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IBM

Review of eComStation OS/2 1.0 248

Posted by timothy from the going-not-gently-into-that-good-night dept.
JigSaw writes: "OSNews features a long and in-depth article about the latest version of eComStation OS/2 1.0. eCS 1.0 is developed by Serenity Systems after they licensed the technology from IBM when the latter had abandoned any hope for the success of OS/2. The article also has information about the future version of eCS, 1.10, which it will be branded as Entry level, Upgrade and WorkPlace. The Workplace version will include all the software one needs to run Java2, Win16 & DOS applications 'natively', and it also includes an X11 server plus a full copy of Connectix's Virtual PC that can run any flavour of Windows and Linux. In fact, eCS OS/2 Workplace will include a full Linux distribution as part of its VirtualPC package."
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Review of eComStation OS/2 1.0 More

Review of eComStation OS/2 1.0

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  • Cross Platform AND runs MS Products (Score:3, Funny)

    by RogrWilco ( 522139 ) on Tuesday December 04, 2001 @09:54PM (#2657750)
    If it won't bluescreen, then I'm sold!
    • It won't - you'll get a black'n'white trap screen instead :o)

      If you keep away from alpha and beta drivers, then it is quite stable. Also use the WarpZilla browser (Mozilla port) instead of the Netscape 4.61 (has an issue with the WPS)....

      Like Linux it is quite frustrating when it freezes, because you know that the base system is working... the message queue is just stopped....
      If it is an internal WPS problem then the WPS restarts automatically.

      WPS = WorkPlace Shell = primary Shell (Like the XFree86 XServer)
      PMShell = Presentation Manager Shell = Secondary GUI shell (Like the Window Manager of UNIX systems)

  • Platforms (Score:3, Funny)

    by Traxton1 ( 154182 ) <Traxton1.yahoo@com> on Tuesday December 04, 2001 @09:56PM (#2657762)
    For those of you who just can't pick one platform. Not, dual booting, what is that, like the equivalent of quadruple booting?

    • For those of you who just can't pick one platform. Not, dual booting, what is that, like the equivalent of quadruple booting?

      You forgot to mention "(booting) without the wait!" OS/2 rules! Well, it used to rule. Ok, it never ruled, but damn, it could have and should have! The WPS was rock solid. And a fully re-entrant virtually bomb-proof kernel? I almost enjoyed watching my Windows programs blow up without taking down the whole system. Too bad IBM was running the show and gave up the desktop "war" when they finally had a product with real potential (3.0 and up). Hmm, I've still got a few of the Blues (Warp Connect) sitting around somewhere...
      • The WPS was rock solid

        I'd say that WPS is the least robust part of OS/2. OS2*.INI files get corrupted if you don't use costless third-party WPSTools regularly. And don't put too many shadows around.

        But it also is the best part of OS/2. A pity.

  • How to make software projects fail (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 04, 2001 @09:56PM (#2657763)
    Are these two the same story ?
  • When OS/2 2.0 came out it was far superior to Windows 3.x from a technical perspective. It always has been and always will be. Unfortunately application compatibility has always been the key. Why run Linux, OS/2, MacOS when you can run Office faster under Windows? Until the MicroSloth Windows / Office hegemony is broken we'll have to keep on neglecting terrific operating systems just because Office doesn't run as well on them...

    • marketing integration (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Alien54 ( 180860 )
      Unfortunately application compatibility has always been the key.

      heck, I feel like a rant tonight.

      Yep, unfortunately, MS quality control seems to have been aimed at the level of how many things we can we get away breaking ( like Lotius, etc) without people running away in terror.

      right now, they could put out complete crap, and people would still buy it because they have to, not because of any apparent merit. Marketing and accounting love it, but it is a complete insult to the engineers, not that account or marketing would care much.

      It is like engineering a new hardware widget. Some cool engineer invents something and does a damn good job. the prototype is excellent. it then gets fed to the production engineer, who work damn hard at trying to produce the widget as cheaply as possible, and still have it work.

      MS engineers probably produce great shit, then it hits the marketing integration tem, and the result is crap. It doesn't survive well being integrated with the Microsft marketing vision.

      It would be like seeing borgified art.

      • I'd disagree a bit. My guess is that marketing drives the MS culture. So the engineer who comes up with a pretty-looking GUI, like those fading menus, gets the promotion and notoriety; while the one who figures out a way to make Windows crash less gets passed by.
    • Have you tried Office v.X under Mac OS X? Beats the Windows version hands down in speed, features, and prettiness.
      • that's not going to last long. Microsoft will start laying off all those Mac programmers who are NOT keeping Windows in the "right" light. Word for OS/2 kicked ars and so did most of the applications which were ported correctly to OS/2 ( read threaded ). Microsoft killed those projects every which way they could because they made Windows look bad. Which it was/is.

