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eComStation 2.2 Beta, the Legacy of OS/2 Lives On
An anonymous reader writes "Yes, those OS/2 Warp bastards just don't want to quit. Today the eComStation 2.2 beta live CD was released for public download. There is also this positive review from TechRepublic, and OS/2 Zelots partying/ranting at their community sites."
HURD lives on in a half-life without ever being born. OS/2 lives on in a half-life without ever dying. You wonder why either of them still exist
I really hope that someday our community can have an open source OS/2 clone. We have several pieces, like WPS components, SOM, parts of Presentation Manager (PM), and some driver. But it still requires a lot of efforts to put it together and create an open source distro. We need more developer horse power, but skilled resourced on OS/2 architecture are hard to get on this days.
OS/2 was used by major corporations back in the day. Even though most of those installations have been replaced with Windows, a few of them remain because: the cost of replacing custom or specialized software can be quite high, and the cost of replacing equipment that is currently in service can be quite high. Serenity Systems (the people who maintain eCS) was created to service these installations.
A nice benefit is that OS/2 remains (moderately) updated for other users.
This is a good reminder of why Microsoft should never be trusted. Ever.
OS/2 was gaining significant ground and (in theory) could have been *Linux* today.
OS/2 was very advanced at the time.
Excepting, MS paid off IBM to kill it so it wouldn't interfere with their race to the desktop.
No jail time, no DoJ investigation; nothing...
Let's see how well secure boot works.
Actually, OS/2 and Linux co-existed side-by-side in the 1990s and one of the most frustrating things was that it was easier to get free Linux support from open-source resources than it was to get paid OS/2 support from one of the largest companies in the world. And we had 2 multi-CPU IBM mainframes at the time, which should have counted for something. As it was, every time we finally found someone in IBM who could help us, they ended up leaving IBM shortly thereafter, and us without support.
OS/2 support sucked. The IBM program products all used different and incompatible preferences and logfile formats, typically only readable by a proprietary IBM program; compare to Linux where the preferences and logs were/are in text files (and thus processable by text utilities) and in well-defined, consistent locations.
Yes, OS/2 had some worthwhile features, but in the end, they weren't enough, especially with Microsoft patting them on the back with knife in hand. Windows contains some of the same horribleness that OS/2 did, but less of it, and that made a lot of difference.
What the hell is a "Zelot"?
Apparently there was actual work done on this, and it was close to being a shipping product --- anyone have any details?
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
It really was.....it's too bad IBM didn't keep pushing harder.
IBM support still sucks. You spend more time proving to them that you're entitled to support than you spend getting support. Customer number? Site code? How about I give you the number of dollars we've sent you, and then we can talk about how you can't find those other numbers in your system.
I went through this yet again earlier this week. At one point I had to bite my tongue to keep from saying, "Four months ago, my company wrote you an eight-figure check for worldwide licensing and support. If that's not in your database, maybe you should switch to Oracle."
Win7 doesn't really have any new features or improvements over XP in the scope of actual functionality. While Win8, is a short trip into the tall weeds and in between them all was Vista - again no actual new features or improvements just bloat and failure. So yes, OS/2 had some problems - not the least of which was it was by IBM which always knows best, better than any customers and IBM does things that IBM wants to do not what you want to do - but in terms of "this is old junk I don't know why people use it!" it's no better or worse than anything else.
I have three Win7 Pro 64 installations running on three different laptops right now. They ALL behave subtly different from one another for no explicable reason at all.
I used OS/2 for a few months in the early 90s and it was uglier than dog vomit. I dropped it entirely it when it wouldn't provide drivers for my new Lexmark printer and that was back when Lexmark were still calling themselves part of IBM. One of my relatives by marriage was using OS/2 extensively ten years later in his job as a systems programmer for IBM and he swore that it was the best operating system he had ever used.
Curiously once I dropped OS/2 I tried three different distros of Linux, I actually paid money for them in those days before the Internet was opened to the public. I could not get a single distro to install even after multiple attempts at each one with its pile of floppies - CD drives cost $400+ so no-one I knew had one then. The experience put me off Linux for ten years.
They were dark days and the only choice was Mac or MS-DOS 5.0 and Windows 3.1 and to get a game to run required changing your config.sys file for each different game.
