Two articles on OS/2: “IBM’s farewell to OS/2 next month shouldn’t take anyone by surprise. Long before Big Blue announced its plans to pull the plug, industry watchers were drafting OS/2’s obituary.” And, “Yesterday saw IBM cease the sale of the OS/2 Operating system. Come the 31st of December, standard support for the OS will end also. However, a significant number of companies and people continue to use it, and they are finding ways for OS/2 to live on.”
It keeps striking me as odd: people stop using a tried and tested product, and exchange it for Windows. If you stop shipping your ATMs with OS/2, why not put a BSD on it? It would seem that provides a larger profit margin once the initial cost of porting it has been completed.
You have to understand how corporate America works to understand why ATMs have Winsdows on them…
You have to understand how corporate America works to understand why ATMs have Winsdows on them…
We understand how corporate America works. It’s all cheap $#!+ made in China.
It’s all cheap $#!+ made in China.
Chinese stuff may be cheap but it ain’t $#!+. When I look at the overblown, smug, and self-obsessed $#!+ from America, I’m more than glad another player has entered the market. Really, the only edge America had left was being the biggest and loudest but that’s changing. It won’t be long before someone knocks the rust off a lawnmower and trims the grass growing in Wall Street.
It’s simple to understand. Developers cost a lot more than software licenses. MS tools allow them to be more productive == lower costs.
Actually, Microsoft flooded the market with their development tools, and gave them away in order to lure developers to the Windows platform. IBM was unable to follow suit. Result: fewer native OS/2 applications, resulting in lower demand for the operating system. They’re not any easier to use than other devel platforms, especially these days when you have so many Linux tools, also available for free. There are plenty of developers out there who I’ve seen attest to that fact. The trouble now is that Windows has gained such momentum that it’s so difficult to break the stranglehold that things like Visual Studio have on the software market.
You can take off your rose-colored specs now.
Actually, Microsoft flooded the market with their development tools, and gave them away in order to lure developers to the Windows platform.
No, no! He said MS made developers more productive!
Now you’ve gone and pointed out that they competed unfairly to get a leg up on the competition. What if the government finds out? Won’t there be a hearing of some sort because of MS using this advantage unfairly? What will happen now? And what about the negative effects [of reality] on MS’s reputation? And what about the shattered ideals of the poor innocent(s) that still believe(s) in MS?
Now you’ve done it! Someone is going to call you a bad name for sure! You should have left this harmless bit of fable about MS superiority and functionality rest. No point in picking at old wounds.
“It’s simple to understand. Developers cost a lot more than software licenses. MS tools allow them to be more productive == lower costs.”
But not in the long term.
Although I would never use OS/2, I’m glad to see it still has legs. The more, the merrier, I say.
Great OS for its time. Rock solid. Enjoyable OS to use. IBM should Open Source what they can.
What does a good mother do when she cannot any longer feed and support her child?
Does she kill it or she does give it for adoption?
What does corporate America do in such a case?
What did Sun do with her child?
The word is given… Warp speed.
Aye…..
I never forget the thrill of being able to have a Dos 5.0 command prompt, a Dos 6.0 command prompt, an OS/2 command prompt, a Windows app and an OS/2 graphical app all open at once. I though Warp was an amazing OS. However, it was obvious to me why it failed. It took me over 6 months to get all the hardware working (sound, video, etc). I never di get dial-up networking to work. With Windows 95, 20 minutes after I started installing, everything worked and I was surfing the net. OS/2 was written BY and FOR geeks, but even a geek sometimes just likes things to work. I don’t ever want to go back to hand-editing the 1000 line config.sys file again!
” I don’t ever want to go back to hand-editing the 1000 line config.sys file again!”
I remember those days really well. OS/2 could be a really stubborn bitch about hardware for anything beyond a basic office box.
I once spent most of my free time for a month getting a Pioneer 602x 6-disc CD changer to work correctly under OS/2. DOS or NT 3.51 were a snap by comparison.
I doubt we will ever see an open source release of OS/2, too many issues attached.
i would hand edit a 1000 line config.sys file instead of a 10.000 entries registry.
and the config.sys would allow for inline comments so that you can document every change you do in the very file you change.
another fine thing about files like config.sys was/is the ability to comment out the old command and put a new one nearby. this way you have atleast some indication that something have changed, and allso the ability to go back of the change isnt a good one.
Edited 2005-12-28 00:04
Welcome to the partial reason OS/2 failed, and why nobody has seriously challenged Windows on the desktop. Windows succeeded in the past, and continues to succeed to this day because of its vast hardware support base. No other viable **DESKTOP** solution has come close to providing such overall compatibility, and Windows undoubtably benifited from the snowball effect that created its market entrenchment. Futhermore, now that Windows has matured, it is common for software developers to write code that is not easily portable.
Let MS have Windows and the desktop…unless you are part of the open source GNU/Linux or BSD movements, your time is wasted competing (especially for profit) in the traditional OS market. In the future traditional desktop computing will become a niche market. Specialized devices are the future, and your imagination is the limitation of how far (and where) they will go. These devices will open the door to widespread use of open source systems, and may create opportunity for new commercial systems to emerge.
So, as I see it, may the best win. MS sees the light, and this new competition is obviously creating a better MS and MS product for everyone. Hopefully, for them at least, they can adapt and avoid the fate of OS/2 and many of IBM’s business units. If IBM had put its heart in OS/2, and exerted the industry influence it had at the time, it may be that we would be using OS/2 today. Likewise, if MS goes about its arrogant ways and fails to adapt, 10+ years down the road will irrelivate Windows to the same fate.
Funny my eComStation (OS/2 4.5.x) works out-of-the-box, something WinXP have had a little difficulty doing.
a significant number of companies and people continue to use it
Can someone please tell me who these prople are? I have been on a quest to find out who (and why) people are still using this software – And don’t tell me banks because none of the banks I have ever been to use OS/2.
