okcpulse
03-01-2007, 07:26 PM
OS/2 WARPED
Technology has many scattered oddities that lived for a short while. Who can forget Betamax, or the laserdisc? How about Prodigy? The Pocket Rocker (so much for using answering machine casettes to meet our music needs)? Then, there are personal computers. Commodores, floppy disks (the large discs that were ACTUALLY floppy) and tape file systems where retrieving a file would take as long as fifteen minutes. And operating systems. Unix is still around, but hanging by a Solaris thread. Well, Mac OS X is built on Unix, but is so commercialized people forget it's Unix. But the OS people can recall, even regular computer users, is OS/2, or Operating System/2. Not much to it, and there never was. OS/2 was an IBM brainchild, although the company worked in close partnership with Microsoft to develop and support the operating system. Consider OS/2 Windows' vanishing twin. Both operating systems were built around the same kernel. The software, around for much of the 1990s, vanished at the turn of the 21st Century after almost two decades of life.
That Was Then
OS/2 was introduced in 1987 by Microsoft and IBM as an OS that was able to support mainframe computers, as well as personal computers. IBM in those days followed the same path as did Apple by selling IBM computers with OS/2 pre-installed, although Windows was also able to run on what was known as the PS/2 computer. My grandfather owned an IBM PS/2 which ran OS/2 2.0 in which everyone in the family can recall the absence of a desktop. Instead, a row of folders was displayed showing programs you could open... a word processor, database file, or a very thin and featureless drawing program that could only draw lines. No filling color. At the time, I was 13 years old, and wanted to create my own program. I had no idea where ot start or was even aware that additional software existed that I could use. I drew on the myth created by the 1985 motion picture 'Wierd Science', where Gary and Wyatt created a supermodel out of thin air on Wyatt's 'powerful computer'. Nonetheless, I was clueless then. When Windows 3.x was released by Microsoft in 1990, the company decided to break from IBM to focus solely on Windows, and left IBM with all of the workload for OS/2. IBM then licensed the REXX scripting language in exchange for the GUI design of AmigaOS from Commodore known as the Workplace Shell (WPS) and released version 2.11 with Symmetric Multi-Processing support.
OS/2 Pioneering Technology
OS/2 Version 3.0 was he first operating system on the PC platform to feature built-in internet support, and two years later in 1996 OS/2 WARP 4 was released. WARP 4 included OpenGL and a Java Development Kit with a Java Development Machine for running programs apart form the browser. OS/2 from version 2.0 and later was a 32-bit operating system and was marketed as a crash-proof system. Curtis Fuller, an IT professional in Houston, recalls a different story. "I tried to get a golf game to work on OS/2. It didn't," he remembers. Instead, the game worked on his friend's Windows machine. And in those days, Windows applications were supposed to work perfectly on OS/2, granted, most did. If this system was so robust, what killed OS/2? Was IBM just not willing to invest anymore time into OS/2? The company withdrew full support of the operating system in 2005, and discontinued selling the installation discs than same year. Extended support was shelved in 2006. The killer was competition. Linux was gaining broad support in the early 2000s, and Mac OS X had made a strong comeback after dropping the old Mach-based operating system, Mac OS 9 in favor of a Unix (NetBSD) kernel, also known as Darwin, in 2001. Windows XP was also released with major fanfare that same year, and is now installed on 90 percent of the world's computers.
The Last of a Dinosaur
The last update to OS/2 was in 1999, with the release of 4.5. IBM had let go all efforts to polish the system for competition, and for unexplained reasons, no support for multimedia or broad hardware support was considered by IBM. Nor was there a goal or roadmap for OS/2, whereas Microsoft was, and still is, on a mission to become the world's strongest software company by developing and releasing a host of applications for Windows. Linux is making strong headway in the field of multimedia, while Apple continues its beauty campaign with Mac OS X, the world's only operating system still monotonously stuck with Apple hardware- such a 1970s model of commerce for electronics. OS/2 in 1999 was far from beauty, its interface takes a user back fifteen years, and the functionality limits the user to the bare necessity of computing. Take care, OS/2, and may code have mercy on your soul.