I said - don't look Ethel!..., but it was too late..., she'd already looked.
Just buying OS2 was a pain in the ass. When I first jumped on the os2 train it took me 4 reps to even figure out what sku to get. Even then they were surprised I wanted to buy it at all.
Then the install process was a horid mess I had to disable the cache to get 2.1 to install (~8 hour install time and sitting there waiting for 'next disk please'). *Most* computers out there did not run OS2 at all. If you could get it to install (stick to the preferred provider list please). MS may be knocked on for what they did but damned if their junk didnt 'just run' least with DOS (NT was similar until the XP flavors). OS2 was a finicky beast that would trap out for no real reason. I can see why many IT manager kicked it to the curb when your first experience is 1 guy sitting there pushing a 20 stack of disks in and then it may or may not run... I can see why they would just say screw it and grab computer shopper and order 20 win3.1 boxes from dell...
MS didnt kill OS2 (though they most certainly took advantage of the situation and heaped it on). IBM killed it. They tried to sell it at a premium level with premium level support contracts to go with it. 20k for a TCP/IP stack, no thank you but you give me token ring free oh thanks. Their marketing guys killed it. They killed the goose that laid the golden eggs thru short term sales projections.
Little known fact winxp can run os2 1.3 apps :) They took it out in vista. But their posix subsystem is pretty cool and can compile and run many linux apps...
IBM support still sucks. You spend more time proving to them that you're entitled to support than you spend getting support. Customer number? Site code? How about I give you the number of dollars we've sent you, and then we can talk about how you can't find those other numbers in your system.
I went through this yet again earlier this week. At one point I had to bite my tongue to keep from saying, "Four months ago, my company wrote you an eight-figure check for worldwide licensing and support. If that's not in your database, maybe you should switch to Oracle."
I might be wrong, but back then, it was mostly that OS/2 support sucked. IBM did, after all, originally have a reputation for providing support so all-encompassing that PHBs everywhere rejoiced in not having to think for themselves - as long as they bought what IBM told them to buy, IBM did most of their work for them.
That was, of course, before IBM jettisoned major constituents of their local talent in favor of offshore staff. Frankly, unless you're one of those rare companies that still has use for mainframes, I'm not sure what they're good for any more. I can get Dogbert Consulting from anyone.
And compatibility is still an issue. You cannot directly unload a DB2 database from an iSeries machine and load it into a Linux or Windows DB2. Or vice versa. For that, you're better off with one of the free open-source DBMS's.
The situation then and now isn't terribly different: when using anything but Windows, you had to select peripherals based upon OS driver support. Then again, that wasn't terribly hard. Pay a bit more for things like PostScript or SCSI, and you usually got much better hardware. As a bonus, that hardware typically made mobility between OSes much easier. (I went from DOS/Windows to OS/2 to Linux to Macintosh within the span of a few years and all of my peripherals made it through the transition.)
It didn't take too long after I signed on before they instituted the processes requiring you to prove you owned a legitimate copy of the product and limiting the amount of support you could get for free. Someone mentioned a number for what just answering the phone cost IBM. I don't recall the exact number, but it was surprisingly large -- somewhere in the $30-$40 range IIRC. So they did away with the call screeners who had previously been taking down customer information before transferring the call to support. The support person answering your call still had the same daily call quota, but also the added responsibility of requiring the customer to prove they were entitled to support, jockying the new 900 number support line and dealing with the technical question. As a reasonably competent level 1 guy, maybe I could fix your shit, but now I had just enough time to understand your problem (or sometimes not,) and take down your information for a level 2 person. I transferred to electronic forum support as this was taking place, and that really was the best place to go to get an answer while we were doing it.
Despite the cost constraints, the people down in Boca really were committed to delivering quality support and the highest customer satisfaction with the support that we could muster. IBM has always had the smoothest process of any place I've ever worked, and they had 5 or 6 different contracting companies in rows of cubes there all working together cohesively. I've never seen that large a team working together that smoothly, before or since. At one point there was a plan that all the level 1 guys would get their IBM "OS/2 Certified Engineer" certification, though I think I may have been the only support person ever to have actually done so -- the were doing the cert test for free at the 95 spring COMDEX and I knocked it out. A few months later, IBM announced they were closing the Boca Raton site and it was over.
