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Keeping the OS/2 Flame Alive
nanday writes "Ever wondered what happened to OS/2? With IBM officially abandoning the operating system last year, users are relying on a third party version of OS/2 -- and, increasingly, using free and open source software to keep
it alive." From the article: "According to Haverblad, the main reason that users stay with OS/2 is for 'features that Windows and Linux don't have yet.' He singles out the REstructured eXtended eXecutor (REXX), an interpreted programming language known for its ease of use, a 'rock solid kernel,' 'excellent multitasking,' and low system requirements. Haverblad also claims a lack of viruses and spyware and, referencing a report on OS/2 Warp Server by Secunia, fewer security vulnerabilities." Newsforge is also an OSTG site.
REXX was also available for Amiga...and others...
See: http://rexxla.org/Links/
Haverblad also claims a lack of viruses and spyware.
um, having a lack of USERS tends to do that.
"Is this just useless, or is it expensive as well?"
Actually it is the most worthwhile OS to crack from a greed perspective... Guess what those ATMs generally run on... thats right, OS/2
The phrase "more better" is acceptable English. suck it grammar Nazis
Well, on Windows there's nothing to stop REXX calling COM methods.
There are about a dozen more than this. See Interpreters. Its a pretty well supported language on just about every platform. Though its really only naturally at home on Z-OS and I-OS and that's where it makes sense to use it.
No, NT was developed by Microsoft independently of IBM. NT did offer an OS/2 compatibility layer early on, but it has a completely different kernel.
And its not the stuffy old version that came with OS/2 either, it's the more modern ObjectREXX. Enjoy.
-- Bill Gates, from "OS/2 Programmer's Guide" (forward by Bill Gates)
Paid Q&A/Research
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
There are probably elderly PCs running Dow Jones feed servers in many banks still, probably even running OS/2 1.3 on the command line as it Just Worked, even to the point that there were attempts to port applications to v4/Warp when it was released. It had an amazingly fast boot time even compared to DOS but even when IBM had a burst of zealotry over Warp and tried to promote it as the Internet desktop of the future (I still have a few of those 60 day trial CDs that got everywhere at the end of 1994). It's good to know that it's being kept alive as despite its foibles, it had a potential that neither Linux, Windows or OS X have managed to really live up to, as a light, fast, multithreading application server. Just perhaps not a desktop.
I developed for OS/2 for about 7 years. Yes the kernel had threads and a solid multitasking support but the flawed design of Presentation Manager (PM) caused a single rogue app to lock up the desktop and making it useless. The single message queue that IBM designed in PM, was one of the worst technical design decisions ever made. There added many workarounds to kill rogue apps but the results were pretty unreliable.
It was fixed in 1996 with the release of version 4. Microsoft owns the copyright on PM, not IBM.
Enjoy,
It's just the normal noises in here.
On that day, OS/2's architect, Gordon Letwin, posted USENET message explaining why the system was doomed in the market. After that, it was all downhill.
Pretty sure there's also a standalone REXX for Windows. I'll let somebody else do the Googling and leech the +1, Informative.
I think it's worth pointing out this petition over at OS2World.com (which is still accepting signatures), asking IBM to release the source of OS/2.
There are apparently some legal issues -- the most frequently cited one is that IBM might not hold copyright to all the code, since the project was originally done in collaboration with Microsoft and Corel -- but the request is that IBM open up all of the code that it has available and can legally release, and note what parts it can't, so that they could be re-implemented.
I'm not sure it's ever going to happen, but it sure would be nice if it did.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Yeah, those old versions of browsers are really painful.
For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert. - Arthur C. Clarke
Firefox 1.5 is available for OS/2 Warp 4 (with updates applied) and eComStation. There are a couple of screen shots of it here: http://toastytech.com/guis/ff15t2.html
No way. I used to work for a bank, and the busiest machines carried $30k when full, and most of our machines carried less. The machines just aren't set up to hold 12,500 bills (about 25 pounds worth of currency), which is $250k in $20 bills. Plus, that amount of cash would be way too tempting for the sorts of idiots who might consider hooking up a tow truck or backhoe and just driving off with the thing.
ABSURDITY, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.
80% of the ATM machines in North America are running OS/2 right now. I'd call that one hell of an install base. I know this becuase my company does remote IT support for several banks, including one that plans to be the largest financial institution by the end of 2007. In that bank, a civil war is being fought between the Wintel and Unix/Linux side to decide what these ATM machines will run when IBM drops support. I do not know about you, but it scares the crap out of me to put in my ATM card and the next thing I see is a blue screen. That is when Mr. Crowbar will have to take over.
