3 Things Elvis and OS/2 Have In Common
Name three things that Elvis and OS/2 have in common. Don’t rush your answer. Think about it for a minute or two. OK, ready? Here’s the answer…
… First, Elvis and OS/2 both are dead. Second, both are badly decomposed. And third, thousands of fanatics won’t let these two deceased entities rest in peace.
A case in point: More than 180 Elvises were spotted running a marathon earlier this month in Las Vegas. Alas, The VAR Guy remembers reading about Elvis’s death 30 years ago.
OS/2 has been dead nearly as long. Well, maybe that’s a slight exaggeration. But seriously, former IBM CEO Lou Gerstner buried OS/2 before the turn of the century. Then Lou threw some more dirt on OS/2’s coffin by betting $1 billion on Linux in 2001.
Admittedly, IBM didn’t issue OS/2’s official death certificate until 2005. But everyone knew it was dead and buried. Well, almost everyone…
So here we are in 2007. Most of the old OS/2 news sites have shut down. (Though some, like this one, are still around.) And most niche software developers have abandoned the long-deceased operating system.
OS/2 is finally resting in peace … except for the fact that nearly 3,000 fanatics have signed a petition to have IBM release the operating system as open source. You know, because the world needs yet another open source operating system.
Dozens of Linux variants aren’t enough. It would be nice to dust off OS/2 and have it sit somewhere between the low-end stuff (OpenDOS and FreeDOS) and Linux in the open source hierarchy.
Maybe instead of a penguin, OS/2’s mascot can be a zombie: Sure it’s dead, but can you really kill it?
Wow, here comes the hate mail. Elvis and OS/2 defenders unite. Perhaps together you can silence The VAR Guy — or at least sneak some OS/2 source code onto his Mac and Linux PC.
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It’s not 3,000 OS/2 fanatics. It’s 3001 if you count me. There’s a lot more of us out here. I’m writing this comment from my OS/2 desktop. Long live Warp.
Well, an open os2 could teach alot about architecture, structure, and reliability as well as give a new view on coding principals. that said in this persons opinion any open source additions (especially new workarounds and instructions) to open source are better than none. If it is truly dead than IBM has nothing to loose minus a few legal problems that may pop up (third party bits) Just keep in mind XP was built from what Microsoft learned from os2!
I guess I am one of a rare breed – an OS/2 user from many years ago who has no interest in its future survival. Perhaps that is because soon after I acquired my Thinkpad 760 (with Warp 3), I installed Linux on it. It is unfair to compare amateurs to professionals.
I don’t use OS/2 on my own computers, however I have worked with it in the past as an IT consultant and I can say that even today it compares favorably with other enterprise class operating systems. For example, I once had to migrate an OS/2 file server over to Windows and what an experience it turned out to be. The Windows server gave us 1/10th the performance of OS/2 on the same hardware (yes we benchmarked it, using real clients on a real network) and could not handle more than a few thousand files in any one directory while OS/2 can easily handle many tens or hundreds of thousands of files. This was on a network with hundreds of clients accessing the server simultaneously. We actually ended up jettisoning Windows for Red Hat Linux on that migration job but it was still a struggle to match OS/2 performance on the same hardware. From what I have seen out there, if enterprise users could still buy hardware that supported OS/2, they would continue using it indefinitely.
I’m not a big fan of OS/2, in fact, it messed up pretty badly during my brief tryout of it.
That said, it had some really neat features. It was a “big” OS in a way that Windows never was.
It had an object oriented interface that goes way beyond everything available today. Don’t like the color of a control? Drag and drop a color from a color palette. Wan’t bold font on a button you use often? Drag a bold font from a font palette. Of course, it made it very, very easy to mess up the GUI, as there was no undo and only a global “reset to defaults”, but the basic ideas were sound.
Maybe releasing it as open source might make those basic ideas appear in other, more modern operating systems, even if OS/2 would be as dead as ever?
I had worked in OS2 warp connect in early 90’s. It was a very good operating system. It shows that not the best product succeeds. It will be good move to release it as aopen source. Maybe this time it will have different course to chart.
Maybe some people would like an open source OS/2, not just for love’s sake but for the very practical reason that it makes more business sense to them to keep maintaining it than to migrate whatever they are using on it to another platform. If IBM really thinks OS/2 is dead they have nothing to lose by releasing it, and they may even reap some free goodwill.
Dozens of Linux variants aren’t enough. It would be nice to dust off OS/2 and have it sit somewhere between the low-end stuff (OpenDOS and FreeDOS) and Linux in the open source hierarchy.
Don’t forget haiku
http://haiku-os.org/
Ever Onward OS/2 At Warp Speed
“All Your Base Are Belong To Us”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksFqjI3gyAo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9oh3gqOEKU
Live Long And Prosper!
Spock
One doesn’t have to be a fanatic to recognize a useful piece of software.
OS/2 is one of the few OSes still around which can run quite well on a low-end box and still proide both a decent level of compatability with the piles of older software that many long-time PC users have accumulated over the years, and can do so alongside modern applications like Firefox (or Seamonkey) and Open Office.
Face it: OS/2 was ahead of its time, and some of the features introduced in OS/2 back in 1992 have still not been matched on modern desktops. Workgroup folders anyone?
I’ve never understood the vitriol that some folks like tossing in OS/2’s direction. It’s just a tool, folks. Some of us simply like using well-engineered lightweight tools rather than the much heavier (if flashier) tools being presented to us by the Windows, MacOS X, and even Linux camps these days.
I want BeOS running on my open-hardware Newton, damn it! 🙂
To the author: So what if 3000-ish people want OS/2 open-sourced? Where’s the harm in that? Who knows, maybe IBM has some good ideas in that OS/2 source code that could be learned from and applied to newer operating systems? If it isn’t open-sourced, then we’ll never know.
You are shortsighted.
Just a thought (I’m not a programmer, so please consider it)
From what I remember from when I was younger, OS/2 was actually a great operating system, just didn’t have a huge base of 3rd party apps.
So here’s my suggestion for a compromise:
Have IBM donate the parts that it legally can (there is a lot of proprietary patent restricted stuff in there (non IBM too) ) to the Linux/KDE/Gnome codebase..
This way we’ll have the best of both worlds, and Linux can grow too, without fragmenting the already overly segmented market.
There’s a 4th thing Elvis and OS/2 Have In Common: they both rocked.