My bank switched away from OS/2 about two or three months ago, and they are one of the five most profitable banks in Canada. And while this is ancient history, I worked for a bank in 1998 and their fax servers were OS/2 based with no plans to change. Given that a lot of their network controllers were from the mid-1980s, I see no reason why they would have changed their fax servers since then.
They have a FAX server running OS/2, and they’ve not yet bothered to “update” it because it continues to do its job without requiring any hand holding.
I still use OS/2 at home on my desktop. Why? Because I have more than enough software to do what I want, and because I like the “feel” of the WPS and 4OS2 better than I do any X window manager and bash/vsh.
No reason to change unless I see some actual advantage.
And you have virtualPC to run any other OS you might want to use too, dont you?
No, I use a KVM for the desktop boxes I use (currently one OS/2, one Windows 95, one Win XP, and one Linux), and I use either VNC or Webmin to admin the fileservers. Or ssh.
My little PPro boxes wouldn’t run Virtual PC very quickly, I suspect… 🙂
TD CanadaTrust still uses OS/2 for their money machines behind the counter (the ones that count out the money when you do withdrawal, cash cheques, etc with a cashier).
Royal Bank of Canada still uses OS/2 on the cashier’s systems.
Last time I was at a ScotiaBank (well over a year ago, so things may have changed), they were still using OS/2 on their cashier terminals.
Office computers at the banks above are all running Windows 98 or XP, but they use terminal emulators to connect to mainframe/minicomputers at the head office to do all their work. Very weird walking into a modern office to apply for a loan and watch as they pull up a text-based terminal app running on a system in another city to fill in the blanks.
And people say the mainframe/mini is dead. 
Why in the world did you spend six months getting it to work. All you had to do was use your head, read the documentation as to what hardware worked with OS/2 and like me, you would have had a computer up and running in easily less than an hour without any stumbling.
No this wasn’t bizarra hardware or IBM only hardware. This was all medium priced name brand build it myself computer that I never had problems with.
All you had to do was use your head, read the documentation as to what hardware worked with OS/2 and like me, you would have had a computer up and running in easily less than an hour without any stumbling.
You mean one of two things:
1. Buy OS/2 compatable hardware – this is not a good answer for selling OS’s.
2. I should have been easily able to get my hardware working. The answer to that is no! For my cd-rom, OS/2 tech support said there was no hope. They recommended I call the manufacturer and tell them to make an OS/2 driver. On my own, I managed to find an OS/2 2.1 driver on Hobbes (after much searching and experimentation), and it worked under Warp 3. And so it goes with the rest of the hardware. I won’t recount the details, but it was not just a matter of reading the manual. Gosh, I feel like I said something negative in a Mac user group!
Video hardware used to be a royal pain under OS/2 — the cards made by Diamond were a real issue in the OS/2 2.0 and 2.1 days, I remember.
Eventually, people learned: Matrox was your friend. 🙂
Things are better today under OS/2 and eCS thanks to SciTech’s SNAP drivers.
The list of hardware that worked with OS/2 was a LOT longer than hardware that didn’t. It wasn’t like I had to go searching for hardware. All the main brand stuff worked. And not just their expensive stuff. The majority of the stuff that didn’t work was on the lower end price wise.
So long, and thanks for all the fish!
OS/2 had some innovative features and was definitely a superior OS when compared to most of its contemporaries circa 90-94. It was not, however, without some serious flaws.
I remember the frustration of trying to recover my hung UI hitting ctrl+esc many times due to the serialized input queue’s issue (not substantially addressed until Warp FP16). There were also holes all over the system (you could overwrite the interrupt descriptor table from a dos vm, the shared usermode window manager code could be taken out by a stray pointer, etc.). And these are not just my assertions; the old DOSKiller and Andrew Schulman’s OS2Killer.exe were pretty good demonstrations of these serious architectural compromises, which are very similar to the memory protection holes present in Win9x (for compatibility and memory footprint optimization in both cases).
I would be willing to bet that if OS/2 garnered the same level of consumer, OEM and ISV support that Win9x had, it would not be remembered nearly so fondly as being a stable and reliable system. Windows 95 running a single application, or a small set of Microsoft applications, was pretty solid also. Throw a bunch of OGL and DirectX games, multimedia applications, modern browsers with flash plug-ins, media players and before you know it, Win9x is an unstable and unusable pile of crap. Granted, OS/2 didn’t suffer from such awfulness as shared User and GDI heaps, but it was still fundamentally a flawed system do to its early 90’s, PC-centric design.
While the WPS was a great GUI environment, OS/2 itself has long been surpassed as a server and client OS by Linux, NT-based Windows and MacOS X. OS/2 running a simple embedded system like an ATM machine is one thing, but if it was asked to run modern desktop and server loads, it wouldn’t fare well compared to what’s out there today. OS/2’s day has long since come and gone.
Nice insightful reply Makfu. I bet now these “no knowledge” windows hater biatches won’t reply to this thread at all.
You start finding problems in any system as it starts getting more users and more applications. IBM knows its not a better OS and thats why they are not willing to spend their money or time on it.
Wake up guys….grass only looks greener on the other side…
Goooooooo Microsoft…
There were also holes all over the system (you could overwrite the interrupt descriptor table from a dos vm, the shared usermode window manager code could be taken out by a stray pointer, etc.). And these are not just my assertions; the old DOSKiller and Andrew Schulman’s OS2Killer.exe were pretty good demonstrations of these serious architectural compromises, which are very similar to the memory protection holes present in Win9x (for compatibility and memory footprint optimization in both cases).
I’d be curious if those programs work on newer OS/2 releases (say Warp 4 without fixes and later), and I’m not aware of these problems being real-world issues in practice.
Perhaps others experienced with those programs can address it in more detail. The only mention of DOSKiller I see on USENET is c.1992, which is back in the OS/2 2.0 days.