IBM's problem with OS/2 was they viewed it as a profit-making enterprise. Microsoft knew their OS was a conduit for all their other products. When you control the OS and the APIs, you have a tremendous amount of leverage for the platform. Microsoft squeezes a little more money out of their OS now that they're at nearly market saturation, but I think they still realize the value of controlling the OS on the desktop. IBM never seemed to. Anything at IBM was either profitable on its own or an enabler to the sale of their big iron. OS/2 was always fantastic at talking to the big iron, but didn't move units. People would buy the mainframe and then get OS/2 as an afterthought instead of some mainframe terminals.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Frankly, unless you're one of those rare companies that still has use for mainframes, I'm not sure what they're good for any more. I can get Dogbert Consulting from anyone.
If you don't count supercomputers as being mainframes, they're still good for that too.
I know several people who worked on OS/2, one of which was a graphical designer (the one who created the swirly blue logo). He said that IBM had a hard requirement that all graphics had to be limited to 16 colors, for legacy video support. That explains a bit of the ugliness. The other part was that they experimented with alternate UI designs which ended up being horrible - specifically, the "tabs on a spiral notebook" layout, where the tabs would be on the left, right, and bottom in the particularly egregious cases.
It was also back in the day where integrating sound with desktop actions was considered a neat idea, and it would deafen you whenever you minimized or maximized a window.
All that being said, I still have fond memories of OS/2 - I ran from 2.0 beta up to 4.0, and it was the best development environment for DOS programs at the time.
I used OS/2 for a few months in the early 90s and it was uglier than dog vomit. ...One of my relatives by marriage was using OS/2 extensively ten years later in his job as a systems programmer for IBM and he swore that it was the best operating system he had ever used.
I respectfully his experience, and opinion, is perhaps more relevant than yours, then.
This topic has been thrashed out a few times here. Like other IBM products of the time, (System/38, but at least that eventually came good), OS/2 contained some very good technical advances that were compromised by poor business & marketing decisions, made by people who clearly did not understand what they were doing. I was in IBM at the time, and too many senior execs were still "big iron" guys; they were stuck in the days of selling multi-million dollar big blue boxes with insane margins. They just had no vision for the PC marketplace as a stand-alone ecosystem.
Hence MS took the Windows market with what was technically an inferior product, (but had better support, including hardware drivers).
You can't get Lexmark drivers for Linux, either.
Well, this is what IBM does to stuff. Someone brilliant invents a cool thing, then IBM adds a new piece to the product or the process every year until it sucks. When I went to work for Tivoli all of our support personnel were former sysadmins. By the time I left we had a whole infrastructure of support personnel below us who couldn't spell, couldn't think, didn't know shit about computers. As usual, most of the biggest idiots were relatives of the chick hired to run level 1 support.
While I was there my proximity to the main campus led to acquisition of about five IBM RT model 135s. They were 32 bit RISC machines contemporary to the PC AT. IBM failed with them by naming them PCs though they had nothing to do with PCs but a form factor (including the ISA bus) and then failing to sell them on that basis. Even if OS/2 were the best thing ever, IBM would have failed with it.
IBM's problem with OS/2 was they viewed it as a profit-making enterprise.
Yeah, you want to make a profit when you sell stuff.
Microsoft knew their OS was a conduit for all their other products.
Microsoft didn't sell computers at the time. They sold software. If they wanted their software to run on your computer they had to make that desirable, possible, convenient.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
OS/2 was XP a decade earlier, IBM just dropped the ball in their marketing department. I have fond memories of dual booting Warp with Slackware. Good to see eComStation is at it still. I might just have to pay the $159 or whatever it is for a personal license now that it can be ran inside VirtualBox.
Fuck Ajit Pai
Another case of superior technology losing. OS/2 was by far better than Windows back in the day. However, once again (just like x64 vs. Itanium and iPhone vs. Windows phones) the inferior tech proves friendlier to consumers and wins despite all the flaws.
However, at this point, I'd let OS/2 die. It was superior back then, but with all the resources going into Windows that are NOT going into OS/2, Windows of today is superior to OS/2 of today...
