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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!
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
For the love of god it's ATM not ATM machine. No one goes to the Automatic Teller Machine Machine
http://www.streetracingwar.com/
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/
Well, obviously the ATM machine is the machine which dispenses the ATMs.
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).
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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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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
Some of them have LCD Displays
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Well you're on the right track somewhat.
IBM and Microsoft worked together on OS2 IBM did most of the code for 1.0 and started working on 2.0 while MS was supposed to sell 1.0 and a new GUI MS called windows that was supposed to be incorperated into OS2 around 2.0 or 2.1 as well as work on 3.0 as the next gen 3.0 ended up being NT BTW yep NT is the offspring of OS2. Anyway while IBM was working on 2.0 MS as some have said was having arguments with IBM about memory requirments as well as price for the new OS turned around and saw windows flying off the shelves and decided they didn't need a new OS or IBM so Gates and CO. bailed on IBM to sell windows. IBM was left to work on OS2 themselves but because of the deals with MS IBM had the rights to include the Windows code into OS2 through 2.1 which is why OS2 2.0 had partial windows 3.0 code in it and 2.1 warp had the full windows 3.1 code in it.
Well after 2.0 finally came out around the time MS was selling windows 3.0 MS started getting scared that OS2 would end up taking their desktop sales away due to a better more stable and flexible OS so they took their OS2 3.0 code off the shelf dusted it off and finished it off with some new things that had been learned since it had been shelved and called it windows NT for New Technology and said everybody would be able to use that. But they couldn't get Dos which people at the time needed for backwards compatability for dos programs people were using at the time to work in NT without breaking security needed for buisness so to satisfy everybody they said that NT would be for buisness and they would write a new version for everybody else which at the time they called NT Lite which later became 93 then 94 and then 9x for whenever they relesed it and finally 95 which as it turned out they shouldn't have released it at that time as it still was buggy and flawed and far from being a new OS with some dos code running under the new OS for compatability with old programs as it turned out 95 was still a shell running old dos with the same problems of dos. As a final point OS2 2.0 had suffered most of the smae problems as 95 like the registry coruptions etc.. and had fixed thoughs problems by the time OS2 2.1 warp was released before win 95 even came out suffering the same ills.
Really i don't know if MS lead IBM astray so much as just abandoning them. Leaving them in the lurch as it were or leaving them holding the bag as far as working on the subequent versions goes. But IBM was just as bad for OS2 as MS was mainly because of how IBM does things OS2 found itself competeing against other IBM projects for money for things like paying for programers and advertising etc. against ideas and inventions by other parts of IBM including some that had come fro the CEO and VP of IBM at the time. It's things like this that lead to stupid commercials for OS2 that left people not knowing exactly what the heck OS2 was. One featured a couple dancing on a dance floor with words poping up in the corner saying something about OS2 will make your life easier but said nothing about what OS2 was or how it was supposed to make anyones life easier. So IBM was doing plenty on it's own to sabatage OS2 even without MS who if they hadn't left to sell windows and later do NT and 95 would just have in some way weasled the rights to OS2 away from IBM by hook or crook anyway so it didn't really matter OS2 was doomed no matter how things played out. As things worked out we still ended up with OS2 just with a different name and MS shockingly weasled it away from IBM by taking the code which was OS2 at the core shelving it for a few years after they broke off from IBM and then finishing it under a new name without giving any royalties or sharing any of the profits from it with IBM even though it had used code written by programers working for IBM.
But thats MS for you.
Coward? Coward! Thems fighten words!!
So, do people understand you when you say you're going to the AT Machine?
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..."