        I've heard from another that MS Office on OS X was really nice but this will be the last time. Bookmark this and come back in 1.5 years. You'll see.

        LoB
    • >Unfortunately application compatibility hasa lways been the key.

      Nah. All you need is well defined (and propably free) filetypes, so it ain't OS dependant anymore.
    • OS/2 forced Microsoft to evolve. While OS/2 was gaining on Microsoft in the market share department, Microsoft was busily improving their OS. Meanwhile IBM was sitting there with its thumb up its collective butt. If OS/2 had been improving at the same rate as Windows, it would easily have come out on top. Instead of redesigning some of the core areas where there were major problems, they elected for mostly cosmetic changes to the UI. Any attempts to address real issues, such as the problems with the single system input queue or the ease with which the desktop could be corrupted were simply hack jobs.

      Very few developers made use of the advanced features of the OS either, especially inside IBM. There were ports of various programs which were obviously simple recompiles of Windows 3.1 code. I wouldn't touch many of IBM's GUI apps for OS/2 because they'd go off to do processing and bog down the system input queue. So even though you had this way cool multi-tasking multi-threaded OS, it was still very easy to bog down the whole OS by simpily not processing messages on the system input queue.

      Politics was the death blow to OS/2 though. If you couldn't even get an OS/2 PC pre-installed from IBM's PC division, there was no way anyone else was going to offer it. The install was hideous enough that your average end user did NOT want to deal with that and IBM was not about to address shortcomings of the PC archectecture that made the install process so bad -- and there WERE things that could have been done to work around a lot of those problems.

      OS/2's death can be entirely blamed on IBM's inability to keep up with Microsoft. They were outmaneuvered, plain and simple. OS/2's current reanimation as the walking dead and probable eventual rise to Amiga-like hype-godhood can probably be blamed on a few users who don't want to let go. The same sorts of people, no doubt, who freeze dry their pets once they die.

      • If you couldn't even get an OS/2 PC pre-installed from IBM's PC division,

        I read somewhere that MS threatened to stop mass-discounting Windows to IBM. But I didn't heard about it being mentioned in the trial.

        Can somebody confirm?
      • Sorry dude but you are f*cking stupid... OS/2 never had a market share advantage on Windows. In addition, OS/2 was *always* technically superior to Windows, even after Windows 95 was released. If you don't realize that then you're not too smart at all...

        Your assertions are ignorant and without merit, too bad you weren't around when these events happened, I'm sure you wouldn't have seemed so silly...

  • Whats in a name? (Score:5, Funny)

    by swordboy ( 472941 ) on Tuesday December 04, 2001 @10:06PM (#2657811) Journal
    eComStation

    Wow... That is the most "buzzword compliant" name that I have ever heard.

    Who do I make the check out to?

  • VA C++ (Score:1, Interesting)

    by chiph ( 523845 )
    Hmmm. I always did like the workplace shell and SOM. Maybe it's time I pulled my copy of Visual Age C++ out of it's hiding place.

    Chip H.

  • This is not a goatsex link, either (Score:3, Informative)

    by Bi()hazard ( 323405 ) on Tuesday December 04, 2001 @10:25PM (#2657889) Homepage Journal
    You can find a lot of information on ecomstation here [mynetcologne.de]. They have information on product contents, options, and availability, as well as support, previews, and links to reviews, distributors and resellers.
  • That is one ugly UI !! Well, good to see an old but good OS chugging along!

  • that'll be fun (Score:5, Funny)

    by NMerriam ( 15122 ) <NMerriam@artboy.org> on Tuesday December 04, 2001 @10:25PM (#2657893) Homepage
    which it will be branded as Entry level, Upgrade and WorkPlace

    I can't imagine what a nightmare this idiotic Laurel and Hardy naming scheme going to be to support.

    Which version do you have? Upgrade? An Entry level upgrade? you can't upgrade from workplace, thats a lower version. You want to buy an upgrade? Do you want the full version of upgrade or the upgrade of the entry level version of workplace?
  • It's nice that this product still has a life.

    Many dedicated people spent their years developing OS/2. It'd be a shame to completely dispose of it, so it's nice that someone is continuing to put love into the product.

    Of course, it'll never make a dime, but still, I'm happy. It's better than the fate of so many other software products, whose source code ends up in a warehouse on an obsolete format of tape.

  • OS/2 Distros (Score:2, Interesting)

    by os2fan ( 254461 )
    eComStation is a kind of OS/2 with a Linux Distro feel to it, aka Linux and the kitchen sink.

    It has lots of interesting things in it, handled through an integrated but separate installer. I like that. The installation stuff is not kept in memory every time the system boots, as is it in the Registry.

    It looks cool, even. Boots off a cdrom to a GUI. Like that.

    What I find distressing is that while the distro has a lot in it, it sends out a disinsentive to ISVs to compete with it. I suspect that the inclusion of IBM Works and Win-OS/2 gave OS/2 users access to word processors that ended up driving the market away from the OS/2 word processors like Describe.

