The end of an era.
Brad laments the end of his use of IBM's
OS/2.
An era has
ended.
As I write this, I have finally decided to let go of my last hold to a significant part of my computing past, and reformat the hard drive of my OS/2 Warp Server for e-Business system in favour of Debian. Sufice to say, my feeling over this decision are decidedly mixed.
My OS/2 machine hasn't been used much in the past two years, ever since it was put into long term storage when I joined the Canadian Forces back in January of 2004. It sat in a warehouse until October 2005, by which time I had been using an Apple PowerBook as my primary computer for nearly a year and a half. As regular readers of my blog (assuming there are any) probably already know, I'm quite taken with Apple's OS X -- it's slick, has features found in no other OS, is brutally easy to administer and maintain, and has one of the best software development environments that has ever existed. I adore Mac OS X -- it has been quite some time since an Operating System has really excited me (Linux excites me, but more due to the model under which it is developed rather than the state of current distros in terms of usability).
This past October, when I once again took possession of my OS/2 machine, I dutifully plugged it all in. Now this is hardly a modern, up-to-date system: it's a Pentium III running at 450Mhz with 384MB of RAM and a 9.1GB UW-SCSI hard drive, EIDE DVD-ROM drive, and a SCSI CD-RW. It also has the distinction of having a 2.88MB 3.5" Extended Density floppy drive installed onto it, and an external, parallel port based ZIP drive. Three or four years ago, it was actually a pretty damn good system -- but today it seems to have a lot of obsolete toys, and not a whole lot of power. After having turned it on to play a few old OS/2 games from Stardock Systems (you wouldn't know it from looking at their website, but they got their start doing strictly OS/2 development), it was turned off, and was left off for several months. Other than enjoying a few old games, and having some old data files I wanted to keep on it, the system was useless to me.
Still, I couldn't bring myself to reformat the system. I had started using OS/2 at home with OS/2 for Windows v2.1. From there, I got involved with Team OS/2, and helped promote OS/2 at trade shows, stores, and user group meetings (in fact, I was the last President of the Toronto OS/2 Users Group). After getting my B.Sc., I even worked at IBM doing DB2 for OS/2 development (until IBM canned it a few years ago). I had used DOS for 5 or 6 years before installing OS/2, and never looked back. I have had an OS/2 machine for roughly 12 years now, making it my longest-used OS.
So reformatting and replacing it is a bit bittersweet at the moment. OS/2 had some fantastic technology for its time: it had a preemptive multitasking model, made heavy use of multithreading, used a flat 32 bit memory addressing with a full virtual memory subsystem, provided an advanced filesystem (HPFS, and later JFS), had a completely Object-Oriented, document-centric user interface that was a work of design genius (if not always well implemented). Files could have names that were up to 254 characters long, including spaces and a variety of special characters, and didn't require an extension to associate them with applications (and one file type could be associated with more than one application). It later had (for quite some time) the fastest Java implementation available on the market (in part because OS/2's threading model fit so well with the Java threading model).
And this was back in 1993. It took nearly 7 years before any of the other major PC OS's came even close to having such features (well, except for GNU/Linux, which in some regards had some advanced features from the earliest distros that OS/2 was missing, in others was only a few years behind, but in some ways, particularly in terms of UI design, is still way behind). It took until Windows 2000 to start getting close to what OS/2 provided in the Windows world, and Mac OS X 10.1 in the Macintosh world.
IBM unfortunately mismanaged OS/2, and never seemed to have the stomach nor long-term vision to make OS/2 a success, and in the end, Microsoft, Apple, and the Open Source communities have generally surpassed OS/2 in virtually every way.
I held on longer than most, and even though the old OS/2 system was disconnected again for the last few months, I didn't want to get rid of it. OS/2 and I have had a very long, and generally very successful association. The OS/2 community has long been among the best user base for the jSyncManager. My OS/2 experience got me my job with IBM with out of my undergrad University. And let's not forget -- I got a lot of really cool free stuff from IBM related to OS/2 (one thing I can't knock IBM for -- they sure did like to spend money on OS/2-related swag of all sorts and types!).
Recently, a project I'm working on has caused me to look at GNUStep. In fact, my recent usage of Objective-C and Cocoa in general has caused me to become interested in GNUStep. I have previously played with it a bit using a GNUStep Live CD, but have recently decided to play around with it on an actual install. As Debian comes with all of the GNUStep libraries and tools, I decided I needed to install it.
The question then became where to install it, and the obvious answer was on my old, disused OS/2 system.
And so here I am. My OS/2 partitions are now long past ever being recoverable, and the latest Debian stable (v3.1) is now mostly installed. I console myself with the knowledge that at least the hardware will see use once again, and that I still have all of my OS/2 install CDs and diskettes if I ever decide I need to play Entrepreneur or Galactic Civilizations again.
I had a very good run with OS/2 -- removing it from its long time home is like saying good-bye to an old friend. In this case, however, it really was finally time for the friend to leave. I'll always have fond memories of OS/2, and there are certain features which I'll long wish were in my new OS of choice, Mac OS X -- but in the end its day has now long set for me, and OS/2 just doesn't live up to the potential it once possessed.
