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Is OS/2 Coming Back?
mstansberry writes "Is IBM considering relaunching OS/2? One source close to IBM says Big Blue plans to repurpose OS/2 services atop a Linux core. IT managers ask, why now?" Hey, back in simpler times OS/2 was super badass. Both of the guys who ran it were hard core.
I would be delighted to switch my window manager back to the Workplace Shell (well, provided that there were keyboard shortcuts). I would not be so delighted to again deal with the SIQ lockups (but I imagine a port of WPS to X11 wouldn't have that problem, except to the extent that its own components might themselves use their own queue). I also would worry about EA corruption, which was always a concern with OS/2 as the collection of cruft in EAs kept growing and often a little mistake led one to need to repair them (or reinstall the system).
Anyhow, point is if I could just have the interface back, with some light Unix sensibilities injected, I'd be happy to switch from WindowMaker back to WPS. (Actually, having Stardock's Object Desktop as part of that would be a huge plus).
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
This is just typical of IBM Services missing a delivery target.
The article is really an April 1st joke, but the 12th was the closest they could come. Probably need a few more contractor billable hours next time.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
People moan and whine because there's Gnome and KDE (although there's increasingly a bit of a norm unifying the whole thing thanks to opendesktop) and now they pull, out of all things, OS/2 services ?
Granted, why not ? But the few who actually worked on OS/2 programming let it go a long time ago. And why OS/2 and not [insert whatever other dead system here] ?
Everybody nowadays either uses Unix or Windows. Come up with something new or work with the crowd. Out with the IT necromancy I say. Bring out the torches and pitchforks !
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
You seem to miss the thousands of banks and financial institutions that were using it as well. OS/2 was far more prevalent in large businesses than it ever was with home users.
.technomancer
OS/2 is still running ATMs, train systems, all kinds of important things. It never went away.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Gnome and KDE are fine, but if IBM really wanted to, they could make them both obsolete pretty quickly with an update WPS interface. Plus, let's face it, at this stage in the "Linux on the desktop" battle, Linux *needs* an official, fully-funded commercial desktop environment. The Gnome vs. KDE battle is retarded, and both DEs are starting to get kind of nutty. IBM could restore sanity.
I'm all for it, personally. But I also think it's obvious that this is just a rumor.
They could port the OS/2 userspace APIs to linux. It would probably work pretty well. They could probably make it load and run OS/2 EXEs and DLLs unchanged. That would be cool.
(Spent some years of my life working on IBMs C++ compiler for OS/2.)
Ian Ameline
For a lot of companies, if something works there is no reason to mess with it. As hardware gets old and is difficult to replace with devices supported by OS/2, this may be attractive for some companies. In the past 12 months I have visited clients running critical applications on OS/2 and Xenix, while it is easy for an outsider to say "Just upgrade it to a newer application", replicating all the business logic and surrounding process would be costly and disruptive.
Finally, I've been dreaming for this day to come for years now. I've been using the PS/2 to USB adapter on my model M keyboard but it's adding unnecessary latency, not to mention USB's slow polling rate sucks. Now I can finally plug my keyboard into a native PS/2 port!
What? What do you mean TFA wasn't talking about the port?
I am one of them :D
Ran it, wrote code for it, supported it for 10,000 users from version 2 to version 4.
Unfortunately, they kind of pulled the wind out of the sails around the time Win 95/98 came out, so it didn't really make sense to stay with it.
I still miss little things like being able to reset the video to the default driver with a key combo, SNA/3270 support (which matters if you're not addicted to using a VB front-end for your mainframe), the first graphical remote desktop support, and a really great CDE style dock.
Oh, and REXX. I loved REXX... that was a great language.
An operating system should be like a light switch... simple, effective, easy to use, and designed for everyone.
I also would worry about EA corruption
Did EA even make any games for OS/2?
Can we have a new tag: "Rhetorical questions to which the answer is 'No'"
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
When I worked for the state there was a company contracted to develop a whole suite of Windows applications to move us off the old VAX green-screen interfaces into the modern world. Most of the department ran on Windows NT 4.
So naturally, the contractor developed all of their applications on a Windows NT 3.51 emulator running under OS/2.