    What is really needed, in both the OS/2 and Windows worlds, is competing Distros. Wouldn't that be just grand. :)

  • Facinating stories -- I was an OS/2 user back when Object Desktop (whoops, I forgot their real name -- Stardock?) was trying to rescue OS/2. I was really disappointed when they failed. They did a REALLY good job in all their other work, though.

    Question: I see a new feature in the next version of eComStation, network boot. In this, the entire OS is stored on the disk of one machine, and the other machines boot entirely from it -- all config files, everything. All processing is done on the clients, but the files are stored on the server. That's convenient!

    I know X can do part of this, but it still puts the processing on the server; NFS can do another part, but it's enormously slow and bulky (and VERY odd to work with).

    So is there any complete solution I can install on a 'terminal' PC so that all booting, storage, and so on is done on a central system, but all processing and running is done on my system -- and it all just works, whether I'm using console or X, svgamode or KDE?

    I'm sure that when MOSIX is done that'll be easy :-). That would be the ultimate solution, I suppose -- but on the other hand, this would make a MOSIX cluster much easier to set up, since the individual machines couldn't be independantly misconfigured.

    -Billy
    • Yeah, this can be done, in about 15 different ways.

      Typically you end up with a perfectly normal linux, but all your filesystems NFS-mounted from the central box.

      Most of the commercial UNIXes were pushing this scheme - "diskless workstations" - at one point, but it never took off. Might be worth reexamining now, though.
      • Diskless UNIX workstations are more common than you think. Especially within classified networks. It saves the problems with someone stealing your diskdrive and you don't have to lock the door.

        At our company diskless UNIX workstations (Ultra 5/10/60 - Solaris 2.6!!! (not solaris 8 - oh no - too modern :-( ) have been the policy for quite sometime. Its quite neat and saves sysadmins and backup people a lot of hazzle. The important thing then is a fast network.
    • It's called a diskless workstation. And for the most part, it has been discredited.

      Disks used to be expensive. Not any more.

      Disk management used to be a chore. For those of us who are conscientious about it, it still is. For must users, a disk is just something to fill up, and with 40GB drives being common this is hard to do.

      Remember quotas on disk systems? Ha .. only my ISP imposes a quota now, because they are cheap. (Well, my employer is trying with my email system, but that's a different issue.)

      Remember network computers? More than an X Station, but slightly less than a PC? Ha .. also discredited. A network computer was a glorified diskless workstation. You don't see too many of those being deployed, except in tightly controller environments.
      • Remember network computers? More than an X Station, but slightly less than a PC? Ha .. also discredited. A network computer was a glorified diskless workstation. You don't see too many of those being deployed, except in tightly controller environments.

        Not so fast. NCs died because Microsoft dissed them and did their best to kill them. It worked. But guess what they are doing now? What's the whole idea behing .NET and software as a service? That's right, it's a network computer! I guess that once again goes to show that nothing is invented until Microsoft invents it.

        BTW, I do agree with your comment that network computer is nothing mode than a glodified diskless workstation. Except that now it's got Java in it and everyone knows Java is cool. Or something.

    • Yes, Boot over nfs does exactly that. Etherboot doesn't. The machines I was testing for such use were token ring so etherboot wouldn't work. KDE and X? KDE defintaly uses X, if you can run X, you can run kde (if you have 2.5gb ram :-). SVGALIB apps work, but the stability wasn't that great, back in the linux 2.4.0-test11 days :-)

    • Search Google [google.com] for "linux diskless howto" and you will get several links. Most *nixes can net boot. Sun hardware supports netboot out of the box to the point that netboot is the default if no hard disk is installed. Even lowly dos can netboot with the help of netware. It is old school. In the early nineties we figured out that netbooting sounded a lot cooler then it really is.

      • its being diskless but doing the processing locally that's different.

        With those NCs the processing was all done of the server - which meant they were as slow as shit with 200 clients all running programs simultaniously (even just 7 NC clients will slow a Dual P3 500 app server to a crawl)

        • In my post I was not refering to NCs. I was refering to *nix boxes without a disk running programs locally and storeing all data and programs on a server. Running *nix and dos+netware like this was quite common circa 1990. It also worked quite well, except when the network went down. All too common with thinnet (coax).

    • While I love and still run Warp 4, the system of network booting that just works, as you described it, is fulfilled by NetBoot on MacOS X Server.
    • A good starting point for this kind of stuff is the bpbatch home page. [bpbatch.org]. And yes, NFS is generally used to mount the shared storage. I haven't found it to be that awful. It does have its quirks.

  • Good kernel... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by WasterDave ( 20047 ) <davep@noSPAm.zedkep.com> on Tuesday December 04, 2001 @10:37PM (#2657942)
    I always thought the OS/2 (warp onwards) kernel sounded good, purely from the idea of a fully re-entrant kernel that booted (including GUI) in 4Mb. So, this came as a pleasant surprise:

    Another cool trick you can do with OS/2 is that you can turn off and on any additional CPUs you may have, on the fly.