I would be willing to bet that if OS/2 garnered the same level of consumer, OEM and ISV support that Win9x had, it would not be remembered nearly so fondly as being a stable and reliable system.
OS/2 had 20% of the desktop market for a while, it was the best-selling retail software package for a few months, and it was considerably more popular than Windows NT in the days before the NT 4 release, so it’s had a fairly wide amount of exposure to a wide array of different users.
Somehow, its noted stability and reliability hasn’t come into question in spite of those numbers..
I think using the two in parallel for a while would demonstrate to you quite conclusively that OS/2 is not only more flexible than Windows 95, but it is also considerably more robust than Windows 95 when it comes to handling ill-behaved applications, be they 16-bit Windows apps or DOS apps.
Granted, OS/2 didn’t suffer from such awfulness as shared User and GDI heaps, but it was still fundamentally a flawed system do to its early 90’s, PC-centric design.
I use programs like Mozilla Firefox, Hummingbird Exceed, GIMP, StarOffice, and various DOS games and multimedia programs on a regular basis (Firefox and the X server are running all the time), and I regularly see uptimes in the 40-50 day range (normally cut short when I boot to DOS to take a bimonthly snapshot of my boot partition).
While the WPS was a great GUI environment, OS/2 itself has long been surpassed as a server and client OS by Linux, NT-based Windows and MacOS X.
Care to provide some supporting examples of areas where OS/2 has been surpassed as an OS instead of tossing out unsubstantiated generalizations? What is it lacking? What do the other platforms provide which OS/2 does not?
I use Windows NT 4, Windows 95 OSR2, various newer and older Linux variants, and OS/2 Warp 4 on the same hardware (all PPro boxes) every day, and Warp has a definite performance advantage over all of the above on a 64MB PPro, and is at least as stable in everyday use as all of the above.
As a single-user OS, it isn’t as good at some types of *server* applications as a Linux or BSD would be, but in terms of raw server performance, it used to run rings around Windows NT in both single and multi-CPU confifurations. The old HPFS filesystem has cache issues these days which would adversely impact filesystem benchmarks, but HPFS386 addresses that, as does the new JFS filesystem for OS/2 from IBM.
I think you’re blowing smoke, and I think you post was modded up because most of the folks here don’t have any firsthand 32-bit OS/2 experience at all and don’t know any better.
OS/2 running a simple embedded system like an ATM machine is one thing, but if it was asked to run modern desktop and server loads, it wouldn’t fare well compared to what’s out there today.
Sorry, but I strongly disagree. I’d love to see some benchmarks comparing OS/2 to modern Linux and BSD kernels and to modern Windows flavors — I strongly suspect the results would startle you.
OS/2 is a quick OS from the bottom up, its ability to handle multithreading applications is almost unparalleled on x86 hardware, and its kernel is very good at dynamicaly changing task priorities under load.
Remember that Microsoft stopped doing head to head comparisons between NT and OS/2 2.x after IBM’s David Barnes left MS’s people with their pants down on several occasions. NT simply couldn’t keep up in that sort of environment. When the technology was actually compared in an unrehearsed head-to-head environment, Windows lost and lost badly.
No, I don’t think OS/2 would do badly at all if actual comparisons were made. I would welcome it.
“Sorry, but I strongly disagree. I’d love to see some benchmarks comparing OS/2 to modern Linux and BSD kernels and to modern Windows flavors — I strongly suspect the results would startle you.”
though i would like to agree with you i am afraid this is not the case. for one, though the JFS (Journaling File System)is rather interesting it is rather slow. ecomstation admits this to be a known OS2 issue effecting speed and is preparing a rather large update to remedy the problem. http://www.ecomstation.com/ecomstation20.phtml?url=nls/en/content/b…
also OS2’s ability to render graphics on any modern machine is poor at best when comparing those os’s that have truely suported 3d drivers. not that the SNAP graphics system isnt good, but its not the best. also on a kerlen level OS2 is rather dated on how it deals with multitasing and what not. again not that it does a bad job, but it does not do the best.
You need to go back and reread your link. They said “(disk operations may achieve 100% increase in speed)”. They were compairing JFS with HPFS. The update is to allow installing on JFS. JFS is fast compaired to FAT16, FAT32, HPFS and NTFS. JFS is popular on Linux, Unix and Mac OSX. JFS has speed and reliability.
You are so typical…just like another zealot. You have not provided any technical data, just refute technical claims and think all is well…bravo
Oh, what utter crapola.
The previous poster presented a series of sweeping generalities (*not* technical issues) as fact, and I simply questioned them.
Is that a problem?
I have over a decade of experience actually using these platforms DAILY and IN PARALLEL with modern desktop application and browser software, and that experience has led me to certain conclusions about the performance and viability of those platforms as desktop OSes.
The previous poster gives no indication at all of his experience with the above platforms, and he makes some assertions about OS/2 which are downright silly — any person who has booted and used OS/2 since the mid1990’s knows he’s full of crap.
Just another zealot my ass…
@rcsteiner: well said. Too many people are commenting based either on experience of the OS 10 years ago, or based on no experience at all (and therefore only on prejudice).
Last time I looked my eCS desktop did everything I wanted from it with little hassle (except some multimedia stuff which it is possible to do on it, but is frankly a lot easier on my Mac). This includes developing commercial web apps using PHP and MySQL.
Look, we eCS and OS/2 users *know* that this OS has a limited lifespan. But that limit is measured in years, not days. eComStation 2.0 is out in beta. Hardly a dead horse, is it?
Is eCS my favourite OS? No, OS X is. Do I like Windows? Yes (but not MS). Do I like Linux? Yes, but I find it rather confusing, although always improving each time I retry it. BeOS? I only tried it once, and found it very nice. SkyOS I like. I liked AmigaOS. Sinclair QDOS was great. Am I a zealot? I really don’t think so.
Edited 2005-12-28 20:52
I’d be curious if those programs work on newer OS/2 releases (say Warp 4 without fixes and later), and I’m not aware of these problems being real-world issues in practice.
