IBM Officially Kills OS/2 609
boarder8925 writes "'Big Blue has hammered the final nails into OS/2's coffin. It said that all sales of OS/2 will end on the 23rd of December this year, and support for the pre-emptive multitasking operating system will end on the 31st December 2006.' IBM has posted a migration page to help OS/2 users easily switch to Linux."
Will it be opened? (Score:2, Insightful)
OS2? (Score:5, Insightful)
So long! (Score:4, Insightful)
I wonder how the 850M MS just paid IBM over it compares to the damage MS really did.
How about orphaning? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Won't somebody please think of the ATM machines (Score:3, Insightful)
Sounds like Windows [daimyo.org] will have competition on an even wider base.
Any cost predictions for such a wide migration? OS/2 is on a fairly wide range of ATMs as it is.
IBM support for linux (Score:3, Insightful)
Ahh hah hah hah!
What I really find interesting is that IBM has offered a migration HOWTO for the OS users, and its to Linux. Always nice to have the big boy support.
Re:Quick Question... (Score:3, Insightful)
Why kill OS/2??? (Score:5, Insightful)
I could understand a company killing a product that competes with its own more modern systems, but how do continued OS/2 sales hurt IBM more than orphaning some existing customers?
Linux gain (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:OS2? (Score:3, Insightful)
Same here. I got a free copy of OS/2 from a computer store in chicago back in 93 or 94. Everyone suspected OS/2 was going to die, and I think they were trying to get more people to use it.
The version I had was very much like Win 3.1. Maybe a little nicer. But I could not get software to run on it. If OS/2 would have had games, I would have kept it longer.
It is around the same time I got my HP 48gx calculator. And the HP is still in use.
I wonder what will happend with all the OS/2 code? IBM should publish it and make it public. Maybe someone can use parts of it in non-commercial ways (so M$ does not exploit it).
And what did OS/2 look like after the mid 90's. Were there any large updates? Any MMX stuff? Any DVD support? Any modern stuff added??
Re:Os/2 Propaganda or accurate user counts (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Think of the marketing IBM wasted (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Quick Question... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:This may tick some off... (Score:5, Insightful)
"Secondly, it was supposed to be compatible with DOS and FAT16. In practice, it could write things to a FAT16 partition across a LAN on a DOS/Win machine that could not be read by DOS/Win and caused automated back-ups to fail and require someone to spend sixteen hours watching the machine to hit buttons and tell the backup software to ignore the problem. It behaved like an infertile virus that happened to double as an OS."
Blame that on Windows! You don't really think that OS2 can have raw access to the disks by lan, do you? Even if it can, double blame on Windows, because it shouldn't. Ok, you come with several non issues and a bug of Windows, a lot of reasons to hate OS2... Saying that it isn't a troll dont make it so.
OS/2 Helped Many down the Enlightened Path (Score:3, Insightful)
Learned a decent amount about OS internals. Certainly led me and others down "enlightened paths" later in life (from an OS PoV).
getting verklempt ...
Knew ye well, OS/2. Rest in Peace.
Re:Think of the marketing IBM wasted (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Open Source OS/2 (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a shame OS/2 didn't beat the technologically inferior Windows 9x series. But on the other hand, a world in which it did would probably be a world in which IBM _and_ Microsoft dominated the OS market together. Thinking about it that way makes me prefer the way things happened in this world.
Re:OS2? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Open Source OS/2 (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Hey! (Score:3, Insightful)
OS/2 just showed that to take on Microsoft you have to have a strategy that deals with the dirty tricks they're likely to pull on you.
Re:I thought... (Score:2, Insightful)
Not only that but IBM and MS had worked together on OS2 1.0 which came out in the 80's (this was before I got into IBM PC's i had dabbled with apple 2 in school but got into pc's in the late 80's so i didn't pay attention to IBM or MS didn't even know MS existed back then) but had broken up before 2.0 came out at the time MS was working on OS2 code which it shelved after the breakup and later dusted off after OS2 2.0 came out (one of the things OS2 2.0 and later had inside it was windows 3.0 and later 3.1 code because of an agreement between MS and IBM before they broke up for compatabilty with windows apps you could even make the desktop look like windows 3.0 and 3.1 or launch the 3.x shell ontop of OS2 which is where i think you are getting the it looked like 3.11 with 95 extentions they weren't 95 extentions they were 3.1 extentions) and finished it off calling it Windows NT. And later a hacked job using old dos for the 9x versions which were buggier than OS2 ever was mainly because of the fact the 9x versions were using Dos at their core.
So to be fair windows looks like OS2 but wasn't as stable as OS2 but OS2 wasn't as stable as NT nor as fast as OS2 itself had Dos in it as well just not to the degree of windows 9x. It also was more flexible and able to do more at once than any 9x OS mainly because it was pre-emptive instead of being co-operative like all windows OS's are including NT, 2000 and XP. Though NT doesn't have the weakness of dos draging it down so it's still a better OS. As for 2000 being fast of course it is it was written at a later time with different code and programing for faster machines with more memory so of course 2000 is more optimised and faster and 2003 is easier to configure for the same reasons they were both written a decade later more in the case of 2003. Though the dificulty configuring is the same problem with linux and linux code is more recent than OS2 code so thats a pretty lame argument. But your right it is to old now for a OS let alone for a server. Back when OS2 1.0 came out i heard it was crap but when 2.0 came out it was a much better OS than windows 3.0 was and much more stable and a better OS didn't come along til MS got NT out and the bugs in that worked out so at the time OS2 was much better than anything else out their for an OS on the PC. But time and IBM's lack of keeping up on it along with the fact that most people just didn't know what OS2 was to begin with (which was all IBM's fault) pretty much doomed it.
IBM was dooming it from the start anyway so it's not really like a suprise anyway. If they hadn't doomed it and had handled it right from the start it would be OS2 that 90 some percent of all pc's would be using today not windows. Take that for whatever it's worth but 95 suffered most of the same problems OS2 2.0 did almost 5 years after OS2 did and had fixed them so most people in 95 could have avoided things like corupt registries and other 95 problems by using OS2 2.1 which was out by that time. But IBM couldn't get it's head on straight and didn't relise what they had till it was way to late to do themselves any good. Heck they hadn't relised what they had for some time after 95 came out and by the time they did it was all over and everybody had gone home years before thats how far out of touch IBM was.
Open Source OS/2 (Score:2, Insightful)
Goodbye OS/2,
I will miss you,
Goodbye to your cousin NT 4.0 too,
Boo Hoo, Boo Hoo
Re:Think of the marketing IBM wasted (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Think of the marketing IBM wasted (Score:3, Insightful)
On one, the hard disk driver didn't work.
On the second, the video driver didn't work, so you were stuck at 640x480.
On the third, it wouldn't boot.
So the company I was working for gave up on OS/2. And now I work for IBM...
OS/2's problem wasn't marketing. The problem was that it wouldn't run on the diverse array of hardware around. It was probably great if you had IBM PCs, but who did?
Microsoft spends a lot of money getting Windows to run on all the hardware out there. Even if Apple wanted to make OS X run on any PC, they probably couldn't afford to.