    Holy shit. And....

    OS/2 (reportedly) scales wonderfully on machines up to 64 CPUs.

    And so runs a good chance of being a kick arse server kernel. Are we going to see Debian/OS2?

    With a price of $299 for the normal version and $399 for the version that supports SMP

    So that's a no then. Oh well.

    Dave
    • While I agree - the kernel is one of the best in the business for a client OS - it doesn't scale well past 8 or so CPU's. It'll run, but you'll see better results clustering.
  • This is great!

    I did a lot of work under OS/2 years ago...and in 1995, I was doing full-motion video in multi-media applications for Trade Shows and Public Information Kiosks using touchscreen systems. One of my applications, Touch Ottawa/Hull, won a design award! I basically moved from OS/2 to Linux, and didn't have to suffer under the Windows for my personal use. Unfortunaely, I am a consultant, and I have to be able to help Windows LUsers when needed. But, luckily, most of my current stuff has been with Linux!

    ttyl
    Farrell
  • Shhhhh not so loud! I'm just now finishing up a project to get a major credit card company off of OS/2 once and for all. If they "discover" this, they may buy it and extend my contract!
    • Wow, subtlety must be one of your qualifications. And they're still running OS/2? What are they migrating to? Should I buy stock?
  • IBM really f**ked this one up. When OS/2 Warp 3 came out back in '94, it ran its own apps, as well as Windows 3.1 apps. The cool part was that because of the way it used protective memory addressing it actually ran Windows 3.1 programs faster, and less crash-prone. Only IBM's marketing department could drop the ball on something so cool. They could have come after M$ with both guns blazing, but instead they half-assed it. It wasn't even an issue of compatability then either. Windows 95 wasn't out yet so all the top selling packages on the market then ran on OS/2...

    I really hope these eCom (gay name) people get it right :)

    --Jon
  • "I used to run OS/2 back ..." posts, which is understandable...

    With the progress of hardware in the last 4 years (since the last release of OS/2, IIRC) and software in the last 6 years (w32-wise), it doesn't IMHO make a lot of sense to run an OS which may not even support your hardware, and even if it does, is there even new software (aside from GNU & the odd shareware droppings) wich will run native on it?

    What can you get from this you can't get from GNU/Linux or FreeBSD? (both support win16 apps under WINE, unless I'm mistaken)

    Are there any "I've been using OS/2 since.." posters instead of "I used to use..." posters out there in /. land?

    PS the pricetag is hefty for an nostolgia OS, IMHO.

    • Are there any "I've been using OS/2 since.." posters instead of "I used to use..." posters out there in /. land?

      Here's one. I've been using OS/2 since 1994. I used it today.

      Part of my job is to maintain DOS applications. The compiler/linker (Clipper/Blinker) runs under DOS, and my fingers' favorite editor (Edix) runs under DOS. For doing this kind of stuff, OS/2 is king and there is no close second-place. Yes, Windows can do it too, but Windows is very clunky and inconvenient.

      As far as I know, that's the only major advantage OS/2 has over Linux/FreeBSD and it's a hell of a small niche. OS/2 also has a nicer GUI than anything else I've seen, but I can get by with anything.

      Lately I've been writing a web app in php, and OS/2 can ssh into my OpenBSD test box just as well as anything else. And it mounts Samba shares just fine. I suppose I could get apache and php for OS/2 but I haven't bothered, because I needed to justify the OpenBSD infiltration. ;-)

      About once a week (rough average) I have to run something that requires Windows. The frequency is going to slowly increase with time and someday it may become frequent enough that I can't justify time spent rebooting. But I don't know when I'll reach that point. Hopefully WINE will be far enough along by then that I will get to switch from something that doesn't suck to something else that doesn't suck. But we'll see...

      FWIW, I am not interested in this new ecomstation thingie. I can't figure out who would want it. First time OS/2 users? No fucking way. Nobody should switch to OS/2 at this point, unless they're unlucky enough to inherit my job or something. Old OS/2 users upgrading? No, none of the new features of this version of OS/2 would be useful to someone who is already getting by wiht Warp 4. I just don't get it.

    • Given the option, I always go with a OS/2 server solution for web server installs. The stability is un believeable. I've had a number of systems that ran for years with the only reboot happining because of a major power outage, or being taken down for hardware maintenance (HD replacement, etc...). The scripting with REXX is probably th emost powerful scripting language I've ever used, contrary to what Perl fan-boys will tell you.
    • I used OS/2 every day of my life from 1993-1999.
      That reads like an epitaph but that's what I get for leading my post with melodrama :)

      I switched to Linux and Mac OS after OS/2 (read my profile), but last week I bought a new Athlon box to play with. Feeling nostalogic and curious to see OS/2 on modern hardware, I fought a losing battle with the Server for e-business installer for a few hours on Saturday. (Yes, I downloaded the new IDEDASD.)

