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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
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"?
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?
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.
VirtualBox was originally written to run OS/2 by an OS/2 vendor, Innotek who amongst other things had previously fixed Virtual PC to run OS/2 and run on OS/2. Of course then MS bought VPC.
VirtualBox ended up the fabled OS/2 killer app but backwards, running OS/2 instead of running under OS/2 and took off. Unluckily Sun didn't care much for OS/2 and now...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
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...