Unisys still sells and supports two distinct lines of mainframes which are architecturally dissimilar (to each other as well as to IBM's mainframe line), which have a long history, and which are in roughly the same power class as the IBM boxes:
The Clearpath IX product line are OS2200-based boxes which are directly descended from the UNIVAC 1108 and Sperry 1100-series mainframe lines, which run an OS still largely based on EXEC 8, which still use 36-bit words and support stuff like TIP and FIELDATA, and which still have a heavy presence in the airline and travel industry.
The Clearpath NX product line are MCP-based boxes that are directly descended from the Burroughs (and Unisys) stack-based A-series mainframe line with its ALGOL-like machine language, which still support things like COMS and CANDE, and which still have a presence in places like the banking industry and like the structural glass-manufacturing company where I currently work.
IBM has a huge share of the mainframe market, but that doesn't mean it's the only player!
The OS/2 Shareware BBS is a BBS I still visit (via a Zmodem-capable telnet client) in order to obtain software.
Why?
Not only does it remain one of the best file repositories for the main OS I use here (OS/2), but I find its MAXIMUS/2 interface to be superior to the one used by the http or ftp-based file collections out there.
...almost every DOS power user that I knew used a third-party shell like the previously mentioned 4DOS or some combo shell/filemanager like Norton Commander, and almost everyone used third-party utilities to augment DOS's relatively spartan command set.
Besides, there were a number of front-ends which augmented the capabilities of basic DOS. Don't forget about things like PC/GEOS (the preemptive multitasking GUI that was used by Geoworks Ensemble), or GEM, or DesqView. Some of those front-ends were relatively powerful environments in their own right.
Also worth mentioning are TSRs -- the pile of little Terminate and Stay Resident programs and utilities that damn near every power DOS user had in spades. Each of these would hook up to one or more hot keys, and one could pop them up whenever one wanted and flip back and forth. Remember Sidekick, anyone? Or PC Magazine's Snipper?
One of my favorites was a little shareware comm program called Invisible Link. It was a nice ANSI-capable VT100 emulator with a phone book and Xmodem, and it would let you dial a BBS or even transfer files at 9600bps in the background while doing something important (like playing in WordPerfect) in the foreground. So DOS *could* multitask -- you just had to know which tools to use...
I agree that basic DOS was just that -- basic. But most DOS users didn't stay with that, not if they wanted to use DOS for anything other than a simple program launcher...
The airline industry (where I've spent most of my career) has a LOT of legacy code that is written in Fortran, as a programmer for a major airline, that is the code that I spent time maintaining and adding to over the years.
Some of it is in places you might expect to see such an "enginerring-oriented" language used -- for applications like flight plan generation, optimum fuel burn calculations, and such.
Other applications, however, like cargo waybill processing, are in Fortran simply because they're relatively old (late 60's/early 70's) and Fortran was considered the most applicable language at the time for the platform (Sperry UNIVAC 1100's) that they were written for.
My current position doesn't use Fortran (it's a lot worse -- we use COBOL74), but it's a paycheck.
The core mainframe-based flight operations system I worked on at Northwest Airlines (originally developed at United and also heavily used there) is almost all FORTRAN code, and there are several dozen airlines around the world (including Luftansa, Air France, and Air Canada) who are still using various "USAS" airline applications from Unisys Corporation (written in FORTRAN 77).
(USAS stood for "UNIVAC STANDARD AIRLINE SYSTEMS" at one point in time, and it reflected the heavy presence Univac 1100 mainframe hardware had in the airline industry in the 60's and 70's).
Some of us DEPEND on KVM switches, and to us it's a topic of critical importance.
Most topics on/. only appeal to a subset of the user base. IF you don't want to read something, just move on to the next topic...
Re:You can get better than KVM for little more mon
on
USB KVMs Compared
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I have keyboard, monitors, and mice that I can swap for the KVM cables if for some reason I want to have someone use one of the KVM'd boxes concurrently.
If I really need to display things on two boxes concurrently by myself, I use either X or VNC (depending on the platform(s) involved).
I use a dozen OSes with my KVM switch...