      I'll try again this weekend. OS/2 can still be a great niche OS. I'd love to have it on one of my desktops again, but I don't think Serenity Systems will be around for long. The price is exorbitant, drivers are still sparce, and the name/marketing is awful.

      Side-note: Server for e-business was the second-to-last official IBM release of OS/2 prior to licensing to SS. It had most of the major features of eCS: HPFS386, new TCP/IP stack, JFS, and the new kernel (4.5 is the rev, I believe). OS/2 Warp Convenience Pack was the last IBM consumer-oriented release. Good to know if anyone's interested in picking up a usable copy on eBay.
    • I still do sustaining engineering for a number of PCs that run OS/2 for telemetry and communications tasks. At the time the applications were developed, OS/2 was the best operating system for the job. It was a real 32-bit operating system with a GUI and decent software development tools that would run on cheap PC hardware. It beat the hell out of MS-DOS and Windows 3.1. Plus, IBM actually supported their software, a concept that is foreign to Microsoft and many other software vendors.

      I don't care if OS/2 can't run the latest games and Microsoft bloatware. It does an excellent job of reliably running our custom applications.

  • It'll be interesting to see where this goes ... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Batou ( 532120 ) on Tuesday December 04, 2001 @10:53PM (#2657999)
    Until earlier this year, I worked at IBM Austin on the OS/2 base team, mostly analyzing core dumps and the like. I remember hearing about this there, and was surprised that no one - including anyone in development management - had ever heard of it. While I applaud Security Systems efforts to attempt to market this OS to the public (lets face it - IBM gave up years ago), I'd be very interested to see where this goes from a support perspective. None of the IBM coders who still provide defect support for OS/2 have any involvement in this. If a nasty bug appears in any of the code, IBM isn't likely to fix it, and I'd assume that OS/2 fixpaks won't work with this (last I heard, they were going to charge subscriptions to receive them, anyway). I would assume that SS doesn't have a full code license, as I can't believe M$ would allow anyone a full code license - and FYI, yes they still have a say - even if they completely yanked out the Win-OS/2 code, it's so tightly integrated within PMShell, you'd never be completely free of it as it would most likely require a complete re-write. That's a few million lines of code, large portions of which are entirely in x86 assembly. Hardly a weekend job. ;-)

    A few corrections: Unless the guys at SS made some substantial modifications to the boot loader (not very likely), the bit about having to boot off of a HPFS partition is blatently false. Os/2 supports boot off of fat, fat32 (with the danidasd freeware fat32 IFS driver - I forget who made it, but VERY nice), or HPFS386 (the filesystem the eBusiness and earlier server versions could utiliza, albeit you had to purchase it as a seperate license). IIRC, JFS partitions were non-bootable, but there were so many problems with the IFS driver, you'd be insane to try it, anyway.

    I can also appreciate what the reviewer was mentioning about LVM - while it is extremely powerful and flexible, it is an absolute bitch. In fact, you can't completely get rid of it once installed on a drive without doing a low-level format (at least for the versions that shipped with MCP/ACP - this might have changed since). It was an in-joke with the support staff that a virus (LVM) had made it into the release build.

    Anyway, best of luck to these guys. I might consider purchasing it if it weren't so damn much. It'll be interesting to see where this goes, and if there are still enough OS/2 nuts out there to provide a niche market for it.
    • While I applaud Security Systems efforts to attempt to market this OS to the public

      It is going to be difficult if people can't even remember that their name is Serenity Systems.

      If a nasty bug appears in any of the code, IBM isn't likely to fix it, and I'd assume that OS/2 fixpaks won't work with this (last I heard, they were going to charge subscriptions to receive them, anyway).

      From my understanding, a subscription to eCS with "Upgrade Protection" (?) gives you the right to receive a fixpack CD on a quarterly basis while IBM's Convenience Package sends only yearly CDs so it is better in this way. (You can also download them if you paid for the passwords).
      I understand that Serenity aggregates OS/2 users so that they are another of the big customers that IBM pays attention to.
      You are not guaranteed a fix anyway. But, unless you are Enormous-Grossebank Gmbh, this is your best chance to get IBM to listen to you.

      with the danidasd freeware fat32 IFS driver - I forget who made it,

      Daniela Engert, the name is a hint.

      niche market for it.

      I hope that not all the meanings of "niche" will be explored.

  • IBM can't kill off OS/2! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by nbvb ( 32836 ) on Tuesday December 04, 2001 @10:55PM (#2658006) Journal
    Seriously.

    OS/2 is what the supervisor PC's that control the zSeries mainframes run!

    Open up a mainframe and inside is a Thinkpad running OS/2 to control it...