Technology has many scattered oddities that lived for a short while. Who can forget Betamax, or the laserdisc? How about Prodigy? The Pocket Rocker (so much for using answering machine casettes to meet our music needs)? Then, there are personal computers. Commodores, floppy disks (the large discs that were ACTUALLY floppy) and tape file systems where retrieving a file would take as long as fifteen minutes. And operating systems. Unix is still around, but hanging by a Solaris thread. Well, Mac OS X is built on Unix, but is so commercialized people forget it's Unix. But the OS people can recall, even regular computer users, is OS/2, or Operating System/2. Not much to it, and there never was. OS/2 was an IBM brainchild, although the company worked in close partnership with Microsoft to develop and support the operating system. Consider OS/2 Windows' vanishing twin. Both operating systems were built around the same kernel. The software, around for much of the 1990s, vanished at the turn of the 21st Century after almost two decades of life.
That Was Then
OS/2 was introduced in 1987 by Microsoft and IBM as an OS that was able to support mainframe computers, as well as personal computers. IBM in those days followed the same path as did Apple by selling IBM computers with OS/2 pre-installed, although Windows was also able to run on what was known as the PS/2 computer. My grandfather owned an IBM PS/2 which ran OS/2 2.0 in which everyone in the family can recall the absence of a desktop. Instead, a row of folders was displayed showing programs you could open... a word processor, database file, or a very thin and featureless drawing program that could only draw lines. No filling color. At the time, I was 13 years old, and wanted to create my own program. I had no idea where ot start or was even aware that additional software existed that I could use. I drew on the myth created by the 1985 motion picture 'Wierd Science', where Gary and Wyatt created a supermodel out of thin air on Wyatt's 'powerful computer'. Nonetheless, I was clueless then. When Windows 3.x was released by Microsoft in 1990, the company decided to break from IBM to focus solely on Windows, and left IBM with all of the workload for OS/2. IBM then licensed the REXX scripting language in exchange for the GUI design of AmigaOS from Commodore known as the Workplace Shell (WPS) and released version 2.11 with Symmetric Multi-Processing support.
OS/2 Pioneering Technology
OS/2 Version 3.0 was he first operating system on the PC platform to feature built-in internet support, and two years later in 1996 OS/2 WARP 4 was released. WARP 4 included OpenGL and a Java Development Kit with a Java Development Machine for running programs apart form the browser. OS/2 from version 2.0 and later was a 32-bit operating system and was marketed as a crash-proof system. Curtis Fuller, an IT professional in Houston, recalls a different story. "I tried to get a golf game to work on OS/2. It didn't," he remembers. Instead, the game worked on his friend's Windows machine. And in those days, Windows applications were supposed to work perfectly on OS/2, granted, most did. If this system was so robust, what killed OS/2? Was IBM just not willing to invest anymore time into OS/2? The company withdrew full support of the operating system in 2005, and discontinued selling the installation discs than same year. Extended support was shelved in 2006. The killer was competition. Linux was gaining broad support in the early 2000s, and Mac OS X had made a strong comeback after dropping the old Mach-based operating system, Mac OS 9 in favor of a Unix (NetBSD) kernel, also known as Darwin, in 2001. Windows XP was also released with major fanfare that same year, and is now installed on 90 percent of the world's computers.
The Last of a Dinosaur
The last update to OS/2 was in 1999, with the release of 4.5. IBM had let go all efforts to polish the system for competition, and for unexplained reasons, no support for multimedia or broad hardware support was considered by IBM. Nor was there a goal or roadmap for OS/2, whereas Microsoft was, and still is, on a mission to become the world's strongest software company by developing and releasing a host of applications for Windows. Linux is making strong headway in the field of multimedia, while Apple continues its beauty campaign with Mac OS X, the world's only operating system still monotonously stuck with Apple hardware- such a 1970s model of commerce for electronics. OS/2 in 1999 was far from beauty, its interface takes a user back fifteen years, and the functionality limits the user to the bare necessity of computing. Take care, OS/2, and may code have mercy on your soul.