(I know, the article is about IBM OS/2, not Microsoft's. Microsoft and IBM parted ways after version 1.3, with IBM working on version 2, while Microsoft focused on building a more ambitious version 3, which eventually became Windows NT version 3. The rest is history. But yes, Windows NT in its embryonic stages was originally supposed to be Microsoft OS/2 version 3. Windows NT could still use HPFS file systems and run OS/2 binaries until, I believe, Windows 2000. Not that there were a lot of killer apps out that used the OS/2 v1.x API, but you could actually still run them on NT 3 and NT 4)..
There is an effort underway to create an open source clone of OS/2. You die-hard OS2'ers might want to check it out and get involved...
// TODO: Insert Cool Sig
Another thing i liked a lot about OS/2 is the WPS, that maybe by now there are better desktops, but back then was wonderful, still waiting some of their features in modern desktops like KDE.
The greatest thing about OS/2 is that it is rock solid and stable. My OS/2 would stay up for months at a time. can't even get Linux to do that in a desktop environment. It had great graphics for the time and applications didn't stomp on each other. I could even run DOS games while I compiled code on my fire-breather 386. I When they finally moved us to Windows, it was hard times. Windows blew up constantly. If you played a DOS game while you compiled, it would freak out like a prom date in a Hummer limo.
I still have a copy of Warp in the closet of old-school stuff. eBay baby.
If you aren't part of the solution, there is good money to be made prolonging the problem
A while back, IBM released ObjectRexx to the opensource world. The OORexx project is hosted on Sourceforge http://oorexx.org/ It runs just fine under Linux, and can be used as a straight scripting language for shell scripts.
OS/2 runs under bochs. Though not very well. (I actually have a screenshot of OS/2 running in bochs from just a couple of weeks back.) You can find factory sealed copies of OS/2 warp v3 on eBay for very little money. I paid $9.99 +shipping for my factory sealed copy, which I bought 2+ years ago on eBay. OS/2 warp v4 still gets $75+ based on the auctions I've seen.
It is now being developed by a company called Serenity Systems. They struck a deal with IBM to continue to develop OS/2 and release new versions under the name eComStation. You can down load a demo CD (70 MB iso) from the eComStation Web site. It won't install to a hard drive but is a bootable live CD version of the OS.
You do realize that OS/2 runs on everything upto AMD64s? The driver for 2 core is currently in beta but I hear it works pretty good.
Pretty well all video cards are supported by scitech (only 2d though). Sound by a port of alsa, usb by IBM drivers and better HD support then most other systems
Only thing really missing is good wireless support
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
It's worth noting as a minor nitpick that it's not actually AppleScript itself that's tied to the OS, but rather the Open Scripting Architecture, which is basically akin to the Amiga's "ARexx Ports" approach -- any language that can be built to talk with OSA can be used instead of AppleScript. There aren't many other OSA languages -- Frontier and JavaScript are the two most well-known ones -- but there's nothing intrinsic to AppleScript to prevent more from being developed. (Philip Aker has produced "OSAComponents," which claim to make Ruby, Python, Perl, PHP and Tcl/Tk "peer-level" scripting languages in the system, but I haven't tried them.)
Also, even non-OSA languages can use the "osascript" utility to execute an OSA script. I find AppleScript profoundly annoying, but it's not that difficult to write, say, a Ruby or an Expect script which does all of the heavy lifting in its native tongue and passes just what it has to via AppleScript.
*Wrong*.
... And you have the one reason OS/2 was never as stable as it could have been.
Version 4 (and everything that followed) still had the single input queue. What it did gain was some sort of asynchronous mechanism to detect when the input queue was hogged and attempt to forcibly grab control of it, but that rarely worked and more often than not caused even weirder problems.
They started playing with the various workarounds in fixpaks for version 3, with version 4 being the first (?) one with this feature enabled by default.
Didn't help much though. Add to that the various unfinished parts of the PM, and other parts that are simply buggy
Love over Gold.
If you are in a mainframe (excuse me zSeries Server) enviroment, the HMC, the ESCON director, MOSS/E console for the 3746-900, the APPN Network Node Processor on the 3746-900, and the console for older 2105's (Shark's) are all still OS/2. The newer sharks (2150-800) use Linux for the consols and I hear that the z9's HMC is Linux.
The natural home is z/VM where it was orignally developed. It was then ported to all other of IBM's OS's.