In short, everyone in my office had higher productivity which more than paid for the expensive RAM: They were not constantly waiting for machines to re-boot.
If ever there has been a case for a class-action lawsuit, it should have been against Microsoft for all the business hours lost waiting for Windows to re-boot due to a windows bug. If our cars ran the way Windows used to, we'd all have walked to work.
*** Don't be dull.***
Back in the 90-ies I used to run a popular BBS, I tried to go modern and multitask with win31 instead of desqview. Users forced me to change and I went for OS/2 which worked wonders (maybe - 92).. What I remember to this day is that some stuff just was much more logical in OS/2 than still in this day in windows (DnD, drag on appicon etc.)
Really liked it and it is nice to see that its legacy is living on.
Not entirely off-topic:
I got curious again just the other day and tried to install OS/2 in a virtual machine just to experience it. However I was completely stymied by the fact that the floppy disk images are in some odd-sized proprietary "DSK" format that neither VirtualBox nor Parallels seem to be able to read, and the CD images are apparently not bootable. I googled for half a day unsuccessfully looking for some way to convert the the floppy images into a compatible format. There was no way that I could see to bypass the floppies and run the installation directly from the CD image either, as far as I could tell.
I'd really love to know how the hell people manage to get OS/2 running in any VM. In almost two decades of playing around with nearly every obscure x86-compatible operating system under the sun (anyone else heard of Native Oberon?) I've never been so stumped just trying to get an OS installed.
Any pointers would be appreciated.
From the website:
'The current Demo CD is based on the eComStation 1.2 product and does not reflect the current state of the eComStation 2.0 product."
--- Generation X: The first generation to have SIG lines inferior to their parents... ---
It's there - heard of osFree? Essentially, it consists of the L4 microkernel, which has multiple personalities riding over it - a Presentation Manager personality, a win16 personality, a win32 personality and a neutral personality. The last one is the native personality that provides the microkernel services to all the overriding subsystems. This is somewhat similar to IBM's Workplace OS that they were trying to do in the 90s to give PPC a native OS of its own, except that instead of the slow Mach 3 microkernel, they are using a real, modern microkernel this time. The project also has in its agenda support for OS/2 features such as REXX, DSOM, et al. The best part of this project is that since L4 has been ported to multiple CPUs, this osFree can ride on several different CPUs, not just x86. Last but not least, it's dual licensed under both GPL/LGPL and BSDL.
Unlike Windows/ReactOS, since OS/2 never had a whole lot of native software, this platform could have its own collection of FOSS software for it. Now, if only the OS/2 community threw its lot behind it...
Excepting, MS paid off IBM to kill it
No, that's not what happened. Microsoft silently broke their agreement with IBM when they realized OS/2 would compete with Windows.
source
And here we also see Microsoft blatantly stealing Digital Equipment Corp. intellectual property... namely, NT.
I'm a techy at heart but an Accountant by profession. I work for a major IBM reseller. Let me just add here that the institutional incompetence of IBM extends way beyond its support departments. IBM Accounts Receivable habitually allocates payments received to the oldest outstanding invoices rather than the ones for which it was paid as they seemingly get commissions based on reducing overdue outstandings: This results in support cases being prematurely closed and promised credit notes not arriving ("Ah, but you paid the invoice in full") as well as multiple payment demands for invoices already paid on our systems. They've even cancelled deliveries based on our not having paid certain un-queried invoices because their AR staff had misallocated payments against items known to be in dispute
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
This is a good reminder of why Microsoft should never be trusted. Ever. OS/2 was gaining significant ground and (in theory) could have been *Linux* today. OS/2 was very advanced at the time. Excepting, MS paid off IBM to kill it so it wouldn't interfere with their race to the desktop. No jail time, no DoJ investigation; nothing...
Let's see how well secure boot works.
Actually, OS/2 and Linux co-existed side-by-side in the 1990s and one of the most frustrating things was that it was easier to get free Linux support from open-source resources than it was to get paid OS/2 support from one of the largest companies in the world. And we had 2 multi-CPU IBM mainframes at the time, which should have counted for something. As it was, every time we finally found someone in IBM who could help us, they ended up leaving IBM shortly thereafter, and us without support.
