Submitted by The Warpstock annual conference was held on Oct 24 to 26 on St. Louis, Missouri. These conferences are related to the OS/2 and eComStation platform. Currently there are two reviews of the event online at OS2World and at WarpCity2 blog. Between the relevant news there is a new company called “Arca Noae” that will focus on software development for the platform. They are working on ACPI, USB, Network and other drivers for the platform. Additionally Mensys also gave some light why there haven’t been activity on the last year. Arca Noae announced driver releases and software subscription products for the users of this platform.
It’s good to see additional players investing in the future of ecs by improving components (e.g. the USB stack) and Firefox/Mozilla for web browsing.
Hopefully others will join them.
As a fan of OS/2 Warp, I have always hoped the price of eComStation could someday approach reason. Who want to drop a couple hundred buck to play with an OS? Heck, I can get Windows 7 Professional for under a hundred. It just never made sense. Perhaps it has something to with royalties. Oh well, I’ll keep hoping.
Unfortunately they see businesses as the primary target market for OS/2. I too *very* much loved OS/2 during the time that I used it from about 1992 when the beta for OS/2 2.0 came out until about 2006 when I changed over to Mac OS X.
Note that I never loved Mac OS X as much as I loved OS/2 but it is a clear second place with 3rd being BeOS only due to lack of apps.
I still dream the dreams I had while doing all the fun and rewarding projects I got to use OS/2 with as my main desktop OS for the first seven to eight years before it became more and more frustrating due to IBM having abandoned the OS that it had little to no clue what to do with.
Yes, if they truly wanted a bigger audience they would lower the price. Linux has found a way to fund all the developers out there that it needs without charging for the OS but the world where-in OS/2 was created was quite different and Microsoft doesn’t want to see it thrive.
It does makes sense.
You have completely missed the point of this product and, thus, why they can charge so much. ‘
eComStation isn’t made for people “to play around with.” Its business case is completely legitimate: allowing people who need to run legacy OS/2 programs to do so on modern hardware.
immanos,
Nothing wrong with this opinion, but it may very well have priced itself out of the market. It’s too bad that the operating system was never able to reach critical mass because I always thought it was a good os.
I agree.
However it wouldn’t hurt to allow free or low cost non-commercial or developer licences. It may help the platform to develop.
someone comes in and develop these drivers for minix. Even commercially it would be some some success.