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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.
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!
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
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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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Yeah, most ATMs block incoming emails.
No existe.
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
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.
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 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