knows? Who cares?
In other news tonight Bill Gates and Linus Torvalds were reported to have been involved in a secret conspiracy which...included suckering Steve Jobs into going x86...
IBM has posted a migration page to help OS/2 users easily switch to Linux.
Sounds like Windows will have competition on an even wider base.
Any cost predictions for such a wide migration? OS/2 is on a fairly wide range of ATMs as it is.
I'm a virgo and on Slashdot. Coincidence? Yes.
So, OS/2. May you rest in peace. And please stop scratching the coffin from the inside. It upsets the bereaved :: wipes a tear from eye ::
Ahh hah hah hah!
What I really find interesting is that IBM has offered a migration HOWTO for the OS users, and its to Linux. Always nice to have the big boy support.
My Thoughts, Kyndig
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?
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
OS2's loss is linux's gain. Is anyone really suprised with this? I think we have all seen this coming for quite some time, and it was more a matter of "when" than "if".
Voice your opinion!
Your PIN number is 1583. Write this down and for goodness' sake, don't reveal it to another living soul.
As a *BSD user, I really feel great today!
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.
I entered my PIN number into an ATM machine, and took out $60 dollars.
I know, I should STFU up...
So, while it looks like IBM is stopping sales(2005) and general support(2006), OS/2 will still be shipping and supported by Serenity Systems via eComStation.
OS/2 is dead, long live OS/2.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
We wrote a large body of building automation software subsystems in OS/2. There was no easy way to provide the same functionality in Windows, so it was never cost effective to port it.
To this day, we keep the central routing server and all the subsystems in OS/2 boxes that are treated like embedded control systems, and have written Windows 2K-based interface code that proxies everything as BACnet devices.
OS/2 was a good combination of modern OS services (named pipes, threads, etc.) and easy development. Given how simple it was to access serial ports, we could easily interface via DigiBoard multiplexers and such, and could write a new system driver (including reverse engineering time) in less than six months.
I'm the primary contact for IBM in our office, so they've been flooding me with information about porting these apps to Linux, which sadly, may never be cost effective.
I am *very* sorry to see this event, even though I fully understand and appreciate all the factors that led to OS/2's demise. It's like watching a very dependable ship being sent to the bottom of the ocean because it's too expensive to keep it afloat.
Oh well...
Tim
This of course came as a shock to the dedicated OS/2 userbase, which had recieved no hints that it might no longer be in the forefrunt of the computer culture . . .
xkcd.com - a webcomic of mathematics, love, and language.
There's an interesting discussion over at OSNews about this very topic. It seems like OS/2 still has a relatively big fan base, someone mentioned three or four native Mozilla/Firefox ports alone!
For the love of god it's ATM not ATM machine. No one goes to the Automatic Teller Machine Machine
http://www.streetracingwar.com/
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.
Did the ATM machine run Windows 2000, which is built on Windows NT technology?
Only if you're posting over a DSL line.
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...
For the love of god it's ATM not ATM machine. No one goes to the Automatic Teller Machine Machine
Anybody with a PIN number goes to an ATM machine.
If you liked OS/2 you will find eComStation is better.
eComStation is more stable than ms win while being easy to use.
http://www.ecomstation.com/
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!
I go to an Automatic Teller Machine Machine and enter my Personal Identification Number Number at least 3 times a wekk!
Music is everybody's possession.
It's only publishers who think that people own it.
Fuck Beta
~John Lenno
Well, obviously the ATM machine is the machine which dispenses the ATMs.
Sure am using it. eComStation 1.2 http://www.ecomstation.com/ Firefox NVU Samba OpenOffice REXX Java 1.4
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.
I don't think you've checked very recently. The vast majority of ATM's have been Windows based for at least 2 or 3 years.
The big transition started happening around Y2K. They needed to upgrade the hardware in many of the systems anyways, so they took the opportunity to bail on OS/2 as well (given IBM's "don't ask, don't tell" stance on it).
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
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.
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.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Yeah, most ATMs block incoming emails.
No existe.
Well, we all go to the slash slash slash dot dot. :P
It means that the operating system doesn't depend on applications voluntarily yielding the CPU to the operating system, like with early versions of Windows and Mac OS.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
I've been running OS/2 for 10 yrs. So far I've had one virus, a boot sector virus that showed up in DOS sessions where it was pretty harmless and a fdisk /newmbr got rid of. Look at places like Secunia for security adviseries for OS/2 and you find one or two for Apache. In all these years I've installed one security update (PPP stack for a ping of death).
IBM created a fairly secure OS, I'd imagine the fact that it ran so many banks etc would of made it a target.
No services running by default. Horribly buggy sendmail thats too hard to configure to use. Straight netbios so home network is not routable.
And I still find it much better then Windows and much simpler then Linux. I just wish that Linux would copy the WorkPlace shell instead of MSes copy of the WPS.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
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.
