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."

Comments

Somehow OS/2 is the antitheses of HURD

[Chrisq]

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

Re:Somehow OS/2 is the antitheses of HURD

[CAIMLAS]

Those of us who do support on systems from many different clients really don't wonder why they still exist.

HURD is one thing; we don't really wonder why it's stillborn. OS/2, or more specifically eComStation, is something else entirely. OS/2 has a history of commercial support, which means it's also got a history of applications with support. Support means that people used those applications, on the OS, in a business capacity. Think of OSes like: SCO, DOS, and yes, OS/2.

Just because the OS, and application, support goes away doesn't mean those applications aren't still needed. There are a LOT of applications out there which were written one-off, for a single client in a specific role. The companies that wrote them may not even be in business anymore, but the application still works and the the cost of

So people are running their applications on legacy operating systems, sometimes on some pretty janky hardware (I once saw an old box with IDE controllers on a proprietary IDE RAID controller - with half the RAID consisting of CF cards on adapters). Maybe they've managed to virtualize the platform, or partially virtualize it (such as when there's a hardware platform to the application, requiring COM port bridging to the guest so that a USB to COM adapter can be used to interface with a proprietary reader/etc. - you get the point).

No, it's not an ideal business scenario, and there are certainly situations where a lot can go wrong, ruining your day. But There are a lot of these companies, which means there's a special use case for support. Or just in-house people needing to upgrade things to keep as much of their stack compatible as they can.

So yeah, there is still a need for such legacy platforms. Just because it's not shiney and new doesn't mean it's lacking a valid business case.

For those who don't get it ...

[MacTO]

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.

Re:A reminder...

[RabidReindeer]

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.

Re:Please

[kelemvor4]

zealot + Grammar Nazi = zelot

Re:A reminder...

[Greyfox]

When I signed on with their support center in 1993, pretty much anyone could call the OS/2 support line for anything and get some of the best-rated support in the industry. A lot of the level 1 guys didn't have any experience with computers when they started, but even if you got someone completely inept at searching the problem database, they'd queue your ticket up to level 2 without complaint. You might get a call-back a couple days later, but you'd probably get an answer. That answer might be "Oh, that's working as designed," but you'd get an answer. We also provided electronic forum support through Compuserve, AOL and Prodigy forums.

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.

It had its moments

[XB-70]

I ran OS/2 for a couple of years during its heyday in our shop. The key was to put in lots of expensive RAM. When we did so, our users were actually running 3-4 apps at once. For the time, this was very powerful. Moreover, when one app crashed, it rarely took down the whole machine. At a time when lots of things crashed for a lot of reasons, I got my users' uptime to about 90%.

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.