Perhaps others experienced with those programs can address it in more detail. The only mention of DOSKiller I see on USENET is c.1992, which is back in the OS/2 2.0 days.
I haven’t run OS/2 in nearly a decade, but I am willing to bet good money that these problems still exist. Changing fundamental architectural concepts was something I doubt IBM would have undertaken for Warp 4. You show me some indication that the system critical globally mapped structures are now protected via some mechanism (stub library, copy on write, etc.) and I will happily retract the above statements.
OS/2 had 20% of the desktop market for a while, it was the best-selling retail software package for a few months, and it was considerably more popular than Windows NT in the days before the NT 4 release, so it’s had a fairly wide amount of exposure to a wide array of different users.
When exactly did OS/2 have 20% of the desktop market? I don’t recall OS/2 EVER having anything remotely close to 20% of the desktop market. Most retail copies of Warp ended up as shelfware.
Somehow, its noted stability and reliability hasn’t come into question in spite of those numbers.
I would really like to see some IDC, Dataquest or other source mentioned for your numbers.
I think using the two in parallel for a while would demonstrate to you quite conclusively that OS/2 is not only more flexible than Windows 95, but it is also considerably more robust than Windows 95 when it comes to handling ill-behaved applications, be they 16-bit Windows apps or DOS apps.
Is the WPS UI more adaptive than Windows 95? Sure. Is OS/2 more flexible – that depends on what you are defining as flexible. It certainly can’t run anywhere near the breadth of applications that 9x can, and that ultimately is how most people define the flexibility of an OS.
I use programs like Mozilla Firefox, Hummingbird Exceed, GIMP, StarOffice, and various DOS games and multimedia programs on a regular basis (Firefox and the X server are running all the time), and I regularly see uptimes in the 40-50 day range (normally cut short when I boot to DOS to take a bimonthly snapshot of my boot partition).
What multimedia applications? What DOS games (does anyone play dos games outside DOSBOX anymore?)? OS/2 only has the most rudimentary OGL support (and zilch in the way of hardware accelerated ICD). I said modern workloads, not 1996 workloads.
Care to provide some supporting examples of areas where OS/2 has been surpassed as an OS instead of tossing out unsubstantiated generalizations? What is it lacking? What do the other platforms provide which OS/2 does not?
In no particular order, all of the platforms I mentioned support the following:
1. DACL based security model
2. Multi-user support
3. Full (meaning no userland accessible shared system code) memory protection
4. Large memory support
5. 64 bit support (in the case of Linux and NT based Windows)
6. Portable code base (MacOS X = PPC and x86, Windows = x86, x64 and IA64, Linux = more than I can count)
7. Modern TCP/IP features like h.323, IPV6 stack, built-in firewall, etc.
8. Extensible and Modular Authentication Support (Linux = PAM, MacOS X = PAM and Apple DS plugins, Microsoft = Windows GINA)
9. Modern 3d API support with accelerated drivers
10. Integrated multi-monitor, multi-adapter support
I’ll leave it at that for the moment, but that’s not a small list nor are those small features.
I use Windows NT 4, Windows 95 OSR2, various newer and older Linux variants, and OS/2 Warp 4 on the same hardware (all PPro boxes) every day, and Warp has a definite performance advantage over all of the above on a 64MB PPro, and is at least as stable in everyday use as all of the above.
It’s almost 2006. NT 4 and Windows 95 are both long obsolete and discontinued products (and you don’t even mention what Linux kernel rev you are at). You are comparing one old system to another. My Amiga 3000 with an 040 accelerator and 16MB or RAM running WP 4.1.12 is probably faster and snappier than your PPro with4 times as much memory, but that doesn’t mean it is capable of running a modern workload.
As a single-user OS, it isn’t as good at some types of *server* applications as a Linux or BSD would be, but in terms of raw server performance, it used to run rings around Windows NT in both single and multi-CPU confifurations. The old HPFS filesystem has cache issues these days which would adversely impact filesystem benchmarks, but HPFS386 addresses that, as does the new JFS filesystem for OS/2 from IBM.
Show me a reputable benchmark of OS/2 outperforming NT 4 in OLTP, Fileserver, Messaging, Web Serving or any other generally accepted server task.
I think you’re blowing smoke, and I think you post was modded up because most of the folks here don’t have any firsthand 32-bit OS/2 experience at all and don’t know any better.
I am blowing smoke? I point out generally recognized flaws in OS/2, like the globally mapped read-write data structures and SIQ and your response is “nothing to see here, look over there”. My point is that OS/2 was simply not that great an operating system. It failed in the marketplace despite being backed by the largest hardware AND software manufacturer in the world. As you point out, OS/2 was, at one point, a big seller. So where are those users now?
Sorry, but I strongly disagree. I’d love to see some benchmarks comparing OS/2 to modern Linux and BSD kernels and to modern Windows flavors — I strongly suspect the results would startle you.
Well, since no one (outside the geeks on this forum) cares about OS/2 anymore, that isn’t going to happen. However, I doubt OS/2 could effectively compete with these platforms on modern hardware running modern workloads. OS/2 doesn’t have VLM support, NUMA aware scheduling or memory allocation, 64bit support and a whole host of other features (some listed above). I doubt OS/2 could scale to the large number of processors that Windows Server and Linux can and OS/2 certainly can’t provide the user experience of MacOS X.
OS/2 is a quick OS from the bottom up, its ability to handle multithreading applications is almost unparalleled on x86 hardware, and its kernel is very good at dynamicaly changing task priorities under load.
Without scalability benchmarks, these are just your assertions.
Remember that Microsoft stopped doing head to head comparisons between NT and OS/2 2.x after IBM’s David Barnes left MS’s people with their pants down on several occasions. NT simply couldn’t keep up in that sort of environment. When the technology was actually compared in an unrehearsed head-to-head environment, Windows lost and lost badly.