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USB KVMs Compared
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· Score: 1
...and I don't have any problems at all with my 4-port Belkin OmniCube and my Microsoft PS/2 mouse unless I perform a switch between boxes during POST time (when rebooting the box), in which case the mouse is sometimes not detected by that box.
The OSes currently installed and working with the four PC's connected to the KVM are as follows:
* PC-DOS 6.3
* OpenDOS 7.01
* Mandrake Linux 8.1
* Mandrake Linux 8.2
* Red Hat Linux 7.3
* OS/2 Warp 4 (FixPak 15)
* eComStation 1.0
* Windows 95 OSR2
* Windows NT 4 (SP6)
* BeOS 5 Pro
* FreeBSD 3.5
* Solaris/x86 7
The only OS which has given me problems other than at POST time is eComStation, which for some reason wants to be in the foreground for the entire boot process or the mouse doesn't get properly detected.
In *all* other cases, I have seen no problems.
Note: my hardware is all from the 1996-1997 time period, including the mouse, so it's possible that newer hardware is more problematic.
Keep in mind that some of us still use a platform that runs DOS games quite well, and that some of us have been collecting games for the PC for over a decade.
I suspect I'll want/need a floppy drive for the next 10 years, at least on one of my boxes...
(1) OS/2 still runs all of the programs I've been collecting for the past 10 years. That includes a fairly sizable collection of DOS, Windows 3.x, and OS/2 software.
That lets me avoid the upgrade treadmill that so many Windows users are stuck on. Why should I have to upgrade an old version of Quicken, ABC Flowcharter, or StarOffice if it still does the job I need? Answer: I don't.
(2) OS/2 is relatively stable, it has a fairly small footprint (by today's standards), and its kernel is a very smooth multitasker compared to Windows and perhaps even Linux/FreeBSD.
That lets me continue to be able to do almost everything I want to do on my 64MB PPro/200, including burning CDs in the background while doing most of my normal stuff in the foreground. That's what I'm doing right now: There are currently 58 processes with 222 threads, all only using 57MB of RAM right now. Not bad, considering I'm also running a copy of Hummingbird Exceed in the background.:-)
(3) With all of the software being ported from the Unix/Linux world, there are a surprising number of things an OS/2 user can still do.
Remember that OS/2 (while somewhat old now) is still a 32-bit operating system with an excellent command line. I regularly use programs like Leech and either LAME or Bladeenc to rip CDs and convert 'em to MP3 format, CDRecord to burn them, GIMP to do work on graphics files, etc.
The cost makes it a hard operating system for me to recommend to others nowadays except in special cases, but for those of us that have been using it for a while (in my case almost 10 years), there are surprisingly few reasons to leave...
There are almost always copies of OS/2 Warp 4 for sale on eBay, and most of the time the price is under US$50.
If you get a copy and need help (or have any other questions), stop on by the comp.os.os2.misc newsgroup on USENET and ask. We'll be glad to help you learn more.:-)
Unfortunately, the product was effectively hidden from view. IBM didn't make any effort to publicize its existence becayse Apple was already in the process of killing the CHRP platform.
Quake 1 ran fine under OS/2 in a VDM, but the production release of Doom (and other games that were based on the Doom engine) did not.
Strangely enough, the initial Doom betas ran fine (with sound) under OS/2, but id Software changed the code before release in a way which broke its use (with sound) in VDMs. I remember having e-mail conversations with American McGee (who was understanding) and Jay Wilbur (who was kind of a dick) about it..
Doom Legacy (a third-party version based on the code id Software released) has since fixed the problem, but I'm sure that the fact that Doom didn't work was one of the points that hurt OS/2 even when DOS was the main gaming platform...
IBM's consumer-targetted PC hardware isn't as slick looking as its business stuff, and I guess that was what you're original comment was about, and it's the lowest common demoninator (the typical consumer) that generates the sales numbers.
The two IBM IntelliStation Z Pro boxes I own were made in 1997, and they were the first sleek black towers I'd ever seen. A really bad picture of them can be seen here
One of IBM's problems is that most of their really cool hardware isn't targetted at consumers, so most hobbyist types have no idea what they actually produce...
I use Quikmenu as an alternative shell for my Windows boxes, mainly to isolate the games from the other software on the box during LAN parties.
