Actually, I think a case can be made that OS/2 is *not* dead yet. A follow-on product, eCS, that is based on the last OS/2 Warp release from IBM plus a large number of enhanced and extended features, can be licensed from Serenity Systems International (in Dallas, I believe).
More details can be found here: http://www.ecomstation.com/ There seems to be active development going on for OS/2 and eCS in Europe and Russia, where I think OS/2 was more popular than here in the USA. Most, but not all, common and necessary applications (Mozilla, OpenOffice, Ghostscript spring to mind) are available. Many others (IBM's PCOMM, e.g.) are not. Support and service are also provided. My copy of eCS 1.2 run well on my ThinkPad x21 with only 256Mb of RAM. Tom Duerbusch wrote: > Of course not all of it is MS fault. > > But when you go back to the beginning. It seems MS started it. > I use to go into computer stores and any time I saw an IBM PC running > Windows, I went to a DOS prompt and key in VERS. It always came back MS > DOS xxx. Should have been IBM DOS on an IBM PC. But MS already had > their licensing hooks sunk in. > > What if, that didn't happen? > Would OS/2 have been the NT of the world? > > I had the same kind of problems installing Linux on PCs as I did with > OS/2. > > The Battery meter on my Thinkpad, > Wifi connection on my Thinkpad, > Cooling on my Thinkpad, > all just didn't work with previous releases of Suse. But Suse 10 seems > to have corrected them (2 years after I got the laptop). > > I have had much better luck with OS/2 with the hardware features of the > day. I'm not saying that OS/2 would do justice to current hardware > features, but for the day, it did pretty good. (as long as you didn't > buy the cheapest crap around) > > In 2005, I finally migrated all of my home/office stuff from OS/2 to > Linux. OS/2 very seldom required a reboot (perhaps once or twice a > year). Most of the time, it was up for 8-10 months at a time. Linux > seems to stay up for a month or more. But I'm still playing with it, > and hence I reboot it. So I don't know if it stays up the same length > as OS/2. > > However, on the mainframe, I've had Linux images up for over 8 months > before I elected to take them down (scheduled maintenance type of > thing). > > > > Tom Duerbusch > THD Consulting > > >>>>[EMAIL PROTECTED] 12/23/2005 1:41:47 PM >>> > > Tom Duerbusch wrote: > > >>It wasn't IBM's fault. It was underhanded, illegal acts by > > Microsoft. > >> >> > > Oh, they certainly had a part in it. But so did IBM. There was this > attitude that hardware vendors should write the drivers all > themselves, > which led to many users not being able to install OS/2. M$, which > had taken that attitude at first, had changed their minds for the 1994 > launching of NT 3.5 before the 1994 launching of Warp. > > Also, as noted in my previous post, Warp was generally hard to install > compared to NT 3.5. > > I was a beta developer for NT 3.1 -- had stuff on the early M$ disks. > I switched to OS/2 because the kernel and the TCP/IP stack on OS/2 > were better. But PM crashed regularly. Windows on NT 3.5 almost > never crashed. > > IBM never *really* grokked consumer operating systems. The > first OS/2 literature I read in 1988 referred to a 386 running > OS/2 as "a programmable [mainframe] terminal" which was the zeitgeist > in IBM --- still a glass house that late in the game. > > So it can't ALL be blamed on M$, sons-of-others-than-their-fathers > that they are. Which I said on VNET in 1994 and almost got fired > from IBM for saying so! > -- Dave Jones V/Soft Software, Inc. Houston 281.578.7544
