Another OS/2 article, this time from John C. Dvorak: “Born April, 1987. Died Dec. 10, 2002. Cause of death: neglect. Place of death: Armonk, New York. Next of kin: none. Attending funeral: nobody. Official announcement appeared on IBM Website.“
Obituary: OS/2
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Just another stupid article about the death of a king.
Now we can start those “dead/not dead” discussion again :-))
Would be nice of OSNEWS did an article/review of OS/2.
I know nothing about it, what architecture is it built on ?
Is it stil developed ? How does it look/feel ?
OS/2 must be the Schrödinger’s Cat of the computer world
OS/2 was great. I was one of the early users of Warp back then, and it had a good browser. But unfortunately, it died not because no one developed for it (there’s a good OS/2 community out there), but because IBM seemed to have abandoned the platform after developing it. There were obvious lapses with regards to updating it, and we just see small snippets of announcements regarding it.
OS/2 getting EOL wasn’t a shocker; it was long delayed actually.
OS/2 passing is the nature of things. First it was OS/2, then PS/2… expect QS/2 soon!
OS/2 might be dead but its child eComStation is alive and kicking and will show its vangance against the destroyers of one great OS, OS/2. This child eCS will avange the death of OS/2.
Windows 9x, DOS and Windows NT. But apparently, they have a long history of family problems and never spoke in a long time.
Oh, I forgot to add eCS, its only son (or daughter)
Presently OS/2 4.52 is my primary system. I can do all that I want to do with it, and in a safe and secure environment. And, thanks to the power of the Workplace Shell, I can do it in a visually appealing fashion.
However, technology marches one, and one day, should there come a technology (REAL technology, not stupid butterflies)to supercede it that obliges me to switch, I will still maintain Warp on a system, even if it is an x86 emulation.
There will always be room for OS/2 with me.
ROFL rajan!!
…to get my old Warp 4 CD out of the closet and reinstall it on my secondary machine
Anyone ever had it running on the same PC as a Solaris x86 system??
Yeah, Eguenia, is it time yet to get rid of that OS/2 warp icon?
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The death of OS/2 must be humiliating for IBM.
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When will it end?
I was trying to find another article on PCmag.com from Dvorak, in which he announced he death of the IBM PC. I think it was about some kind of PC celebration where IBM didn’t show up, therefore the IBM PC is dead, moving to services. He also has a theory about tech periods, where he includes the rise and fall of the IBM PC, and with all that he calculates when will Micorsoft Windows OS decadency will aproach one: about the year 2010.
Dvoraks ways of reporting are a bit too Sherlock Holmes styled for my taste in tech news, although with his deductives ways and all I think he is mostly right: horrible decade for Big Blue. First blow was MS-DOS, second was Lotus Notes, the PC clones take over, and now this… what will follow?
I don’t know, but I do know that my IBM Deskstar hard disk died also three weeks ago, it started making funny noises and one day it refused to boot, baaaad booting sector, 30 gigabytes of data lost in darkness, if I had only used Gibson’s SpinRite, too late boy. ANYONE HERE KNOWS A HARD DISK DOCTOR FOR THE MASSES??? (I already know of the $500 “a pop” ones). This time I bought me a Western Digital Hard Drive. You see?, it’s humiliation non stop.
My first computer was an AppleII, my first PC was an IBM, a laptop, and it came with Microsoft Windows3.1 installed. My second PC was another laptop, a Texas Instruments (that was quality and not IBM!!!), Microsoft Windows came installed of course. This is the story of most of us, IBM OS/2 didn’t have a chance in hell.
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At the Joint Warfighting course, I always refer to a movie called “The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean,” which a few of you may be old enough to remember. It’s a Paul Newman film. Newman plays Judge Roy Bean, who is the hanging judge west of the Pecos, who ran a saloon and a courtroom. In the movie, the original Bad Bob announces he’s going to come and he’s going to kill Roy Bean. And in the movie, Bad Bob was 6-foot-3 and wears two guns, rides up and gets off his horse and he says,
– “Roy, you need to come out here because I’m going to kill you.” He stands around and then he says, “Now, Roy, no point in being a coward and making me come in and drag you out here. It’s your day to die, Roy. Just come on out here; I’m going to kill you now.”
You suddenly hear the sound of a buffalo rifle’s .50 caliber shots, and Bad Bob falls straight forward, having been shot in the back. And the camera tracks up to the second floor of the barn where Paul Newman has rested his gun on a bail of hay to ensure accuracy, and there’s about a 9 year old kid sitting next to him who looks up and says,
– “Judge, that man didn’t have a prayer. He didn’t have a chance”
– Newman looks at him and says, No, son, he didn’t have a chance in hell.”
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(Thursday, November 7, 2002, Newt Gingrich speech to the USA Joint Forces Command)
It’s no surprise this failed : the commercial when it launched had a bunch of nuns talking in Italian for gods sakes. Way to make your product look sexy IBM !
This is really funny. There’s a big WindowsXP banner right beside Dvorak’s obituary for OS/2.
I used Warp 3.0 for about a year on a 40MHz AMD 486. I had just prior to this used MS DOS 6.2/6.22, and had stability issues with both.
OS/2 was a revelation for me. In a year of use I did not have one operating system crash – not a single one. It allowed me to play all of my DOS based computer games, most times better than in DOS. You could right-click on a game shortcut on the desktop, and configure extended, expanded memory, the amount of total RAM it saw, the available memory below 640k that was free for that program (a limitation with many dos games – required memory that was used for other drivers), etc. No more reboots with different disks to get the memory configuration that I wanted – I would just launch that software with it’s own config from OS/2, and it was handled.
It was early ’96 when I finally put Win95 on my machine, not because I thought it was better, but because it had the games I wanted to play. I always missed the stability of OS/2 though – it just worked.
Windows NT and it’s decendents are little more than surgically altered clones of OS/2 with a few (thousand) extra parts added each revision. Read “The Road Ahead” (cover photo shows an empty road) author; Bill Gates.
…try to do something: sign my petition !
http://www.petitiononline.com/OS24FREE/
Actually, architecture wise, while the possiblity of having OS/2 is large, NT is more influence by VMS than OS/2. Win32, on the other hand, have been influence a lot by OS/2 (especially DirectX :-), but the architecture of it itself is more towards Win16.
gaaa, we need a Preview button.
Original: while the possiblity of having OS/2 is large
Change: while the possiblity of having OS/2 code is large