Good-bye old friend.
As I write this, I have finally decided to let go of my last hold to a significant part of my computing past, and reformat the hard drive of my OS/2 Warp Server for e-Business system in favour of Debian. Sufice to say, my feeling over this decision are decidedly mixed.
My OS/2 machine hasn't been used much in the past two years, ever since it was put into long term storage when I joined the Canadian Forces back in January of 2004. It sat in a warehouse until October 2005, by which time I had been using an Apple PowerBook as my primary computer for nearly a year and a half. As regular readers of my blog (assuming there are any) probably already know, I'm quite taken with Apple's OS X -- it's slick, has features found in no other OS, is brutally easy to administer and maintain, and has one of the best software development environments that has ever existed. I adore Mac OS X -- it has been quite some time since an Operating System has really excited me (Linux excites me, but more due to the model under which it is developed rather than the state of current distros in terms of usability).
This past October, when I once again took possession of my OS/2 machine, I dutifully plugged it all in. Now this is hardly a modern, up-to-date system: it's a Pentium III running at 450Mhz with 384MB of RAM and a 9.1GB UW-SCSI hard drive, EIDE DVD-ROM drive, and a SCSI CD-RW. It also has the distinction of having a 2.88MB 3.5" Extended Density floppy drive installed onto it, and an external, parallel port based ZIP drive. Three or four years ago, it was actually a pretty damn good system -- but today it seems to have a lot of obsolete toys, and not a whole lot of power. After having turned it on to play a few old OS/2 games from Stardock Systems (you wouldn't know it from looking at their website, but they got their start doing strictly OS/2 development), it was turned off, and was left off for several months. Other than enjoying a few old games, and having some old data files I wanted to keep on it, the system was useless to me.
Still, I couldn't bring myself to reformat the system. I had started using OS/2 at home with OS/2 for Windows v2.1. From there, I got involved with Team OS/2, and helped promote OS/2 at trade shows, stores, and user group meetings (in fact, I was the last President of the Toronto OS/2 Users Group). After getting my B.Sc., I even worked at IBM doing DB2 for OS/2 development (until IBM canned it a few years ago). I had used DOS for 5 or 6 years before installing OS/2, and never looked back. I have had an OS/2 machine for roughly 12 years now, making it my longest-used OS.
So reformatting and replacing it is a bit bittersweet at the moment. OS/2 had some fantastic technology for its time: it had a preemptive multitasking model, made heavy use of multithreading, used a flat 32 bit memory addressing with a full virtual memory subsystem, provided an advanced filesystem (HPFS, and later JFS), had a completely Object-Oriented, document-centric user interface that was a work of design genius (if not always well implemented). Files could have names that were up to 254 characters long, including spaces and a variety of special characters, and didn't require an extension to associate them with applications (and one file type could be associated with more than one application). It later had (for quite some time) the fastest Java implementation available on the market (in part because OS/2's threading model fit so well with the Java threading model).
And this was back in 1993. It took nearly 7 years before any of the other major PC OS's came even close to having such features (well, except for GNU/Linux, which in some regards had some advanced features from the earliest distros that OS/2 was missing, in others was only a few years behind, but in some ways, particularly in terms of UI design, is still way behind). It took until Windows 2000 to start getting close to what OS/2 provided in the Windows world, and Mac OS X 10.1 in the Macintosh world.
IBM unfortunately mismanaged OS/2, and never seemed to have the stomach nor long-term vision to make OS/2 a success, and in the end, Microsoft, Apple, and the Open Source communities have generally surpassed OS/2 in virtually every way.
I held on longer than most, and even though the old OS/2 system was disconnected again for the last few months, I didn't want to get rid of it. OS/2 and I have had a very long, and generally very successful association. The OS/2 community has long been among the best user base for the jSyncManager. My OS/2 experience got me my job with IBM with out of my undergrad University. And let's not forget -- I got a lot of really cool free stuff from IBM related to OS/2 (one thing I can't knock IBM for -- they sure did like to spend money on OS/2-related swag of all sorts and types!).
Recently, a project I'm working on has caused me to look at GNUStep. In fact, my recent usage of Objective-C and Cocoa in general has caused me to become interested in GNUStep. I have previously played with it a bit using a GNUStep Live CD, but have recently decided to play around with it on an actual install. As Debian comes with all of the GNUStep libraries and tools, I decided I needed to install it.
The question then became where to install it, and the obvious answer was on my old, disused OS/2 system.
And so here I am. My OS/2 partitions are now long past ever being recoverable, and the latest Debian stable (v3.1) is now mostly installed. I console myself with the knowledge that at least the hardware will see use once again, and that I still have all of my OS/2 install CDs and diskettes if I ever decide I need to play Entrepreneur or Galactic Civilizations again.
I had a very good run with OS/2 -- removing it from its long time home is like saying good-bye to an old friend. In this case, however, it really was finally time for the friend to leave. I'll always have fond memories of OS/2, and there are certain features which I'll long wish were in my new OS of choice, Mac OS X -- but in the end its day has now long set for me, and OS/2 just doesn't live up to the potential it once possessed.
Good-bye old friend.
Posted: Sunday - January 01, 2006 at 03:54 PM
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