Aaaaand after millions of dollars spent, the contractor demonstrated their applications (working flawlessly under the emulator in OS/2) got their money and high-tailed it, leaving us IT schlubs to implement the applications. All the apps immediately crashed when we attempted to run them in the real NT 4 environment. We never did get them working, except on the few workstations actually running OS/2 with an NT emulator.
Your tax dollars at work. Remember kids, watch your specifications when hiring a contractor!
Since MS has won the desktop OS battle, IBM has been behaving as a small company, but they are not. Sure the company that IS big IT must have more aspirations then just being a service provider?
And of course they are a lot more, but once they were the face of IT to ordinary people. You bought an IBM or at least an IBM compatible.
And now?
So if this story has some truth in it, it could mark an attempt by IBM to get back out there and fight in a crowded market place and not just charge 1000 dollars per hour for its personnel.
Doubt this is the case but I have always had the thought that if anyone can break the current stalemates it is IBM. It could force both hardware and software makers to worry about competition again.
Not that I think it is likely, IBM does quite well as it is. But it would be more intresting if it is true.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Buying software from IBM just encourages them to write more.
Maybe a port to the ReactOS kernel? Would keep a whole bunch of the OS/2 benefits of Windows compatibility, only now it would get Win32 support. Could be interesting. Plus, it would give the ReactOS project a key differentiator, instead of just being a "hey, I'm kinda like Windows too!" thing.
Although there are a lot of virtues in UNIX programming, some people just don't like it. They prefer richer APIs that Windows and OS/2 provide.
I have a revolutionary idea: Let's put only the necessary primitives into syscalls and let rest of the rich APIs be served by user-space libraries. Chances are the applications won't give a damn.
Ezekiel 23:20
BeOS, AmigaOS User Groups Say OS/2 Not As Worthy Of Rebirth As Their OS, Scuffle Ensues
General Availability (GA) Release 2.0 Of eComStation Announced For Autumn 2009
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
"2 guys who had it" jokes aside, back around 1994-95, OS/2 was way more common than Linux seems to be today. I knew several friends who had it and it blew Win 3.1 away. I actually considered getting it myself, until MS started touting Win 95. I remember them selling OS/2 pretty much everywhere you could buy software. IIRC, you could even buy it at Walmart. I suspect this was one of the main reasons that MS launched such a heavy-duty ad campaign for MS 95 (one of the biggest software ad campaigns ever launched up until then). After Win 95 came out, it pretty much disappeared, but there for a while it was pretty well regarded in computer-savy circles as a superior choice to Windows.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
This would not be for your auntie or some drooling drone making sales calls. It would be for real work like launching missiles, aligning satellites, Controlling a 900 ton press making metal clips, ATM machines, roaming death bots for the new death panels, I.E. real work.
Most of those people don't want a richer API. they want a minimal API that is rock solid stable.
IBM could care less about someone that wants fluf and talking paperclips.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Up until rather recently, a large majority of bank ATM's ran OS/2.
Many call centers ran software that used OS/2.
OS/2's attempt to reach the consumer market were laughable - they sponsored the OS/2 Fiesta Bowl in the 1990's, without explaining to the public what OS/2 even was - but the software was everywhere in the corporate world it seemed. (for those slashdotters who don't know what the Fiesta Bowl is, it's one of the biggest college football ball games.)
Ford car dealerships ran a satelite uplink system that required OS/2.
I used it to ran a multiline BBS. It was good stuff. Even today, many of the guts (and filenames) of Windows stem from MS's long ago partnership with IBM....the more stable portions of Windows.
Not sure what the relevance of it today would be, but it was more widespread than you might think.
Would it not make more sense to open source the existing code base? As I understand it some of the code was created by Microsoft so they probably can't do so with that, but the Wikipedia article suggests that code from ReactOS might be able to fill the gap. That said, I guess it would have years of development to catch up on anyway, but surely it would require less work that way than something like Haiku?
The Amiga had proper co-operative multitasking around a decade(!) before Windows
Amiga multitasking was pre-emptive, not cooperative. Much better. Windows multi-tasking was cooperative (if that) until Windows NT/95. Pre-emptive multitasking was where Amiga OS had a ten year advantage over common versions of Windows. The Mac didn't get co-operative multitasking until System 7, and pre-emptive multitasking on the Mac didn't come until Mac OS X.
The main problem with AmigaOS was that there was no security or process isolation to speak of. That made it _extremely_ fast, but also rather vulnerable to a variety of problems.