http://www.osnews.com/story/2852/InnoTek_Announces_Availability_of_OS_2_Kit_for_Java Exploring the Future of Computing en-us Copyright 2001-2013, David Adams adam+nospam@osnews.com Tue, 21 May 2013 08:57:34 GMT http://www.osnews.com/images/osnews.gif http://www.osnews.com http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? Okay...this needs to be asked sooner or later, so I'll do it: Who uses OS/2? I remember a lot of professors at U. Penn used to use it, but I don't know any that still do. Are there any mission critical apps that still run it? Seems a bit futile to continue to develop, to me... Wed, 19 Feb 2003 02:42:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? At first I thought it was a version of OS/2 that can run in a JVM!


I'm kidding. Wed, 19 Feb 2003 03:03:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? simply can't fill some of my needs. OS/2 is on it's way out, but it still provides so very much. InnoTek is capitalizing on that.

Please don't bash ("Seems a bit futile to continue to develop, to me...") just because you don't understand. It's not always beneficial to chase what everyone else chases. Embrace diversity.

P.S. Jim, your humor is appreciated. For the unfamiliar, OS/2 was the first OS to embed a JVM. Wed, 19 Feb 2003 03:09:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? Hmm,

OSNews didn't seem to post my entire comment (must be my OS). The line that was at the begining was:
"Plenty of people use OS/2. I use OS/2 at work because Linux (this isn't a Linux bash)" Wed, 19 Feb 2003 03:11:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? God damn. It should of been given the last rights years ago.
How do people still use the thing?
There must still be plenty of new hardware that comes with OS/2 drivers otherwise it would be dead in the water (like Linux will be if hardware makers dont start writing Linux drivers). Wed, 19 Feb 2003 04:11:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? OS/2 is still used heavily in the banking sector as the default desktop to connect to the mainframe apps.

You never hear of OS/2 viruses... Wed, 19 Feb 2003 04:16:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? Why use OS/2 to connect to mainframe apps? You can run your mainframe connection software on anything surely?
Maybe u can even run some open source mainframe connection software on a hacked together amateur OS started by some Finnish guy. Wed, 19 Feb 2003 04:52:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? I'd be using it NOW if I could have figured out how to go online with it. Wed, 19 Feb 2003 06:18:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? Mission Critical: nuclear plant, IC manufactoring, stock market....

It is not so dead as the windows world wants it to be.... Wed, 19 Feb 2003 07:11:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? The Swedish state railroad uses OS/2 throughout the entire company, and I don/t see them changing. Pretty new IBM environment in every office. They have what they need (train apps), and IBM support to boot. Wed, 19 Feb 2003 10:23:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? > I'd be using it NOW if I could have figured out how to
> go online with it.

It's pretty easy to figure your nic card. Most modems works(except for the 5$ cpu plaguing ones). Nice try troll. Wed, 19 Feb 2003 10:39:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? Here is an interesting link to a recent article about choosing OS/2 even today.

http://www.os2ezine.com/20030116/page_2.html Wed, 19 Feb 2003 11:05:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? > OS/2 is still used heavily in the banking sector

Not in the UK. Barclays, my bank, uses a UNIX flavour. I think it's either Solaris/SunOS or possibly (but less likely) some form of BSD. They certainly use a CDE style windows manager and an X Server, any way. They have for about 4 or 5 years. Before that they use Windows 3.11. Wed, 19 Feb 2003 11:19:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? Not in the UK. Barclays, my bank, uses a UNIX flavour. I think it's either Solaris/SunOS or possibly (but less likely) some form of BSD. They certainly use a CDE style windows manager and an X Server, any way. They have for about 4 or 5 years. Before that they use Windows 3.11.

Thank you for that information. I'll make sure to stay away from that Bank as far as possible. Wed, 19 Feb 2003 15:10:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? "There must still be plenty of new hardware that comes with OS/2 drivers otherwise it would be dead in the water (like Linux will be if hardware makers dont start writing Linux drivers)."

IBM uses SciTech's graphic device driver architecture to provide OS/2 users with access to a wealth of accelerated graphics HW.

SciTech SNAP Graphics supported HW:
http://www.scitechsoft.com/chiplist/snap_os2_chiplist.html

As for Linux we agree with your assessment regarding a lack of quality drivers and are doing our part to correct this:) Look for a release of SciTech SNAP Graphics for Linux soon! Wed, 19 Feb 2003 16:04:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? Aaaaaarch, this brings up long forgotten memories when I had to install OS/2 from 30 floppies and wanted it to connect to a banyan vines network...

Thanks a lot, now I can't sleep tonight... Wed, 19 Feb 2003 16:34:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? Just a note, the author of URL http://www.os2ezine.com/20030116/page_2.html makes some incorrect and misleading memory complaints about linux because the author inappropriately compared os/2 Theseus mem reports to linux Gnome system monitor's memory report.Someone in the os2ezine discussion forum set this straight. Wed, 19 Feb 2003 16:50:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? Remember that OS/2 commercial from like 1992 where the advert was about the worldwide availability/use of OS/2 and they had all these different people in different languages basically just saying "OS/2 blah blah blah" Whenever I see OS/2 or a similar reference, the Russian speaking in that commercial always comes to mind. It's even been in my DREAMS.

