"In this anniversary, I'd like to shed some light about my first-hand experience with [OS/2], especially since I see many attempts at history re-writing and over-simplification, when people compress OS/2's two decades into a single paragraph. An OS/2 user named Roger Perkins wrote to OS/2 newsgroups ten years ago: "Here's to OS/2's 10th Anniversary on April 2nd! No OS has ever died so many times!"
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Member since:2005-12-13
I mean I like OS/2 and had Warp 4 Fix Pack 15 installed for a long long time, but I realize and acknowledge that IBM was never going to keep on supporting the OS for obvious reasons:
Competition from mainly Windows became too much to cope with since everyone wanted Windows for home use and nearly everyone wanted it for business, with the exception of some large banks and the likes, that couldn't trust its security with Microsoft until the days of NT4/W2K.
Reason. If you can hardly sell your product, even when in some places it is arguably superior to the above mentioned competition, there's not much to do for funding of a niche product like OS/2. Plus, the corporate changes within IBM focusing on providing services for 'anyone' that'd generate cash flow made OS/2 seem like a bad choice. Not in terms of technology, but in terms of the work needed to be done to support a declining user base.
History. IBM never had the same obvious problems with AIX and its past. It's never been 'in bed with the enemy' and as such can live on an IBM life forever, I think.
...And there's a bunch of other legitimate reasons for this butchering of a fine, fine OS...
But what puzzles me is why IBM would license OS/2 4.5 to Serenity Systems without handing over the code base as well... It seems that there's some access, but it can't be 100%, I'm sure...
Why not release it for serenity to take care of and then let Serenity figure out what would be needed to actually make this OS live in peace for years to come? I don't get it... And I don't necessarily think that open source is the answer, albeit I'd love to see bits and pieces emerging in new shapes and forms, like e.g. a modern implementation of the GUI, based on the original one, but with the updates required to make it a Gnome / KDE alternative 
Apart from that, though, I'd really have to say that it'd be interesting to see what OS/2 might have turned into, should the Taligent OS have had any real life!
A toast to object oriented greatness!!!
'OS/2 is dead!'
'-Long live OS/2!'
The Verge pointed me to a blog post by Leap Motion - which reveals how their Kinect-like motion control works with Windows 8. "From the second you plug in your Leap Motion Controller, you'll be able to browse the web and interact with your computer just by moving your hands and fingers in the air. With Leap Motion technology and Windows, you can do everything that's possible with multi-touch inputs - without actually touching anything. This also means that existing applications in Windows 7 and 8 will respond to your natural hand and finger movements. Soon, we'll show you how Leap Motion will work with Mac OS X." Quite cool.
PocketNow interviews Marc Dillon, and there's an interesting note about why Jolla is keeping the display properties under wraps: "We're leaving some of those details out because we do understand that there are a lot of really big players in the market and they tend to take certain components in the market and dominate them. We created the ability to actually be able to run Sailfish on multiple hardware displays and be able to swap components, so this is part of the demand and supply planning phase. We are committed to this industrial design which is a 4.5-inch display, an 8 megapixel camera on the back and a front-facing camera at the front, and the exact specs of the display we'll provide when we're close to delivery." Something you rarely hear anything about.
"This is my NeXTstation Turbo Color booting the Mac System 7.1 Operating System using a hardware add-on called 'Daydream'. The Daydream has a Mac ROM and a few custom ICs in it and hooked up to the NeXTs DSP port. Turns your NeXT into a full fledged 68k powered Mac." So cool.
"The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 6.1, the first feature update of the NetBSD 6 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed important for security or stability reasons, as well as new features and enhancements. Please note that all fixes in the prior security/bugfix updates (NetBSD 6.0.1 and 6.0.2) are also in 6.1."
"At the end of a week in which Electronic Arts confirmed it wasn't developing a thing for the Wii U, one of the software engineers in EA Sports' Canada studio, in a series of since-deleted tweets, disparaged the console as 'crap' and suggested Nintendo should give up on hardware altogether. 'The Wii U is crap. Less powerful than an Xbox 360. Poor online/store. Weird tablet', tweeted Bob Summerwill, listed as a senior software engineer at EA Canada, in a reply to a tweet posting a link about EA's no-Wii U news. 'Nintendo are walking dead at this point'." The Wii U is turning into the 21st century's Virtual Boy.
"In NixOS, the entire operating system - the kernel, applications, system packages, configuration files, and so on - is built by the Nix package manager from a description in a purely functional build language. The fact that it's purely functional essentially means that building a new configuration cannot overwrite previous configurations. Most of the other features follow from this." Interesting approach. A Linux distribution, sure, but with some very refreshing ideas about system configuration.
Appfour added, among other features, C/C++ support to its new version of AIDE. From Android-IDE, "Now you can write parts of your app or your whole app in C/C++ on your device. AIDE supports the Standard Android NDK toolchain (GCC 4.6 + Bionic, STL, ...). No changes are necessary if you want to build an app developed on a PC with Eclipse. C/C++ development is fully integrated: Build errors appear in the error list and files can easily be navigated to with Go to file. The editor supports C/C++ syntax highlighting."
Ars nails it: "The answer is that Google did announce what amounts to a fairly substantial Android update yesterday. They simply did it without adding to the update fragmentation problems that continue to plague the platform. By focusing on these changes and not the apparently-waiting-in-the-wings update to the core software, Google is showing us one of the ways in which it's trying to fix the update problem."
"It is good for programmers to understand what goes on inside a processor. The CPU is at the heart of our career. What goes on inside the CPU? How long does it take for one instruction to run? What does it mean when a new CPU has a 12-stage pipeline, or 18-stage pipeline, or even a 'deep' 31-stage pipeline? Programs generally treat the CPU as a black box. Instructions go into the box in order, instructions come out of the box in order, and some processing magic happens inside. As a programmer, it is useful to learn what happens inside the box. This is especially true if you will be working on tasks like program optimization. If you don't know what is going on inside the CPU, how can you optimize for it? This article is about what goes on inside the x86 processor's deep pipeline."
"It was the only moment I heard regret slip into Otellini's voice during the several hours of conversations I had with him. 'The lesson I took away from that was, while we like to speak with data around here, so many times in my career I've ended up making decisions with my gut, and I should have followed my gut,' he said. 'My gut told me to say yes.'" The world would've been a much different place - Apple would have been less dependant on Samsung for its chips, which probably would've meant less money for Samsung to develop its Galaxy business.
Member since:
2005-06-29
IBM does not own the source, big portions were written by Microsoft.
I doubt Microsoft owns any OS/2 source code nowadays.
The real answer is why should IBM pay huge amounts of money to clean up/verify the source code and release something that they fought hard to phase out?