Microsoft most likely stopped doing head to head comparisons because OS/2 became irrelevant. Nothing David Barnes EVER did was unrehearsed. He was an IBM employee evangelist for OS/2. And again, you are living TEN YEARS in the past.
No, I don’t think OS/2 would do badly at all if actual comparisons were made. I would welcome it.
You are running a dead, unsupported platform. No one is going to make any comparisons as they would be ludicrous. Let it go and move on.
A few quick responses…
I haven’t run OS/2 in nearly a decade,
Thanks for admitting that.
When exactly did OS/2 have 20% of the desktop market? I don’t recall OS/2 EVER having anything remotely close to 20% of the desktop market. Most retail copies of Warp ended up as shelfware.
Actually, prior to NT 4 coming out, OS/2 was outselling NT. Even Microsoft admitted that. And since IBM considered NT to be the main “competition” for OS/2, this is significant.
Looking at your list of stuff, OS/2 isn’t as bad off as suggested. Perhaps taking a fresh look at the latest version might help.
2. Multi-user support
There are a few options for this. Muiltidesk is the one I use, which does offer multi-user support. There are a few other solutions for this, and I’ve read that multi-user support is also apparently being looked at for a future version of eComStation.
4. Large memory support
This has been fixed in kernels for several years. OS/2 can recognize as much memory as you put in your system.
5. 64 bit support (in the case of Linux and NT based Windows)
While admittedly OS/2 doesn’t take full advantage of 64-bit CPU’s, the kernel has been updated and the system does run quite well on 64-bit CPU’s.
6. Portable code base
I don’t really see this as an issue. When you chose to run Linux, do you chose it because you can buy 4 or 5 different computers based on different architectures just so you can say you run Linux on multiple platforms?
7. Modern TCP/IP features like h.323, IPV6 stack, built-in firewall, etc
The latest TCP/IP for OS/2 is a fully 32 bit stack based on the same stack as found in AIX. While there are a few things which are out of date (IBM’s sendmail for one) It includes modern features like a bulit-in firewall. Furthermore the few pieces which are out of date have up to date ports which have been done by users.
10. Integrated multi-monitor, multi-adapter support
I don’t know about multi-adapter support, as I’ve never had a need for this. But from reading the documentation from Scitech SNAP, I believe multi-monitor is supported.
I doubt OS/2 could scale to the large number of processors that Windows Server and Linux
The OS/2 SMP kernel scales up to 64 processors. I don’t know what the limit for Linux (or Windows Server) is, but when was the last time you bought a 64-processor machine?
Anyways, just a few points.
“Actually, prior to NT 4 coming out, OS/2 was outselling NT. Even Microsoft admitted that. And since IBM considered NT to be the main “competition” for OS/2, this is significant.
Looking at your list of stuff, OS/2 isn’t as bad off as suggested. Perhaps taking a fresh look at the latest version might help.”
I remember those days. OS/2 had around 2 million “users”, while NT had around 1/2 a million. Yes, OS/2 owned Windows NT 3.51. However, the two operating systems combined probably added to less than 1 percent of the market. The market was ruled by DOS and Windows and Microsoft wiped OS/2 off the map with the release of 95 and NT 4.
A few quick responses…
I haven’t run OS/2 in nearly a decade,
Thanks for admitting that.
Your welcome. I never made any representation to the contrary.
When exactly did OS/2 have 20% of the desktop market? I don’t recall OS/2 EVER having anything remotely close to 20% of the desktop market. Most retail copies of Warp ended up as shelfware.
Actually, prior to NT 4 coming out, OS/2 was outselling NT. Even Microsoft admitted that. And since IBM considered NT to be the main “competition” for OS/2, this is significant.
I didn’t ask if it was outselling NT. And no, NT was not OS/2’s primary competition when Warp 3 shipped. It was very clearly Windows 95 and the ramp-up to 95’s release. Furthermore, I would still very much like to know when OS/2 has 20% of the desktop market?
Looking at your list of stuff, OS/2 isn’t as bad off as suggested. Perhaps taking a fresh look at the latest version might help.
2. Multi-user support
There are a few options for this. Muiltidesk is the one I use, which does offer multi-user support. There are a few other solutions for this, and I’ve read that multi-user support is also apparently being looked at for a future version of eComStation.
It still isn’t an integrated component of the OS. Also, is this third-party product still resold and supported?
4. Large memory support
This has been fixed in kernels for several years. OS/2 can recognize as much memory as you put in your system.
4GB is not large memory support in 2005. Intel Physical Address Extensions (aka 36bit addressing) is. So no, you could not install OS/2 on one of my boxes with 32GB of ram and have it recognize all the memory in the box.
5. 64 bit support (in the case of Linux and NT based Windows)
While admittedly OS/2 doesn’t take full advantage of 64-bit CPU’s, the kernel has been updated and the system does run quite well on 64-bit CPU’s.
I would love to know what “updates” those would be. An AMD64 or Intel EMT64 x86 CPU running in 32bit mode is no different than any other 32bit x86 CPU. For access to the 8 additional GPR’s and whatnot, the CPU has to be in 64bit mode. This is an entirely different mode than traditional 32bit protected mode.
6. Portable code base
I don’t really see this as an issue. When you chose to run Linux, do you chose it because you can buy 4 or 5 different computers based on different architectures just so you can say you run Linux on multiple platforms?
So what you’re saying is that I shouldn’t care because x86 is good enough? That’s just silly. If I want to build a compute intensive IBM Power based Beowulf cluster for Linux, or want a 64-way Itanium HP Superdome for SQL 2005, I have those options, OS/2 doesn’t.
7. Modern TCP/IP features like h.323, IPV6 stack, built-in firewall, etc
The latest TCP/IP for OS/2 is a fully 32 bit stack based on the same stack as found in AIX. While there are a few things which are out of date (IBM’s sendmail for one) It includes modern features like a bulit-in firewall. Furthermore the few pieces which are out of date have up to date ports which have been done by users.