OS DVAI WARPA
OS DVAI WARPA!
OS DVAI WARPA!!
OS DVAI WARPA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Wed, 19 Feb 2003 19:20:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? It's not dead. It's pining for the fjords. Thu, 20 Feb 2003 00:28:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? Sorry, but it is used in the UK for banking. I work for a bank that processes credit cards. It's used in the UK. In the US, we've up to 300 stores authorizing through a single 486, running OS/2.

Use Linux (or whatever) if you wish, but stop knocking an OS that you don't know anything about. Otherwise, you may as well be Bill Gates. Thu, 20 Feb 2003 04:15:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? I am a long time OS/2 user (both at work and at home). I can also vouch that it it being used in the UK banking sector (in this case investment banking). IBM support it on a case by case basis for their large clients, but if you're a small to medium business or simply a home user then you're better off with the eComStation variant (IMHO).

Java 1.4.01, Flash 5, Smartsuite 1.7.1 (equates to Millenium or 9 on Win, I think), Mozilla 1.3b, Scitech SNAP, latest VisualAge Smalltalk, PHP 4.2.3, Apache 2.x, Virtual PC 5, etc, etc.

It works, it runs along pretty much without complaining, it does it's job well. No need to knock it just because it never became the mainstream OS. I like OS/2. I like Windows. I daresay that I'll like Linux when I get around to install it.

PS. PJM, liked the parrot gag So the next question must be, apart from the aqueducts, sanitation and the roads, what did OS/2 ever do for us Fri, 21 Feb 2003 10:41:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? It's so boring to hear all the people who have no clue chant that OS/2 is dead.

You know, back in the day (and yes, I can remember that day), AT&T Bell Labs developed an OS for their systems (no, they didn't have PC's, kids) called Unix. Move forward, into the 1980's, beyond the advent of the PC, and it looked like DOS was King. Sure you could run Unix on an Intel CPU, but who wanted it (yes, that was the mainstream sentiment, especially by those who had never even seen Unix). "SCO Xenix" was some exotic buzzword...

Along came OS/2, and it promised to be the OS to narrow the gap between PCs and mainframes, and to shorten the days of the minis. The term "big iron" lost quite a bit of ground when you could get the hardware together to run OS/2 (16MB and a 286 - that was max - and you were really cranking). M$ decided that they didn't like the joint development agreement with IBM, so the tail started wagging the dog. Windows, once considered the stopgap measure to migrate frugal users from the command line to heavier hardware (tease them with a picture of what an object oriented user interface could be - a GUI; that's the picture - and make them want to go to the real thing: OS/2), became M$' raison d'etre.

NT (3.5, 4.0, 2000 - NT 5, now - heaven help us - XP - NT 5.1) is OS/2's younger cousin. Not quite up to the task of living up to its legacy, and not quite having a legacy of its own (the networking is still - aside from Active Directory, still way outclassed by Novell's NDS - OS/2 1.0). Everything off the desktop is owed to OS/2 and the joint development agreement from almost two decades ago... "NT Domains?" Hehehe... Try LAN Server Domains (LAN Server is OS/2!!). The desktop is a poor remake of the Windows 3 Program Manager GUI. Not object oriented, like the Mac or OS/2 or Gnome, but simply a picture of a desktop.

OS/2 servers run the majority of the world's banking systems, insurance companies, brokerage houses, and ATMs. In fact, when any of you kiddies go to the bank to draw out your parents' hard earned cash from the machine, you're probably dealing with OS/2 on the other side of the screen (90+% of the time). Ever wonder why ATMs are so rarely out of service??? When was the last time you went to the bank and they told you that the computers were down, so they couldn't post your deposit? That's the point: mission critical. At IBM, "go ahead and just reboot" isn't good enough. OS/2 systems go up and stay up.

IBM's zeitgeist is to support its products until the last customer stops using them. They support their Selectric typewriters and their Executive typewriters going back to the 1950's & 60's. Their AS/400's are commonplace in large organizations. OS/2 will be with us all a long, long time, whether you children see or recognize it or not.

Yes, I run OS/2 on a daily basis. Yes, I use an IBM ThinkPad. I also run Novell NetWare, from another company known for innovation and top notch support. For 32-bit Wintendo apps, I either use Citrix MetaFrame or Connectix Virtual PC. Most of the time, I have a native OS/2 app which does the job on par with or better than its Wintendo counterpart. (The fact that many of you don't see OS/2 apps available in the marketplace is your own fault: stop shopping at supermarkets for filet mignon. Apps are available. Their developers just spend their money on better things than advertising. Ever heard of R&D? Support?) No, I don't use M$ Office; I use SmartSuite. I could just as easily use Office or OpenOffice for Win32 (via Virtual PC running any flavor of Windows I want, in a window on my eComStation desktop, or in a Citrix session running on another box). With Virtual PC, I can even use Linux apps I like. In fact, under OS/2 I can do pretty much whatever I d-mn well please, without selling my soul (and all my personal information) to Redmond Washington. Sat, 22 Feb 2003 05:31:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments