Keeping the OS/2 Flame Alive

nanday writes "Ever wondered what happened to OS/2? With IBM officially abandoning the operating system last year, users are relying on a third party version of OS/2 -- and, increasingly, using free and open source software to keep it alive." From the article: "According to Haverblad, the main reason that users stay with OS/2 is for 'features that Windows and Linux don't have yet.' He singles out the REstructured eXtended eXecutor (REXX), an interpreted programming language known for its ease of use, a 'rock solid kernel,' 'excellent multitasking,' and low system requirements. Haverblad also claims a lack of viruses and spyware and, referencing a report on OS/2 Warp Server by Secunia, fewer security vulnerabilities." Newsforge is also an OSTG site.

Rock Solid Multitasking?

[thammoud]

I developed for OS/2 for about 7 years. Yes the kernel had threads and a solid multitasking support but the flawed design of Presentation Manager (PM) caused a single rogue app to lock up the desktop and making it useless. The single message queue that IBM designed in PM, was one of the worst technical design decisions ever made. There added many workarounds to kill rogue apps but the results were pretty unreliable.

Re:NT kernel

[cnettel]

OS/2 shares a few design decisions with the NT kernel. The NT kernel used to have a "personality" (just like the Posix and the more famous, Win32, one) to run a small subset of OS/2 console applications in Windows NT. At one point, of course, NT was supposed to be primarly an OS/2 successor, instead of a Windows 3(.1) one. This means that a lot of data structures and so on are similar, where it really doesn't matter, just to make it familiar to user application developers.

BTW, what's "unsolid" about the NT kernel itself?

While some OS/2 Peeps are browsing...

[phase_9]

wonder if anyone could offer me a quick bit of advice (Sorry, I know this is O/T!). Our phone system, apart from being ancient, runs on a 166Mhz Cyrix (lol!) with OS/2 installed. If the hard disc in that machine fails, we are buggered as our telco no longer supports OS/2 and wants us to upgrade (a snap at £8,000!).

My question is - does anyone know how I can make a perfect hard disc image that I can restore from if the Rickety 2Gb Segate in the box fails? Any advice greatly appreciated.

Jonny.

OS/2 Lives!

[nothingtodo]

I use/used it for about 10 years now. I dont use it for my primary duties though, mostly just playing around on it and enjoying the WPS. I just recently setup an old Netfinity server running WSEB (v4.5) with RAID, Mozilla, Staroffice, VPC, Java, Netfinity apps, a newsreader and some other goodies. Sytem is rock solid and stable and pretty snappy on dual PII 450s no less. OS/2 will never be opensourced because there's too much M$ and IBM code mixed in together. For machines that just have to run attended for years doing something, OS/2 is a perfect match. The only thing that sucks now is that any updates (fixpaks,drivers,USB) for the operating system require a paid subscription which I cannot afford. I wish they allowed access for hobbiests.

Re:Let it go man!

[oringo]

It is true. Back when I was in elementary school in China (1980s), the 4th grade math was exclusively about abacus calculus. The teacher would hit students with a long abacus if she/he caught a mistake in your numbering.

In fact, up till highschool you are not allowed to use any form of calculator; it's considered cheating. All calculation regarding trigonometry and logrithmics are to look up from tables. I am not kidding. I came out that education system and am very proud when I can do the calcuations without a calculator!

Argh OS/2 Story... Must... Post...

[Greyfox]

I started with OS/2 with my first job. I had to travel around a lot and my boss ended up buying a 486 laptop for me. Now I was used using real operating systems from the various schools I'd attended and was not satisfied with Windows. I looked around for a real operating system to install on the laptop. SCO was my first choice but their OS cost mid 4 digits and the look and feel sucked. BSD was kinda scary back then and the only way I could find a distribution was to order a bunch of tapes. So I ended up installing OS/2. It was pretty nice -- I could work on the 3 DOS programs my company maintained for dogtracks in 3 separate windows, play most Windows games and had a spiffy interface. Workplace shell, for all everyone complained about it, was nifty. It was object oriented and allowed casading folders and a lot of other functionality that Windows 3.0/3.1 didn't.

I ended up working for IBM doing OS/2 technical support after a couple of years. IBM really did have a highly rated support line despite the fact that out of all the people training with me, I was the only one who'd ever used the system. After about a year on the phones, they promoted me to electronic forum support, where I answered questions from users posting on CompuServe. Remember CompuServe? We had quite a presence there. I specialized in REXX and networking, although I would frequently hit the other forums as well.

I was also an advocate for the OS because it really did suck less than Windows. In fact, it sucked less than Windows right up until the Windows XP/ME timeframe. In many ways, the OS/2 interface is still superior to Windows. I attended a couple of COMDEXes with Team OS/2 and attended several local Team OS/2 events at ham fests and things like that.

At its peak, OS/2 had an estimated install base of 10,000,000 users despite the PCCO's refusal to pre-install the OS on systems for customers. We're all familiar with why they didn't -- Microsoft would revoke the volume discounts for any manufacturer preinstalling a competing OS on systems being sold. That was one of the nails in the OS/2 coffin. Others included the attitude in IBM that PCs weren't real machines and if you wanted a real OS you should be running AIX, the refusal of engineering to fix several really annoying little bugs, and several other factors as well. The two most annoying bugs were the tendency for the Workplace Shell to become corrupt (Binary registry files and all that...) and the single system input queue which would allow one application to hang the entire shell. Half-assed hacks were made to work around both problems, but they were half-assed and sucked.

Around 95, I saw the writing on the wall for OS/2 and downloaded a copy of slakware 1.0 off the Internet. I've been using Linux ever since then.

As for its advantages, REXX was an advantage over the DOS batch file language, but honestly what isn't? Perl, ruby and python all provide similar features and you're far more likely to find someone who knows how to write in one of those than in REXX. REXX was also quite limited, possibly even intentionally crippled, in what it was capable of doing. Interacting with the WPS and GUI components was always a pain in the ass, if not completely impossible. Network communications was impossible with the version of it that I used.

The OS/2 kernel WAS rock solid outside its third party drivers, and as far as I know no one ever managed to write a virus for it. The WPS was always the biggest draw but IMHO IBM ruined it after OS/2 2.0 or 2.1. It was hideous in Warp 3 and later. Gnome kind of looks like the WPS -- very similar object desktop concepts, and the WPS used an early version an object system similar to CORBA to provide access to desktop objects. I never really liked icons on my desktop to begin with, so I don't really miss it all that much.

Inside IBM most of the OS/2 people I knew switched to Linux after IBM killed the system. There might still be a few hold-outs lurking in the bowels of the company, but most of the stuff you need for t

Re:OS/2 is still alive and well...

[tomcres]

You're right. I could have explained it a bit clearer. I was trying to make a joke, but felt a need to explain it because I thought a lot of folks wouldn't catch on. Probably the best analogy I can come up with is Mac OS X vs. Mac OS Classic. It's the successor product, and retains compatibility with its predecessor, but is based on a new kernel and primarily uses a fundamentally different API.

So, as Mac OS X suceeded Mac OS 9, so did Microsoft Windows NT 3.0 succeed Microsoft OS/2 1.3. But at its inception, Windows NT was very much Microsoft's continuation of their OS/2 development, intended to be the 3.0 release. It just took a radically different turn from IBM which was independently developing the 2.0 release, and so it became essentially a new product in its own right. It's also one of the reasons that Windows NT version numbers began with 3. It was already intended to be version 3 of OS/2, and it fit neatly with the 16-bit Windows version that was current at the time of its release, so it worked well from a marketing perspective too.

Re:REXX was also available for Amiga...and others.

[npsimons]

Is available for most OSs as there are free implementations of it.

Yes, exactly what I was going to say [freshmeat.net].

But in OS/2 was very tighly integrated with the OS, in a way that gives to that implementation extra value.

Yes, and AppleScript is very tightly integrated with MacOS, giving it extra value (this coming from someone who doesn't like Macs, mind you). While GNU/Linux may "suffer" from not having a scripting language tied to everything in it, it benefits from the flexibility of having all languages be on equal footing and having to compete on features rather than favored language status. Although, if I had to pick a language to be tied into my OS, it would probably be Lisp. And, yes, I've used Rexx and AppleScript.

Another thing i liked a lot about OS/2 is the WPS, that maybe by now there are better desktops, but back then was wonderful, still waiting some of their features in modern desktops like KDE.

It's not exactly the WPS, but DFM [freshmeat.net] is working in that direction. I tried it out a long time ago (when I had first switched from OS/2 to GNU/Linux) and gave it up shortly thereafter. I used to be a hardcore OS/2 user, but I switched to GNU/Linux in college to learn it for a job, and I haven't looked back since. There were some things I missed in the beginning, but over time GNU/Linux has made much more headway, and kept the features that OS/2 *still* doesn't have, that I have been extremely happy with GNU/Linux. Not to mention GNU/Linux is Free and OS/2 isn't.

Re:Claiming lack of virii due to quality of OS

[Kancept]

Actually, up until 2 years ago, I was running WSeB on an HP NetServer e40, which was a SCSI based server with a PPro and 128 MB RAM. I had a 9.1 GB SCSI drive in it. It ran antivirus, firewall, SPAM filtering, email, web, ftp for about 500 accounts. I had NO issues with it. 2 years ago I upgraded to an IBM eServer x330 with 2x 1.13 Ghz P3s, 2x 36GB UW SCSI (hot swap), 1.5 GB RAM. This new server runs eComstation and does the exact same damn thing. The upgrade was in part due to wanting HW RAID, and faster FTP thouroughput, as the bus and slow SCSI were to blame ( all ISA machine ). Plus the newer machine fits into my rack nice. Overall, there are no issues with either machine, and the HP NetServer could easily be a fallback rollover machine. Your doubts are seem unfounded. It doesn't sound like you've used OS/2 in ages. But, just letting you know that it does run on modern HW and has no issues with the load. Also note that the anti-virus is mostly run for the clients running windows boxen. It picks out viral files from mail before it's delivered, so it's not just to the benfit of OS/2 users, should there be a DOS or OS/2 based attack. It benefits everyone.

Re:Rock Solid Multitasking?

[GooberToo]

I think there are two different, conflictive, references for this; which is probably where your ex-partner got it from. I read it in one of my OS/2 books I had in the day, and it has always stuck in my head. Everytime I post this tidbit, someone comes back with a reference from a MS Press book. Realistically, we'll probably never know. In the book I read, this was one of the fracturing design decisions that made such bad will between MS and IBM on the OS/2 project. According to what I read, shortly after this was implemented, MS left for NT-land.

You are right, there was no reason for IBM not to have fixed it in version 2.0. That fact falls squarely on IBM.