Sendmail is not part of the IP stack, it’s an SMTP MTA daemon. I wasn’t aware that OS/2 had a built-in firewall (I’ll take your word for it).
10. Integrated multi-monitor, multi-adapter support
I don’t know about multi-adapter support, as I’ve never had a need for this. But from reading the documentation from Scitech SNAP, I believe multi-monitor is supported.
So no, it’s not built in, I have to either rely on the OEM to provide a driver or buy SNAP (which you need for modern chipset support anyway).
The OS/2 SMP kernel scales up to 64 processors. I don’t know what the limit for Linux (or Windows Server) is, but when was the last time you bought a 64-processor machine?
That it supports up to 64 CPU’s does not mean it scales up to 64 CPU’s. There are many obstacles to SMP scalability, not the least of which is optimizing the use of global data structures (locking) and synchronization of threads. Given that 32-way x86 based systems didn’t even exist when Warp 4 was released, I doubt it scales past 4-8 CPU’s.
As for Windows and Linux, both sport impressive vertical scalability with the Windows Server 2003 (NT 5.2) kernel having an advantage over the Linux 2.6 kernel (for the moment). Windows currently holds the number 3, 7 and 10 spot on the TPC-C non-cluster (single machine) benchmark running various version of MS SQL Server on 64-way Itanium2 HP Superdome hardware. Linux currently holds the number 11 spot running SUSE 9 on a 32-way Itanium2 NEC Express system.
Anyways, just a few points.
Your points did little to change the fact that OS/2 is a dead and obsolete platform better left in the past.
“Your points did little to change the fact that OS/2 is a dead and obsolete platform better left in the past.”
I fail to see why it would be better left in the past. while there are “better” alternatives, there is nothing wrong with having OS2 if it suites your needs.
That it supports up to 64 CPU’s does not mean it scales up to 64 CPU’s. There are many obstacles to SMP scalability, not the least of which is optimizing the use of global data structures (locking) and synchronization of threads. Given that 32-way x86 based systems didn’t even exist when Warp 4 was released, I doubt it scales past 4-8 CPU’s.
Actually the 4.5x kernel is from 1999 – as most SMP kernels it has been optimized for 8 processors, it has been limited to 64 processor (AFAIR the algoritm is capable of supporting 1024 processors) – but hasn’t been tested with more than 16 processors.
Your points did little to change the fact that OS/2 is a dead and obsolete platform better left in the past.
OK, you don’t like OS/2 – who gives a freaking s***
“4GB is not large memory support in 2005. Intel Physical Address Extensions (aka 36bit addressing) is. So no, you could not install OS/2 on one of my boxes with 32GB of ram and have it recognize all the memory in the box.”
Your point is moot, IBM never sold OS/2 as an operating system for large servers.
Ah yes…at the time OS/2 was released they were TOTALLY thinking about how it would expand on Itaniums, 64 bit procs, and how it was going to compete with the likes of linux 2.4 & 2.6 kernels and Windows XP and Server editions. Yup. They looked into that crystal ball, looked at their user base and said that yes, they all need 64 CPUs, 4 GB of RAM, multiuser support, and to never buy anything again. You are arguing with brick walls. Not a damn thing you type and anyone reads will change what OS they are using on their desktop. Give it a rest. You like linux, great, enjoy. We like OS/2, sweet, it’s still OS News..you know – NEWS ABOUT AN OS.
Why beat a dead horse…
OS/2 is dead. So let it stay that way. Lets not revive it – not when there are so many OS choices. And fine ones at that.
Why listen to old music, when there is such a wide variety of ‘good’ new music?
Why drive a classic car, when there are so many new ones to choose from?
Why read an old book?
You get the point, I think? At least, I hope you do.
(Because we can, and we want to do so.)
I ran OS/2 for a while in the Pre Win 95 days. I loved it… It has a fairly nice GUI and ran multiple DOS apps like nothing in it time. It did tend to make you work to configure it. In the end, it was a lack of native applications that reduced OS/2 to a bookend on my software shelf.
On very rare occasions (generally after an electrical storm) you could sometimes catch a glimpse of the OS/2 desktop on a crashed green screen ATM. I guess they are moving to color screens in preparation for Windows so that they can properly render the Blue Screen of Death. ; )
(Your favorite Soylent Blue Screen of Death is now available in nutritious Soylent Red. Soylent Red is Longhorn!!!)
“Your favorite Soylent Blue Screen of Death is now available in nutritious Soylent Red. Soylent Red is Longhorn!!!)”
No. The RSOD is caused by a failure in the 64bit (X64)Windows (XP and Server 2003) NT boot loader. At one point Longhorn used the same loader code, but this has since been replaced with a new rewritten boot loader.
The BSOD (aka, BugCheck/Stop Error) is a fatal kernel mode exception. It is still blue in Longhorn.
OS/2 isn’t going away where I work yet…a huge national bank. We have os/2 running teller workstations from coast to coast. I think we may be the only customer IBM has for os/2.
Much like ZETA is to BeOS (only without the bad publicity) OS/2 lives on as eComStation http://www.comstation.com which has development support from IBM.
I can run on most modern hardware (even AMD64 stuff), has about as much hw support as linux stuff, and WAY more hw support than BeOS or ZETA have ever had. Has OO.o, FF, TB, Nvu, Java, etc. Works great. I even run VPC for those Windows things I need that won’t run in Win 3.1 sessions. GIMP & Pixel runs on it as well, among many other linux apps. I have a server running with apache, ftp, mail, DB/2, & postgres services. It still runs things from all over…it’s weakness and downfall is still an asset.
My bank still uses OS/2. They just replaced all the terminals in the lobby with new shiny HP machines running XP so they can use a nice DOS program to get into the server and run their banking stuff- and have a game of solitaire running in the background. The atms are still OS/2 as well. I have never had a problem with them, or had their systems down for anything. My account at Bank of America is another story. And god forbid I use Wells fargo and their XP-based ATMs. Hell no.