    It's not going anywhere anytime soon...

    --NBVB

    • Re:IBM can't kill off OS/2! (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Just to clarify this...

      Yes.. the service element (SE) runs OS/2, as does the Host Management Console (HMC).

      The SE is used to monitor the processor, as well as providing system control functions (such as telling the processor to power down, or to run a diagnostic tool against an I/O Channel, etc.). The SE orchistrates the monitoring of the physical system (such as how all the power supplies are doing, how the cooling units are doing, etc.).

      The HMC is used to centralize the access to one or more systems. It also handles making backups of the SE, as well as calling "home" to IBM to retrieve any microcode maintenance for the processor, as well as calling "home" if there is a problem. The HMC is the main system operator access point to the processor (again allowing the operator to power down or power up and initialize the processor, or allowing a systems admin to configure LPARs (logical partitions), or to monitor overall system activity (how busy the system is).

      What the SE and HMC are not. They do not "run" any of the mainframe operating systems. Think of the SE as the souped up holder of the ROM BIOS with a softkey power switch.

      Technically, the HMC and the SE can be powered off and the processor will still function (though some control functions may not be available -- such as dynamically updating the I/O configuration, and of course the ability to "control" the system).

      The SE is really just the evolution of the service console that has been used for decades in the S/370, S/390, z/Series processors.

      But the comment that

      "It's not going anywhere anytime soon..." is true.

  • Favorite Bumper Sticker from 1993 (Score:4, Funny)

    by 3ryon ( 415000 ) on Tuesday December 04, 2001 @11:00PM (#2658033)
    OS/2 on a PS/2, half an operating system on half a comptuer.
  • Honestly - it's about time we saw something like this. I have my boxed set of OS/2 2.0 that I ran instead of Win 3.1 for a while (but later ditched because prorgams wouldn't work right.) It was a great OS - better multitasking, memory managment, etc.

    For the new OS/2 to include the system apps to run apps from just about any operating system in existance (Java and legacy Windows apps natively, Linux and newer Windows programs in emulation, and X11 for native Unix apps) it will undoubtedly make it a lot easier to get servers up and running. Want Apache httpd to do your web serving, Oracle for your database, and a unix ftpd, you'd be able to do it from one box, out of the box. That alone is worth quite a bit of money to me.
    • Want Apache httpd to do your web serving, Oracle for your database, and a unix ftpd, you'd be able to do it from one box, out of the box. That alone is worth quite a bit of money to me.

      Bad example, man. :)

  • this is OS/2 v5.

    It just might go as well as BeOS v5.

    Oh, wait....

    (only a quad boot? C'mon I had a quintuple boot 98se, 2000, slack 7, redhat 7 and BeOS 5...all via (drum roll) LILO! Taaadaaa!)

    Not to offend, but linux zealots are interesting... os/2 had zealots, but they were called the "user base". Some were pretty scary when you brought up Windows {shudder}

    My experience, mind you. I guess it is hard to be a zealot when you are...OOOOooo, shiney operating system!!!

    Moose
    • I remember reading an ZD (forget which mag, offhand) that was pro-linux a few years back (98 or 99) which stated something along the lines of "unlike OS/2 users, Linux users will never stoop to sending death threats" and then the author went on to cite a anectdote where an OS/2 user did exactly that.

      There's liking your OS, then there's really liking your OS, I guess...
  • Crappy UI aside, OS/2 Warp 3 was one of the most rock solid, fast systems I ever got to use, and it was that way long before NT ever came around.

    Having noce worked at a large Air Conditioning company (who will remain anonymous, but who has their name on a large [and non-airconditioned DOH!] dome in Syracuse NY USA) we used to run upwards of 100 OS/2 machines for the sole purpose of maintaining the entire international email system, and it worked, by-and-large very very well. Had IBM early on worked to improve the UI, enhance the kernel and memory access, beef up hardware support and come up with a serious file/print server to compete with M$'s (then new) NT 4, they might still be using it today.

    As it were, NT 4 Wks and Server came out and had a faster kernel, way fast networking and a friendlier (~laff~) UI... so we switched. Switched so much in fact that we pared it down to 20 or so NT boxes for the price of 100 OS/2's...

    As far as I'm concerned, IBM had the desktop arena by the balls and totally blew it. (no pun intended)

    So hats off to you eCom, I'll give you all the credit in the world, but methinks M$ is far too entrenched, and Mac OS X and Linux far too visible with developers to give OS/2 a real shot at the desktop or development platforms right now.
    • Why is everyone dissing the OS/2 UI? When it came out it totally blew away the Windows 3x crap, and was still better than the Windows 9x gilded crap.

      There were quirks, to be sure. They should have done something to halt the tabbed dialog infestation. They should have had a better help system. And they could have used a decent usability study. But overall it was the best UI I have ever seen.