The OS/2 userbase was totally shocked upon hearing this news from IBM. He then went to the fridge and got a soda.
Basically, yes. Once upon a time, there was cooperative multitasking (e.g. Windows 3.1). A program was given control of the system's resources (CPU, etc.) and the program and the OS had a gentleman's agreement that the program would return control of the resources after using up its timeslice. This worked as long as all programs cooperated properly . . . which of course means it sucked.
Preemptive multitasking means the OS preemptively takes control of the resources when the program's time is up, without asking. So, if a rogue program starts eating up cycles and generally acting like an asshole, the rest of the system doesn't suffer (much). Anyway, OS/2 had it first in the early 90s (along with Linux), and Windows didn't really have it implemented decently until 2000.
Funny... whenever we've done end-user training and the end-users don't have a preconceived notion of what a computer OS is supposed to look like, they seem to latch on to OS/2 just fine. And yes, we had users that would wave the mouse around in the air, so much so that I (when I was working as a tech writer) created a graphic that showed that the mouse had to be in contact with the table.
Once we got people to that level of understanding, the interface was reasonably consistent throughout.
Not sure what your benchmark is, but as someone who used OS/2 as my day-to-day OS for several years, and have supported apps developed under this OS for several more, and spent more than a few hours writing articles for "Inside OS/2," your comments strike me as bogus.
Tim
"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.
Rethinking email
Learned a decent amount about OS internals. Certainly led me and others down "enlightened paths" later in life (from an OS PoV).
getting verklempt ...
Knew ye well, OS/2. Rest in Peace.
They've updated the error message in Longhorn to make it much more comprehensible to the average user. The new message reads:
If you don't want crime to pay, let the government run it.
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.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Indeed. IBM pretty much left the ATM market entirely about 5 years ago. There's only a few left, most are Diebold (which I curse every time I have to use one)
Acutally.... Most of those ATM machines you see in Deli's, liquor stores, and otherwise still run OS/2 1.3 - the Microsoft/IBM release.
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.
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
My only real beef with OS/2 was the fact that it ran rather like a dog on 4megs of ram, and the cost to upgrade to 8megs was rather high. I gave it a good honest shot when I upgraded to 8 but at the time I was running mostly dos apps.. so I could either run OS/2 which took up a good deal of HD space and ram, or desqview which took up about 2megs of disk space and squat in the way of ram. By the time the pentiums came out and memory prices dropped to a point something like os/2 was practical and spiffy win95 was already out.
I'm not saying I didn't like the product, it was just too much for what I needed at the time, which was running a dos app and word once and a while and terminal emulation which at the time worked so much better in a dos window.
What I didn't like were those OS2 prophets. Nothing worse walking down the street and getting one of those jackasses with the "end is neigh" signs trying to convert me to OS2, when I was perfectly happy putting along in dos and desqview.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
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?
Younger readers might not remember much (or anything) about OS/2 and the history behind it.
This is my understanding, anyone correct me if I'm wrong on some points, please:
Microsoft developed OS/2 for IBM, as a sort of next generation operating system. And it was; it was fast, efficient, good looking, responsive, easy to develop under, with a much cleaner API than Win32.
I'm not sure if Microsoft sold OS/2 itself, but I seem to vaguely remember that there was a Microsoft version of it, as well as an IBM version of it, with only minor differences. It's my recollection that all indications were that Microsoft was going to put its weight behind OS/2.
After getting IBM heavily committed to it, they turned around and worked on their own, incompatible, equivalent (NT). It really was quite a screw job on the part of Microsoft to intentionally lead IBM astray, in my view. A faily anti-competitive way to weild their growing clout.
Wikipedia has some interesting history on it.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
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
Guess I haven't lived, as that's never happened to me, I've never had an ATM fail on me. However popups and such aren't a worry, it's not a full version of Windows it runs, and it's connected to the bank via an IBM encryption card. The security doesn't come form the software, it'd be stupid to rely on that, it comes from an extremely robust peice of hardware that is, for all intents and purposes, uncrackable.
However if random bashing of companies makes you feel good, go right ahead.
Some of them have LCD Displays
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Actually OS2 didn't look like 95 as OS2 2.0 came out before 95 was even developed heck OS2 2.0 looking like 95 as you put it came out before windows NT which was Pre 95. It's been a while but i belive OS2 came out in 90, 91 several years before 95 and a couple years before NT.