It may be dead to the mainstream. It’s been dead to them for years. But like any hobby OS, it still lives as long as it’s useful to them. I’m all for right tool for the right job. I have a Wintendo in the house. I also have a BeOS & ZETA based box, and an eCom box. I have a linux server as well, and it chugs right along with the eCom server box. To each their own.
forgot my eCom server also has a faxback system running on it. Not that anyone uses the system anymore.
CIBC also has a bunch of OS/2 boxen at the branches.
🙂
See the Forbes list for Royal Bank Of Canada, CIBC, etc. Pretty big institutions.
Browser: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.01; Windows CE; PPC; 240×320)
Look at this list http://en.ecomstation.ru/solutions/?action=solutions
…i still have original CDs os OS/2 Warp, OS/2 2.1 & OS/2 for Windows. I’m still a big fan of it.
The most impressive feature IS (in my opinion) the filesystem (HPFS, High Performace File System): rock solid, efficient & fast.
Anyway, BeOS has its open alternative (Haiku), but the OS/2 one (osFree -> http://www.osfree.org) it’s less than a project. Please help in any mathod you can.
Sign my petition (2100+ signs in about 2 years): http://www.petitiononline.com/OS24FREE
and read about the OS2 World one too: http://www.os2world.com/cgi-bin/news/viewnews.cgi?category=2&id=113…
Marco Ravich
Another Microsoft monopoly victim. Good thing the Justice Department is around to protect the operating system market from monopolies (sarcasm).
Another Microsoft monopoly victim. Good thing the Justice Department is around to protect the operating system market from monopolies (sarcasm).
More like a victim of piss poor marketing (or lack of any *real* marketing) and bad management.
I invested heavily in OS/2 back in the day. Watched IBM drag their feet and knew the end was coming when I saw their half assed attempts at “marketing” os/2.
I blame no one but IBM for OS/2s failure and I was a major supporter of the thing.
I agree with you, IBM’s marketing was not the best, but Microsoft used alot of unfair illegal marketing practices on its competitors. If you as a person were caught doing these same practices you would probably do jail time. Microsoft paid IBM 775 million for damages to OS/2. A slap on the hand.
I haven’t used OS/2 since the 3.1 days, and by no means do I make any claims of expertise. I have never done anything but tinker in OS/2, and I certainly have never deployed it for production purposes. Being a thing of the past, I have no opinion on OS/2 and do not consider it relevant to what I, and the majority of Internet-system administrators deal with on a daily basis.
That being said, if it is so great of a system, and its demise is such a loss, why don’t OS/2 user groups pressure for IBM to open source OS/2? I wonder if they would do it, with or without pressure. I also wonder if the OS/2 advocates would be willing to truely spend the time to update OS/2 to modern standards. My guess is that it would end up like the BeOS and AmigaOS open source continuations.
Off topic, this brings me to something that really bugs me: wasted productivity on useless projects within the open source community. I am no master at programming, however I have made contributions to several small open source projects. I felt the little help I provided was of significance. If I was contributing to these pointless, fruitless, pipe-dream projects, I might as well be beating a dead horse. Open source developers need to put their excellent talent towards projects that can and will come to fruitation. For example, why waste your time on resurecting an outdated OS such as BeOS, when your talent could be used to help a project with a future such as FreeBSD.
And now…let the FLAMES begin. Go ahead, I’m not listening. Nobody will convince me that BeOS and AmigaOS have a future, or will make a comeback.
That being said, if it is so great of a system, and its demise is such a loss, why don’t OS/2 user groups pressure for IBM to open source OS/2?
Interestingly enough, there have been several formal petitions to IBM during the past several years about this very issue, and some of them were made quite public (at least to OS enthusiasts) on this web site and on places like Slashdot.
IBM has opened some OS/2 subsystems (like JFS), but the core of the product remains closed. Why? Only IBM knows — we can only make (educated) guesses.
I also wonder if the OS/2 advocates would be willing to truely spend the time to update OS/2 to modern standards.
eComStation is well on the way to doing that now, and some of the independent developers in the OS/2 community are starting to assess what needs to be done to update various subsystems in a modular manner.
didnt they say this a few months ago. pull the plug already. DIE DIE DIE!!
In response to those who have complained about OS/2’s hardware support…
I’ve been running OS/2 since 1995 (Version 3), and have not had any significant hardware issues in a long time. True, the *original release* of Version 3.0 had trouble with my CD Rom, however a call to IBM’s tech support directed me to updated drivers and how to update the install disks. Since then I’ve generally had good luck with support for hard disks, CD Roms, Sound cards, Modems (with the exception of those crap win-modems), video cards, scanners, CD and DVD burners, etc.
On stability, my wife runs Windows 2000, I run OS/2 4.52. We also run a m machine as a file/print/web/ftp etc server running Os/2 4.52. The OS/2 machines generally have fewer problems then the Windows 2000 machine. I’ve never had any “crashes” on my server – last time it got rebooted, we had a significant power outtage that lasted longer then the UPS could keep the machine running. Before that I’d rebooted about 7 months prior to the outtage – not because anything had “crashed”, but because I’d installed some new software on it which required a restart. As for my desktop, it does get restarted more frequently then my server, but that is because I install and test a lot more software on it then I do my server.
As for the Windows 2000 machine? My wife has taken to restarting it once every other week or so because otherwise it starts acting up. Before people start flaming this statement (and in defense of Windows 2000), I’m sure there is probably something running in the background causing problems and there are probably ways to make it more stable.