QM allows me to create several different desktops (menu pages if you will, though they're more freeform than that) on which to place icons, and it lets me selectively password-protect the links between each desktop (and selectively password-protect each icon on each desktop) if I want.
That way, I can have the system boot into a "games" desktop, and I can hide my various serious desktops (I currently have two: "utilities" and "graphics") from folks that I don't want to give real access to.
(1) It came with some useful software bundled (HobLink's X11 server and Lotus SmartSuite were the two biggies for me).
(2) It provided me with a chance to get an SMP kernel in the client version (IBM doesn't offer that, and Warp Server is *expensive*).
(3) It integrated all of the FixPaks into a single place. I didn't have to go through the somersaults to install them myself.
(4) It gives me an advocate (in Serenity Systems) that has some clout with IBM. Not a lot of clout, I suspect, but certainly more than I had by myself as a Warp 4 user.
...and it's a wonderful desktop operating system for my 64MB SCSI PPro.
Of course, I've been actively collecting software since that time (both native OS/2 stuff and older DOS and Windows 3.1 packages that work under WinOS2), so I have a much larger collection of working software than could easily be obtained today by a new OS/2 user (since many of the packages I use are no longer available through normal sources).
I find OS/2 plus 4OS2 (the JP Software OS/2 equivalent of 4DOS -- remember that?) to be a very nice command-line environment. I like it better than sh, bash, tcsh, zsh, or any other *nix shell I've been able to play with.
Also, OS/2's VDMs are much more robust than, say, DOSEMU, and much less resource-intensive than a Virtual PC or VMWare virtual machine, so they are a fairly nice (and lightweight) way to run DOS games and multimedia apps like QuickView (a DOS AVI/MPG player) and DAMP (a DOS MP3 player that does shifting/pulsating graphics while the music is playing).
It all depends on what you're used to and on what you want to do. I admit it's a lot easier to have stayed with OS/2 then it is to get into it now, since I've already paid the price of admission long ago...
Slashdot Mirror
Unisys still sells and supports two distinct lines of mainframes which are architecturally dissimilar (to each other as well as to IBM's mainframe line), which have a long history, and which are in roughly the same power class as the IBM boxes:
The Clearpath IX product line are OS2200-based boxes which are directly descended from the UNIVAC 1108 and Sperry 1100-series mainframe lines, which run an OS still largely based on EXEC 8, which still use 36-bit words and support stuff like TIP and FIELDATA, and which still have a heavy presence in the airline and travel industry.
The Clearpath NX product line are MCP-based boxes that are directly descended from the Burroughs (and Unisys) stack-based A-series mainframe line with its ALGOL-like machine language, which still support things like COMS and CANDE, and which still have a presence in places like the banking industry and like the structural glass-manufacturing company where I currently work.
IBM has a huge share of the mainframe market, but that doesn't mean it's the only player!
Give me a good set of comprehensive libraries, and I can create solutions in Fortran VERY quickly.
Perl is nice. I'm in the process of learning it myself. But don't give it too much credit.
The OS/2 Shareware BBS is a BBS I still visit (via a Zmodem-capable telnet client) in order to obtain software.
Why?
Not only does it remain one of the best file repositories for the main OS I use here (OS/2), but I find its MAXIMUS/2 interface to be superior to the one used by the http or ftp-based file collections out there.
"NT, was, MS's real "successor" to OS/2."
An ironic comment indeed, given that NT was a subset to its OS/2 comtemporary in almost all respects...
...almost every DOS power user that I knew used a third-party shell like the previously mentioned 4DOS or some combo shell/filemanager like Norton Commander, and almost everyone used third-party utilities to augment DOS's relatively spartan command set.
Besides, there were a number of front-ends which augmented the capabilities of basic DOS. Don't forget about things like PC/GEOS (the preemptive multitasking GUI that was used by Geoworks Ensemble), or GEM, or DesqView. Some of those front-ends were relatively powerful environments in their own right.
Also worth mentioning are TSRs -- the pile of little Terminate and Stay Resident programs and utilities that damn near every power DOS user had in spades. Each of these would hook up to one or more hot keys, and one could pop them up whenever one wanted and flip back and forth. Remember Sidekick, anyone? Or PC Magazine's Snipper?
