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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.
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.
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!
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.
Good luck with that son, but I'm sorry to tell you that Microsft did NOT help IBM code OS/2 so it would run Windows. As a matter of fact, Microsoft did far more to STOP OS/2 from running Windows and Windows applications. When Microsoft was releasing betas of Chicago( Win95 ), IBM had Chicago apps running under OS/2. When Microsoft found out, they changed the OS so that a very small portion of the Win32 resources loaded up at the 1GB memory address. This was so OS/2 could not run ANY Chicago applications or the OS. It worked because OS/2 supported virtual memory up to 512MB.
So you got that WAY WRONG. The bit about Microsoft licensing issues preventing opensourcing OS/2 is correct.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
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!
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on Slashdot.
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