As for the comment about : “why don’t OS/2 user groups pressure for IBM to open source OS/2?”, the OS/2 user groups have been pressuring IBM to do this for quite some time now. The latest effort is a petition that OS/2 World has sent to IBM. So far IBM’s response has been silence. Check more information at:
http://www.os2world.com/
And as for who is currently deploying OS/2, I can’t speak for others. But for myself, coming up next month I have a new project that I’ll be deploying on OS/2. This decision was made after considering windows 2000, Linux, and OS/2 for platforms. After testing the options, OS/2 offered both the best selection of software along with the best performance. Linux came in a close second. And it is true, the job could also be done on Windows 2000, but when the Windows 2000 testing was done there were a number of issues which turned up which required work-arounds that I wasn’t comfortable with due to security concerns.
On the one hand, it is dissapointing to see IBM dropping OS/2. However the reality is that within the last 4 or 5 years more support for OS/2 has come from the OS/2 community then from IBM. And even prior to 4 or 5 years ago, a lot of good support came from the OS/2 user base (a strong example is Ray Gwinn’s SIO drivers – which actually worked well on more platforms then IBM’s comm.sys driver). IBM has released updated copies of both the client and server within the past few years (the Convenience Packs), they have also updated the kernel to get the system to run on 64-bit processors (AMD and such). However a lot of new drivers, GUI updates, enhancements and fixes – have come from non-IBM sources. IBM withdrawling OS/2 from marketing won’t prevent users from continuing to provide the support they have been for years. It also won’t prevent people from buying eComStation – an OEM version of OS/2 – which contains the latest copy of OS/2 as its base (despite what some people may suggest, the IBM OEM part numbers which eComStation uses are not included in the product withdrawl, which essentially means that this product is not effected by the withdrawl)
I doubt OS/2 could scale to the large number of processors that Windows Server and Linux
Actually the 4.5x SMP kernel has been limited to support only 64 processors (Optimized for 8) – AFAIR Datacenter Server supports 32 processors – and isn’t Linux still on 16 processors.
OS/2 didn’t fail anything, it was pulled from the market – The decision to terminate OS/2 was AFAIR made back in 1994, due to the costs of maintaining and developing another softwareplatform.
Hopefully IBM have learned their lesson, perhaps they’ll handle the AIX kill better.
Come on everyone – sing it along with me:
Trap 0 e (reset)
Trap 0 e (reset)
Come on baby, boot this time
Trap 0 e
I still remember the fateful day I walked into Computer City (long gone) and saw the shiny new OS/2 Warp 4 boxes piled to the ceiling.
I had watched OS/2 hype build, and read reviews from people running test versions, all saying that it was really reliable and very fast. It was so fast, they started calling it OS/2 Warp.
And so there I stood, in disbelief, seeing the total lack of understanding from IBM at what was meant by “Warp”. I heard people as they walked out of the store – “Why would I buy something that will warp my computer. I have enough problems already with it.” Nooo! IBM! What’s wrong with you?!?! WARP SPEED!!! That’s what it is all about!
I sadly shook my head and left the store, knowing right then that OS/2 was already doomed.
The SIQ-Problem was mentioned, but delicately left out of the argument by the passionate OS/2-advocates.
I was an OS/2-advocate once, but it is simply no accident that except a few people with special needs no one used it, or tried to and gave up. I used OS/2 in versions 3 and 4, and that on supported IBM-Thinkpads, but it turned out to be a PITA – mainly because of the SIQ-Flaw in its architeture, which made it practically unusable for me. Every half hour or so the desktop would simply freeze, and that was it. IBM did release fixpacks for this, and I had my system up-to-date, but it didn’t help – the hangs continued.
The one thing OS/2 was really good at was multitasking – in Windows 95 this was rather a bad joke – but this of course only until the WPS choose to hang again.
Add to this the missing applications (the existing ones being mostly rather strange, to put it mildly) and the laughable multimedia support, so it was no surprise that I was MUCH more productive and had way more fun with the poor, unstable Windows 95 … which was not that bad, by the way, once you got used to its quirks – rather the opposite of OS/2.
The SIQ-Problem was mentioned, but delicately left out of the argument by the passionate OS/2-advocates.
In all fairness to the OS/2, the SIQ problem was addressed (through a hacked up fix) as part of W-FP16 (IIRC). The problem was that enabling the fix required editing the config.sys, so most people never enabled it (though I do believe it was enabled by default in Merlin). Even so, all it did was allow automatic focus change away from the offending app (failing to check its input messages) after a couple of hundred milliseconds to prevent the queue from being overrun and it expand the queue depth. The fundamental design flaw of the SIQ was never addressed, but its impact was significantly lessoned.
However, the issue of the shared globally mapped PM subsystem libraries was actually a much more serious problem. Most unrecoverable hangs that occurred were not the result of SIQ (as ctrl+esc would usually get things moving again after a wait), instead they were usually caused by corruption of the UI code itself by an application. I spent more than a few hours with PMDF analyzing system dumps I created trying to figure out why the system had hung. One big offending application turned out to be my favorite (still to this day) word processor, AmiPro (no laughing).
At work, we each get unrecoverable hangs 1-3 times a week on Windows 2000 Pro and have to reboot. The computers are on a network, so we are not allowed to try and fix them. At home my eComStation gets a reboot for a unrecoverable hang 1-3 times a year. This is about the same as my Mac OS X. These are usually caused by going to some web site that is using Windows fluff.
I haven’t used AmiPro since I was running OS/2 3.0 . I use WordPro for OS/2 Warp 4 or OperOffice, I have not had either program cause a hang, ever.
I have used OS/2 4.0 on a Toshiba, a Chembook and an IBM-Thinkpad. I have never experienced the desktop freeze/WPS hang you talk about. Maybe my Kungfu is better. Each of these laptops was used for years at a time and never required a “fresh reinstall”as the Windows partitions on these machines did. I used OS/2 on these machines for word processing, spreadsheets, email and Web surfing. I used Windows when I had to, or when I needed to see some fluff.
By missing applications did you mean games? Window is good for games.
Howard Stern used to hawk OS/2 Warp on his radio and WOR 9 show..
The bank I used to work for used OS/2 extensively.. And all those QuickTrack machines at Penn Station use it too. Never once had a problem with those…