Not only that but IBM and MS had worked together on OS2 1.0 which came out in the 80's (this was before I got into IBM PC's i had dabbled with apple 2 in school but got into pc's in the late 80's so i didn't pay attention to IBM or MS didn't even know MS existed back then) but had broken up before 2.0 came out at the time MS was working on OS2 code which it shelved after the breakup and later dusted off after OS2 2.0 came out (one of the things OS2 2.0 and later had inside it was windows 3.0 and later 3.1 code because of an agreement between MS and IBM before they broke up for compatabilty with windows apps you could even make the desktop look like windows 3.0 and 3.1 or launch the 3.x shell ontop of OS2 which is where i think you are getting the it looked like 3.11 with 95 extentions they weren't 95 extentions they were 3.1 extentions) and finished it off calling it Windows NT. And later a hacked job using old dos for the 9x versions which were buggier than OS2 ever was mainly because of the fact the 9x versions were using Dos at their core.
So to be fair windows looks like OS2 but wasn't as stable as OS2 but OS2 wasn't as stable as NT nor as fast as OS2 itself had Dos in it as well just not to the degree of windows 9x. It also was more flexible and able to do more at once than any 9x OS mainly because it was pre-emptive instead of being co-operative like all windows OS's are including NT, 2000 and XP. Though NT doesn't have the weakness of dos draging it down so it's still a better OS. As for 2000 being fast of course it is it was written at a later time with different code and programing for faster machines with more memory so of course 2000 is more optimised and faster and 2003 is easier to configure for the same reasons they were both written a decade later more in the case of 2003. Though the dificulty configuring is the same problem with linux and linux code is more recent than OS2 code so thats a pretty lame argument. But your right it is to old now for a OS let alone for a server. Back when OS2 1.0 came out i heard it was crap but when 2.0 came out it was a much better OS than windows 3.0 was and much more stable and a better OS didn't come along til MS got NT out and the bugs in that worked out so at the time OS2 was much better than anything else out their for an OS on the PC. But time and IBM's lack of keeping up on it along with the fact that most people just didn't know what OS2 was to begin with (which was all IBM's fault) pretty much doomed it.
IBM was dooming it from the start anyway so it's not really like a suprise anyway. If they hadn't doomed it and had handled it right from the start it would be OS2 that 90 some percent of all pc's would be using today not windows. Take that for whatever it's worth but 95 suffered most of the same problems OS2 2.0 did almost 5 years after OS2 did and had fixed them so most people in 95 could have avoided things like corupt registries and other 95 problems by using OS2 2.1 which was out by that time. But IBM couldn't get it's head on straight and didn't relise what they had till it was way to late to do themselves any good. Heck they hadn't relised what they had for some time after 95 came out and by the time they did it was all over and everybody had gone home years before thats how far out of touch IBM was.
Coward? Coward! Thems fighten words!!
So, do people understand you when you say you're going to the AT Machine?
To be fair: Say "ATM" around a collection of geeks and see what's the first thing that pops into their head.
Like Token Ring it [OS/2] was stillborn
You have a very limited vantage point of history. Token Ring, like OS/2, had a large install base. Token Ring died because once Ethernet was (finally) standardized with 10baseT and low-cost hubs and NICs, it was cheaper and faster and easier. But token ring had a huge install base which was only eliminated once organizations needed to upgrade their bandwidth to 100 Mbit.
Why won't IBM release OS/2 into the wild as Open Source? It is (was) a great Operating System.
Goodbye OS/2,
I will miss you,
Goodbye to your cousin NT 4.0 too,
Boo Hoo, Boo Hoo
One ring to bind them - should probably have more fiber and less rings in their diet.
Actually, it was 3 years. OS/2 2.0 came out in 1992. 3 years with no competion and it STILL lost to Microsoft! IBM's marketing stunk!
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
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.
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
Three leters for you.... G N U.
Don't be a word nazi
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..."
OS/2 was out for EIGHT YEARS before Windows 95. The 32-bit OS/2 was out THREE years before Windows 95 and a year before Windows NT 3.1. OS/2 Warp version 3 (which you are probably thinking of) was out a year before Windows 95.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
I tried to get OS/2 running on three separate systems.
On one, the hard disk driver didn't work.
On the second, the video driver didn't work, so you were stuck at 640x480.
On the third, it wouldn't boot.
So the company I was working for gave up on OS/2. And now I work for IBM...
OS/2's problem wasn't marketing. The problem was that it wouldn't run on the diverse array of hardware around. It was probably great if you had IBM PCs, but who did?
Microsoft spends a lot of money getting Windows to run on all the hardware out there. Even if Apple wanted to make OS X run on any PC, they probably couldn't afford to.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
It looks like AmigaOS is slowly crawling to the top again. heheheh
Like others, I ran OS/2 until Windows 95 came out. IBM used to advertise that you could get 736k available in a DOS box under OS/2 and I came pretty close to that a couple of times - and thought I was hot stuff until someone asked me why I needed 736k to run an application that could only address 640k ;-)
But - this was back in the days when I quad-booted OS/2, a Win95 beta, Windows 3.1 and a RedHat distrubution just because I could. I finally outgrew that phase and understand that people with multiboot machines have way too much time on their hands ;-)
we see things not as as they are, but as we are.
-- anais nin
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.