OS/2 Archive

Remember OS/2? Promoted as the successor to DOS in the late 1980's and early 1990's, the product wound up losing out to Windows and then slowly fading away. This article recounts what happened and summarizes OS/2 today.

The Register is running a very interesting article by Dominic Connor, telling the insider story about OS/2 1.0/1.1 development in the old days. From the terrible management in IBM, to the hilarious coding practices of Microsoft, there's lots of stuff in here - and it's only part one. "The unholy alliance of IBM and Microsoft unleashed OS/2 25 years ago with a mission to replace Windows, Unix and DOS. Back then, I was a foot-soldier in that war: a contract bug hunter at Big Blue. Here's how I remember it."

"Co-developed by IBM and Microsoft, it was intended to replace DOS, the aging software that then powered most of the planet's microcomputers. It never did. Instead, Microsoft's Windows reinvigorated DOS, helping to end IBM's control of the PC standard it had created. By the mid-1990s, IBM had given up on OS/2 - a major step in the company's slow-motion retreat from the PC industry, which it completed in 2005 by agreeing to sell its PC division to China's Lenovo. But while OS/2 never truly caught on, it's also never gone away. Even if you believe that you never saw it in action, there's a decent chance that you unwittingly encounter it at least occasionally to this day." The last time I took a look at eComStation was way back in 2007.

Les Bell has released (Jan 2012) his course material "Introduction to OS/2 Warp Programming" under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license. The course had been released with its original files, OOXML, ODF, PDF version and lab exercises.

Yes, it's still being updated. OS/2 eComStation 2.1 has been released by Serenity Systems International and Mensys BV. The market for eComStation may not be particularly huge, but it still has its niches here and there. Since there might be folks here that aren't in the know: eComStation is the commercial continuation of IBM's OS/2, developed to support modern hardware.

"The netlabs.org project to port Java to OS/2 has released an RC2 build of OpenJDK 1.6.0-b22; both JRE and SDK packages are available, including versions marked as 'single processor only' to avoid SMP crashes. This release improves system tray support and has other fixes, and can compile and run Java applications, including GUI applications that use AWT and Swing. It uses the Odin32 runtime libraries; a GA release is scheduled for mid-April, and future updates should include browser plugins and OpenOffice support. The project is still short on funding; you can help by sponsoring units via Mensys. There is also a review with some screenshots showing some applications running with it." He didn't test Minecraft, though.

"This article is about the OS/2 and eComStation community on 2010 and I will try to resume the high points of the past year. Of course that this is my point of view and I'm listing the projects that I liked more."

Mensys has announced the availability of OpenOffice.org 3.2 for active eComStation subscribers. It is offered in several languages like English, German, Italian, French, Spanish, Dutch and Russian.

"Previously, Java had been made available for OS/2 and eComStation by IBM, Golden Code and Innotek. However, new versions with many changes and improvements have been released since then and current applications require a current JVM implementation. The new project will port such a current JVM to OS/2 and eComStation. Dmitry Kumenov, who is well-known for his work on the Qt 3 and 4 ports, has been hired as chief developer. Funding is provided by several companies and individuals, with Mensys BV being the main sponsor."

After god knows how many years, it's finally here: the final release of eComStation 2.0. We first reported on eComStation 2.0 back in December 2005, when the first beta was released, and between then and now, we've seen countless betas and release candidates come and go, but the wait is finally over.

Now this is one for the rumour pile. Yes, a rumour about a long-gone (mostly) operating system that lots of people have fond memories of. Barbara Darrow, Senior News Director at SearchDataCenter.com, claims that IBM is mulling over a reintroduction of OS/2. Wait, what?

"Silvan Scherrer and Dmitry A. Kuminov have released the GA of the port of the Qt 4 application framework to OS/2 and eComStation, i.e., version 4.5.1 GA. The new release comes with complete support for drag and drop, session management, SQLite3, and includes the Qt Designer application."

For some months now, independent developers have been working on a Qt4 port for eComStation, and it's almost ready. Some Qt4 applications have been ported to eCS, as well. This project is funded by donations from the eCS-OS2 community and currently they have 82% of the needed sum.

"The Technology Preview of the Flash 10 Plugin wrapper for eComStation is intended to show the progress of this product and to give you an early experience of being able to use websites implementing the latest Flash content. The development team is working hard to resolve the last outstanding bugs before we release a real test version. With this new release of Flash 10 we have up-to-date Flash support for eComStation. The release also supports proper rendering of Flash 10 text elements and Flash keyboard input works." It's only available for subscription members.