🚀 go-pugleaf

   Despite the Wall St Journal declaring the "OS/2 is dead" back in 1990 
or 91 and the prevarications of IBM management since OS/2 has continued 
to thrive.  Despite Gerstner's (the previous IBM CEO) lack of support, 
OS/2 Warp 3 received 42 or more "Fixpacks" (equivalent to M$'s "service 
packs) since 1996.  These included Y2k fixes.

   Someone, reiterating IBM, has said that IBM's approach has been a 
"maintenance" one.  However whether this is really only "maintenance" is 
debatable.  This could be a case of management living in an unreal world 
being outflanked by the people who actually do the work.  Even though 
Gerstner announced that OS/2 is to be stopped, in actuality it could not 
be done just like a flick of the fingers.  Committed customers would 
have taken IBM to court and taken them to the cleaners!  Commitment from 
software engineers deep inside Big Blue seem to have made this 
"maintenance" opportunity "on-going support".

   Warp 4 came out around 1996 and received 15 "free" ("maintenance") 
fixpacks and many device driver packs as hardware technology advanced. 
Around 2000 the kernel was further developed and there are a large list 
of them marking progress over time.  The current one is called 14.093_W4.

   The current 4.51 and 4.52 versions have introduced LVM, JFS, Java 2 
and the TCPIP ver 4.3 with a 32 bit stack.  Logical Volume Managers 
allows you to control which drive letter is assigned to which partition 
and Journaling Files System brings the Unix world to the PC.  With the 
modern large hard drives disk cleanup which must be done if there is a 
unscheduled shutdown becomes very time consuming.  With JFS the cleanup 
mechanism only has to look up the journal for any unwritten sectors and 
write them - a much quicker process.  Also with JFS the Unix concept of 
"mounting" partitions is partially implemented on the PC.  You can 
dynamically mount disks from anywhere accessible onto a JFS volume and 
enlarge the volume on the fly.

   With Java 2 and various plugins, access to internet offerings are not 
so far behind that OS/2 is no longer in the race.

   I continue to use OS/2 because of excellent applications which are 
solid and can hardly be regard as being "dated".  It networks easily 
with Windoze machine to which I now have three connected.  Each machine 
does what it does best and OS/2 is certainly not something I can do without.

   OS/2 technology is still the best except that it has not yet moved to 
the full unix concept of one large filesystem capable of mounting other 
filesystems and unifying them all. Is this a point where OS/2 and Linux 
can merge?

   However having the best technology is not enough.  It has created a 
potential to contribute to the market but somehow IBM has failed to 
realise it properly.  For long term survival a bigger place in the 
marketplace is essential.  It's a shame that it lost the marketing 
battle around 1993 - 96 because if all those Windoze apps ran on OS/2 
life would be much better!  When OS/2 sinks into your bones you realise 
how shockingly flimsy and unsatisfactory Windoze is.

   The realisation in mainline media that Windoze has created a 
computing "monoculture" with its attendant openess to wipe out attack by 
hackers and terrorist creates new opportunities to "alternatives" such 
as OS/2.  It will be interesting to see what Serenity Systems and IBM 
make of this and the market's response in the period ahead.  (IBM has 
outsourced the marketing of OS/2 to Serenity Systems who is promoting 
the product as "e Comm Station" or eCS for short).

   Also ideological times have changed.  Competition and "free markets", 
which creates "chaos" for those of a tidy regulatory mind frame, is now 
the norm.  It will be interesting to see if IBM changes its tune and 
gets out there and competes with ITS product rather than being 
subservient to Windows and saying, as Gerstner did, "the market has 
chosen Windows, the battle is over and OS/2 is to be closed down"!

http://hobbes.nmsu.edu/cgi-bin/h-search?key=gerstner&pushbutton=Search