OS/2 support sucked. The IBM program products all used different and incompatible preferences and logfile formats, typically only readable by a proprietary IBM program; compare to Linux where the preferences and logs were/are in text files (and thus processable by text utilities) and in well-defined, consistent locations.
Yes, OS/2 had some worthwhile features, but in the end, they weren't enough, especially with Microsoft patting them on the back with knife in hand. Windows contains some of the same horribleness that OS/2 did, but less of it, and that made a lot of difference.
This was what failed OS/2 - it being owned by IBM. Had it been independent, or managed by a consortium of Microsoft rivals, like Borland, WordPerfect, Lotus (before IBM acquired it), Quicken, Symantec, Netscape and some others, it would probably have had more success
If one recalls, people were waiting forever for Microsoft to come out w/ Chicago a.k.a. Windows 95, and despite the 'OS/2 is here today' mantra, IBM could never get widespread support behind it. Their clout in the industry would have been enough to get the above companies I mentioned to throw their lot squarely behind it. When IBM was trying to make PPC a challenger to Intel, OS/2 on that should have been their top priority, instead of playing footsie w/ Microsoft to get NT on it, when NT was already running better on MIPS and Alpha.
In hindsight, when IBM finally failed w/ OS/2, they should have done what Ralph Nader suggested, and just open sourced the whole thing, just like Netscape did.
ECOM station won't actually boot on any PC you have either :).
Excepting, MS paid off IBM to kill it so it wouldn't interfere with their race to the desktop
You need to get back on your meds. I was a strong OS/2 advocate at the time, and MS did no such thing. MS was just a lot better at this kind of business than IBM was.
I've told this story on /. before when OS/2 stories come about. OS/2 had the unfortunate luck of coming out at a time when IBM was running/trying to run all of its divisions as separate companies. Case in point: I had some true blue IBM PCs (PS/ValuePoints IIRC) with true blue IBM 5250 (minicomputer terminal) emulator cards, trying to connect them to true blue IBM System/38s and AS/400s (The predecessors to the iSeries). I could not get the emulator cards to work with the OS/2 installed on the PCs, and the IBM support people told me point blank that they did not support OS/2 with their cards and to get it to work I would need to install Windows 3.1. So my nascent OS/2 rollout at the company I worked for was stopped dead in its tracks because even IBM wouldn't support OS/2. It's a shame because OS/2 was superior in almost every way to the Windows of the same era.
IBM's problem with OS/2 was they viewed it as a profit-making enterprise.
Yeah, you want to make a profit when you sell stuff.
You don't have to make a profit on everything you sell. IBM knows about loss-leading. The OS/2 people were never allowed to run their business like that.
I worked for a company that went Big Blue (desktops, mainframe and OS/2). Overall I liked OS/2 although the Windows 3.1 (WinOS2) emulator had a few issues.
IMO the thing that killed OS/2 was the success of Windows. If Windows hadn't made enough improvements to be acceptable then OS/2 would have had the edge and kept on growing market share. They had some advanced functions for the time and with a larger support base they would have kept on growing.
When Microsoft had a viable product they stopped supporting their products on OS/2 and that was that.
I still remember the game where you tried to catch the cat with your mouse. You could also put the cat on your desktop so it chased your mouse. Completely useless but amusing.
http://www.ecomstation.com/images/demo/palettes.png
I got Warp 3 when it came out. Loved it. I stayed with OS/2 throughout the rest of the 90s, through Warp 4.5 Server. I loved it. I still miss the hipsterish, superior feeling I got lording it over all the sheeple using Win 95 (Get off my lawn!).... Sometime during that period I also loaded up Yggdrasil Linux, which was about as user-friendly as a brick to the head. Back then I was dual-booting by using removable hard drives that slid in and out of a caddy-type device. Good times!
Part of the problem goes back to IBM's consent decree agreement. IBM couldn't announce features, developments while Microsoft could push vaporware in its war for the desktop. Also, thanks to Microsoft's per-CPU licensing and monopolistic practices the IBM PC division had no incentive to support the company's OS/2. It had a disincentive. Lack of support and within the company was highly disruptive to its advancement and support system. TeamOS2 volunteers, like myself, were much better at it than IBM because we were passionate about the product.
compare to Linux where the preferences and logs were/are in text files (and thus processable by text utilities) and in well-defined, consistent locations.