One of my favorites was a little shareware comm program called Invisible Link. It was a nice ANSI-capable VT100 emulator with a phone book and Xmodem, and it would let you dial a BBS or even transfer files at 9600bps in the background while doing something important (like playing in WordPerfect) in the foreground. So DOS *could* multitask -- you just had to know which tools to use...
I agree that basic DOS was just that -- basic. But most DOS users didn't stay with that, not if they wanted to use DOS for anything other than a simple program launcher...
The airline industry (where I've spent most of my career) has a LOT of legacy code that is written in Fortran, as a programmer for a major airline, that is the code that I spent time maintaining and adding to over the years.
Some of it is in places you might expect to see such an "enginerring-oriented" language used -- for applications like flight plan generation, optimum fuel burn calculations, and such.
Other applications, however, like cargo waybill processing, are in Fortran simply because they're relatively old (late 60's/early 70's) and Fortran was considered the most applicable language at the time for the platform (Sperry UNIVAC 1100's) that they were written for.
My current position doesn't use Fortran (it's a lot worse -- we use COBOL74), but it's a paycheck.
More info can be found here:
Click Me!
I've been looking since January, as have a number of my friends with similar experience, and I'd be happy with a Help Desk position right now...
The core mainframe-based flight operations system I worked on at Northwest Airlines (originally developed at United and also heavily used there) is almost all FORTRAN code, and there are several dozen airlines around the world (including Luftansa, Air France, and Air Canada) who are still using various "USAS" airline applications from Unisys Corporation (written in FORTRAN 77).
(USAS stood for "UNIVAC STANDARD AIRLINE SYSTEMS" at one point in time, and it reflected the heavy presence Univac 1100 mainframe hardware had in the airline industry in the 60's and 70's).
Some of us DEPEND on KVM switches, and to us it's a topic of critical importance.
/. only appeal to a subset of the user base. IF you don't want to read something, just move on to the next topic...
Most topics on
I have keyboard, monitors, and mice that I can swap for the KVM cables if for some reason I want to have someone use one of the KVM'd boxes concurrently.
If I really need to display things on two boxes concurrently by myself, I use either X or VNC (depending on the platform(s) involved).
...and I don't have any problems at all with my 4-port Belkin OmniCube and my Microsoft PS/2 mouse unless I perform a switch between boxes during POST time (when rebooting the box), in which case the mouse is sometimes not detected by that box.
The OSes currently installed and working with the four PC's connected to the KVM are as follows:
* PC-DOS 6.3
* OpenDOS 7.01
* Mandrake Linux 8.1
* Mandrake Linux 8.2
* Red Hat Linux 7.3
* OS/2 Warp 4 (FixPak 15)
* eComStation 1.0
* Windows 95 OSR2
* Windows NT 4 (SP6)
* BeOS 5 Pro
* FreeBSD 3.5
* Solaris/x86 7
The only OS which has given me problems other than at POST time is eComStation, which for some reason wants to be in the foreground for the entire boot process or the mouse doesn't get properly detected.
In *all* other cases, I have seen no problems.
Note: my hardware is all from the 1996-1997 time period, including the mouse, so it's possible that newer hardware is more problematic.
Keep in mind that some of us still use a platform that runs DOS games quite well, and that some of us have been collecting games for the PC for over a decade.
I suspect I'll want/need a floppy drive for the next 10 years, at least on one of my boxes...
That was the solution used at Northwest Airlines.
Frankly, I'd have preferred a pay cut...
Some of the key troublemakers have been quiet. :-)
(1) OS/2 still runs all of the programs I've been collecting for the past 10 years. That includes a fairly sizable collection of DOS, Windows 3.x, and OS/2 software.
:-)
That lets me avoid the upgrade treadmill that so many Windows users are stuck on. Why should I have to upgrade an old version of Quicken, ABC Flowcharter, or StarOffice if it still does the job I need? Answer: I don't.
(2) OS/2 is relatively stable, it has a fairly small footprint (by today's standards), and its kernel is a very smooth multitasker compared to Windows and perhaps even Linux/FreeBSD.