      The OS/2 WorkPlace Shell was document centric and object oriented. The former meant that you never needed application icons. Just open up the document and it used the appropriate application. Drag a new document out of the templates folder. All without cheesy file extensions or editing a million mime types. The latter meant that programs could inherit from objects. This allows image viewers and archivers to be merely specialized folders.

      These things have all since been implemented in other desktops to one degree or another. But at the time it was revolutionary. Grab the best bits of RISC OS, Plan 9, KDE and GNOME, and integrate them into a whole. That was OS/2 WPS.
  • K-Maps kick ass!
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • They Amplified the Original Flaw (Score:5, Interesting)

    by KarmaBlackballed ( 222917 ) on Tuesday December 04, 2001 @11:46PM (#2658171) Homepage Journal
    OS/2 was cool because you could run OS/2 native applications (there were not many) and you could run Windows applications. Why didn't OS/2 specific applications take off? Because it was stupid to write OS/2 applications if you could get by with the inferior multitasking of Win 3.1.

    Think about it (back in the early 90's): Write a program in Windows and all the OS/2 & Warp users can run it AND all the Windows 3.1 users can too. Write a native application for OS/2 and you will see the difference in sales pretty quick.

    Producing an OS/2 that runs native Windows + Linux ironically makes their previous business model flaw larger in that there is NO incentive for developers to write native OS/2 applications.

    Sorry, this one is destined to die again ... slowly with vestiges kept alive for a while by islands of hobbyists that appreciate it or keep it for snob appeal. The market is not big enough to sustain an OS development and support effort without users that must have THAT OS to run their critical apps.
    • Certainly that was a problem, but others and possibly the biggest by far were:
      1. IBM

        I contracted for them for 8 months and I have never seen such disorganized company. The PC division was promoting Win3.1 while another division was trying to sell OS/2. Our group never got to reuse code from another group and the OS/2 developers played second fiddle to the Win3.1 ones. The left hand hadn't a clue what the right was doing. By the time they started putting it in the hands of home users with discounts and cover CDs it was already way, way too late.
      2. Usability

        The UI for OS/2 - the Workplace Shell was fine in principle, but crap in practice. It looked drab, was inconsistent, it needed too many mouse buttons and it was only "logical" if someone taught you the WPS logic. I think usability was a dirty word in IBM since the WPS was just perverse; commonly used options being buried in the fifth page of some settings dialog, and usused appearing in the popup menus. And no two OS/2 applications looked or behaved alike because apparantly no one in IBM saw fit to share code such as toolbar classes. Apps did have to comply to a bizzaro UI compliance standard called CUA which meant they handled Shift+Insert the same way and other superficial similarities but that was it. I have a sneaking suspicion that some genius in the upper echelons of IBM actually thought unfriendly apps was a good idea to drum sales from selling training.
      3. Microsoft

        We know all about that one. They put the boot in and IBM (the world's largest computer company) mumbled not very convincingly about unfair competition. But whatever dirty tricks Microsoft were playing, they still had more of a clue about usability. They have people an easy to use (certainly easier than OS/2) operating system. And apps such as MS Office looked consistent and clean.

      Now I programmed OS/2 and loved the thing, but it was and is screamingly obvious why it was doomed. IBM had its head up its butt (just like Commodore with the Amiga) and simply dithered around wondering why every one was buying someone elses supposedly inferior product.


      An analogy would be a master chef wondering why people doesn't buy his delicious cakes when makes them to look like a giant dog turd. I wonder why not...

    • Windows NT is also designed to run multiple types of applications natively.

      win32 is one runtime, but there is also a win16, dos and posix runtime. These are no longer promoted or maintained.
  • I remember using OS/2 Warp 3 years ago on an old 486, since it flew on that machine; unlike win95 which ran like a piece of crap. OS/2 was a really fast operating system with direct virtual machine capabilities built in (you could boot operating systems from image files in the OS without any special software). Here's how OS/2 died. Back in the early 90's, Microsoft and IBM co-developed OS/2, and it was called Microsoft OS/2. When version 1.2 came out, the two companies split, and IBM continued production all the way to version 4, while Microsoft rewrote the kernel and transformed it into Windows NT. If you do speed benchmarks, you'll easily realize that NT is far more bloated than any version of OS/2. NT was and is a RAM hog, while OS/2 3 ran on 4 megs of RAM easily. If IBM opened up the source code for OS/2 and strictly made it illegal for microsoft to steal any kernel code advances, then we would all be set. We could develop a Windows-killer OS. That's what OS/2 was destined to be since version 2. It's funny how the development of OS/2 was the second time Microsoft ripped off IBM; the first was DOS when Microsoft sold IBM PC-DOS and kept MS-DOS for themselves. Then it was Windows NT versus OS/2.
  • These prices are off the prismdataworks.com site:

    eComstation Standard $329.00
    eComstation Std. with 30 Day Support $418.00
    eComStation PRO $464.00
    eComStation PRO with 30 Day Support $553.00

    Who's going to pay that much? Maybe someone who has a big investment in OS/2, but that's not too many people anymore.