The contents of which are still different and incompatible, some with their own complicated parser to learn, most with simple but always different parsers, making programmatic access difficult or impossible.
See /etc/everydamnedthing for examples, look at several distros for examples of inconstant locations.
Anyway, please don't knock configuration databases, UNIX systems have a severe YetAnotherParserSyndrome thing going on. Linux is in dire need of programmatic configuration interfaces.
I've told this story on /. before when OS/2 stories come about. OS/2 had the unfortunate luck of coming out at a time when IBM was running/trying to run all of its divisions as separate companies. Case in point: I had some true blue IBM PCs (PS/ValuePoints IIRC) with true blue IBM 5250 (minicomputer terminal) emulator cards, trying to connect them to true blue IBM System/38s and AS/400s (The predecessors to the iSeries). I could not get the emulator cards to work with the OS/2 installed on the PCs, and the IBM support people told me point blank that they did not support OS/2 with their cards and to get it to work I would need to install Windows 3.1. So my nascent OS/2 rollout at the company I worked for was stopped dead in its tracks because even IBM wouldn't support OS/2. It's a shame because OS/2 was superior in almost every way to the Windows of the same era.
Actually, there was a cynical joke about IBM being 12 different companies on 5 different continents, none of whom were on speaking terms with each other that dates all the way back to at least the early 1980's.
OS/2 just helped prove the point.
I'd hardly consider the Itanium as superior to anything. The whole thing about the EPIC architecture is that it gains a minimal speed gain as a result of die size shrinks as a result of moving all dynamic analysis algorithms off chip, while losing whatever backward ILP compatibility there is w/ previous generations. Also, w/ multi-core CPUs becoming the trend ever since XP merged the Windows 95 and NT branches, the reason to have any VLIW based architecture went away. So there is not even the theoretical advantage of VLIW that there previously (arguably) was.
As for iPhone vs Windows phone, I'm curious to know why you seem to think that the latter is superior?
I still use OS/2 every day! I am just running the Microsoft fork called Windows (NT/2000/XP/Vista/7/8). I don't see OS/2 error messages anymore though, I guess they cleaned those out. (And nowadays DHCP don't stand for 'Dynamic Hose Configuration Protocol' like it said in the old Windows dialogs)
Also, lets not forget who wrote 90% of all the OS/2 version... That is right, your pal Microsoft. I still have the "Inside OS/2" with Gordon Letwin on the cover hacking HPFS in assembler. :-)
http://www.amazon.com/Inside-OS-2-Gordon-Letwin/dp/1556151179
Where one unresponsive application would cause the entire OS to freeze?
And here we also see Microsoft blatantly stealing Digital Equipment Corp. intellectual property... namely, NT.
Uh, no. Hiring people away to work on new IP similar to the IP they worked on before is not IP theft unless, you know, actual IP theft occurs. As in, that person steals source code on their way out the door, then uses it to jumpstart $NEWPROJECT at $NEWCOMPANY. That didn't happen in this case, or DEC would've sued Microsoft into the stone age (and you can bet they were watching given the prominence of Cutler). I've never seen anything at all to suggest that even a single line of code was borrowed.
For that matter, I've never even seen anything to suggest that VMS and NT are similar at any level above the conceptual. AFAIK, there is no compatibility, even at the application source code level. When you sell the VMS lead architect on the idea of being in charge of the OS Of The Future for arguably the most influential software company in the world, and that guy is ambitious, and compatibility with VMS isn't even close to being a requirement, you aren't going to get a carbon copy clone of VMS. You're going to get some superficial similarity to VMS, because that's what he was familiar with, but you're also going to get every idea he ever had for improving on VMS which couldn't be done at DEC because VMS had to remain compatible with older VMS versions.
Also, attempts to define the migrations of guys like Cutler as IP theft bear an unpleasant resemblance to legally mandated indentured servitude. "Are you really important to $OLDCOMPANY? Then you are not allowed to go anywhere else. Your brain belongs to us."
XP can't run OS/2 applications - the subsystem was last included in Windows 2000 (and the graphical support add-on was only released for NT 3.51 and 4).
int main
Is that a single line?