That lets me continue to be able to do almost everything I want to do on my 64MB PPro/200, including burning CDs in the background while doing most of my normal stuff in the foreground. That's what I'm doing right now: There are currently 58 processes with 222 threads, all only using 57MB of RAM right now. Not bad, considering I'm also running a copy of Hummingbird Exceed in the background.
(3) With all of the software being ported from the Unix/Linux world, there are a surprising number of things an OS/2 user can still do.
Remember that OS/2 (while somewhat old now) is still a 32-bit operating system with an excellent command line. I regularly use programs like Leech and either LAME or Bladeenc to rip CDs and convert 'em to MP3 format, CDRecord to burn them, GIMP to do work on graphics files, etc.
The cost makes it a hard operating system for me to recommend to others nowadays except in special cases, but for those of us that have been using it for a while (in my case almost 10 years), there are surprisingly few reasons to leave...
There are almost always copies of OS/2 Warp 4 for sale on eBay, and most of the time the price is under US$50.
:-)
If you get a copy and need help (or have any other questions), stop on by the comp.os.os2.misc newsgroup on USENET and ask. We'll be glad to help you learn more.
Unfortunately, the product was effectively hidden from view. IBM didn't make any effort to publicize its existence becayse Apple was already in the process of killing the CHRP platform.
Click here to see some Warp 4 Example Screens
Quake 1 ran fine under OS/2 in a VDM, but the production release of Doom (and other games that were based on the Doom engine) did not.
Strangely enough, the initial Doom betas ran fine (with sound) under OS/2, but id Software changed the code before release in a way which broke its use (with sound) in VDMs. I remember having e-mail conversations with American McGee (who was understanding) and Jay Wilbur (who was kind of a dick) about it..
Doom Legacy (a third-party version based on the code id Software released) has since fixed the problem, but I'm sure that the fact that Doom didn't work was one of the points that hurt OS/2 even when DOS was the main gaming platform...
IBM's consumer-targetted PC hardware isn't as slick looking as its business stuff, and I guess that was what you're original comment was about, and it's the lowest common demoninator (the typical consumer) that generates the sales numbers.
My bad...
One of IBM's problems is that most of their really cool hardware isn't targetted at consumers, so most hobbyist types have no idea what they actually produce...
I use Quikmenu as an alternative shell for my Windows boxes, mainly to isolate the games from the other software on the box during LAN parties.
QM allows me to create several different desktops (menu pages if you will, though they're more freeform than that) on which to place icons, and it lets me selectively password-protect the links between each desktop (and selectively password-protect each icon on each desktop) if I want.
That way, I can have the system boot into a "games" desktop, and I can hide my various serious desktops (I currently have two: "utilities" and "graphics") from folks that I don't want to give real access to.
It's rather slick.
(1) It came with some useful software bundled (HobLink's X11 server and Lotus SmartSuite were the two biggies for me).
(2) It provided me with a chance to get an SMP kernel in the client version (IBM doesn't offer that, and Warp Server is *expensive*).
(3) It integrated all of the FixPaks into a single place. I didn't have to go through the somersaults to install them myself.
(4) It gives me an advocate (in Serenity Systems) that has some clout with IBM. Not a lot of clout, I suspect, but certainly more than I had by myself as a Warp 4 user.
...and it's a wonderful desktop operating system for my 64MB SCSI PPro.
Of course, I've been actively collecting software since that time (both native OS/2 stuff and older DOS and Windows 3.1 packages that work under WinOS2), so I have a much larger collection of working software than could easily be obtained today by a new OS/2 user (since many of the packages I use are no longer available through normal sources).
I find OS/2 plus 4OS2 (the JP Software OS/2 equivalent of 4DOS -- remember that?) to be a very nice command-line environment. I like it better than sh, bash, tcsh, zsh, or any other *nix shell I've been able to play with.
Also, OS/2's VDMs are much more robust than, say, DOSEMU, and much less resource-intensive than a Virtual PC or VMWare virtual machine, so they are a fairly nice (and lightweight) way to run DOS games and multimedia apps like QuickView (a DOS AVI/MPG player) and DAMP (a DOS MP3 player that does shifting/pulsating graphics while the music is playing).
It all depends on what you're used to and on what you want to do. I admit it's a lot easier to have stayed with OS/2 then it is to get into it now, since I've already paid the price of admission long ago...