    • Who's going to pay that much? Maybe someone who has a big investment in OS/2, but that's not too many people anymore.

      That's why the per unit price is so high.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Why is there a need for two different versions, one with SMP support, and one without? Shouldn't that be a install option?

    Bottom of this [prismdataworks.com] page.
  • I used to run a two line bbs using maximus under os/2. On a measly old 386, even with both lines connected I could still keep working in several programs without any noticeable lag. I'd keep a terminal open to log in and chat or play games with my users and even keep a dos session open to play the latest apogee shareware games. Worked like a charm! I miss those days.

    At the time, the only other viable options for running a multiline bbs with maximus were to run the dos version under desqview (task switching, very slow) or BLECH windows 3.1. OS/2 ran like a charm. Too bad IBM didn't have any faith in it as a desktop platform.

    Now if only Stardock had aquired it...
    • oooh, those were the days. A mate used to run 4 lines with maximus on Warp 4, and I myself was running 2. Hellishly stable, and a ton of fun. That being said, it was wonderful to be able to see my mate fire up a game of Doom while all 4 lines were active, and not be able to notice any lag at all.

      Try doing that on win95 on a p75/16mb of ram :)

  • What I'd really like (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Would be IBM to release the WPS and PM source code to the public, allowing then the porting to other operating systems of the best graphical user interface ever designed.
    Just to give an example, it was -really- object oriented. you could derive and create a persistent object on the screen with a single function call, you could inherit properties from other objects (windows, icons) and asssign to one (some, all). Also, after creating 100 links to a file, if you moved that file every link updated itself to move to the new location (it worked like a charm, nothing in common with craps like MS Active Desktop).
    That was possible in on a 486 with 8 Mb of ram. I just wonder how it will run today on a Beowulf cluster of...:)
  • Okay, this might be unintentional flamebait...

    Last time I looked at the OS/2 API (many, many years ago), I walked away with the thought that it was overdone. As an example: the CreateProcess function call had something like 10 parameters!!! It seemed like a function such as that should be simple, since invariably it would be called a lot (e.g., fork!). Of course, then there is the perspective that if there was a simpler function, I could have found it if there developer documentation had been friendlier?

    I subscribe to the Unix philosophy of functions doing 1 thing and doing it very well. The amount of overloading on those API calls (due to all the flags and options passed in) could break the bank. And there's a lot of evidence that a simpler design leads to longer-lasting software: Linux, to name just one.

    I always thought the complexity of OS/2's APIs scared away developers from the platform. At the time, Win 3.1 (aka Win16 API) had a much simpler API, albeit a much less powerful platform. Heck, another example of the value of simple APIs might have been Win16, since it did last for a long time and introduce a lot of programmers to WIMP programming.

    Oddly, the Win32 API introduced by Windows NT echoed OS/2's complexity. CreateProcess still has 10 arguments! So how did it survive? Microsoft marketing, I guess. Or the complexity of the API had nothing to do with OS/2's demise....

    My $.02
  • I called our OS/2 guru everytime it blew up. I called him twice in two years.

    If I did that with Winders, the tech would come over here and shoot me.

    Ahhh....Microfuckus COBOL running on OS/2. Now that is REAL code. You would actually watch the code being processed. Made you dizzy as Hell. It taught you to keep your procedures in sequential order.

    We ran it on a IBM PS/2 Model 70 (386) with 8 meg of RAM. And you could run Kings Quest II on it as well. Is there a downside to this?

  • Information on developing for OS/2? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Dr. Manhattan ( 29720 ) <sorceror171.gmail@com> on Wednesday December 05, 2001 @09:06AM (#2659296) Homepage
    I made the mistake of making my app too portable. It already runs on Linux, Solaris, HP-UX, Tru64, AIX (yuck), and even VMS. Now management wants SGI (easy enough), AS/400 (EBCDIC?!?!?), and OS/2 (should be simple...).

    I have a boxed set of OS/2 Warp Connect, and VA C++ Pro 4.0, but boy is documentation of the OS/2 API hard to come by. Not much on the web, either. If I wanted to write an app for OS/2, where the heck would I find any documentation, hints, FAQs, etc.?

    • Everything you need to develop for OS/2 is in the OS/2 developers toolkit. Like everything else in the OS/2 world, it isn't free. eComStation comes with a copy of the latest version of the toolkit, which has about 100 Mb of libraries, sample code and documentation. If you are porting a Unix-like app, then you can use the emx package, which you may download at no charge from the OS/2 file repository at http://hobbes.nmsu.edu/ [nmsu.edu].
    • Grab the EMX package off of hobbes. It's a better compiler (gcc port to OS/2) and it comes with extensive documentation. And it's got most of the GNU library anyway...

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