SamBach's OS/2 Technologies Page

Supporting Warpstock

Working for a company that collects and indexes magazine articles, particularly back when I was a clerk who shelved copies of the magazines, it was fairly easy to catch news items of interest. Looking at the front page of PC Week once back in about 1987 or so, I saw an article about a new operating system being developed by Microsoft and IBM called Operating System/2. It looked interesting, but there wasn't much I could do with it at the time.

When I was finally ready to get a computer with a 80386 processor, I thought I'd look into OS/2 a bit more. I'd used Microsoft Windows 3.0 at the office and found it more trouble than it was worth compared to the fairly reliable DOS of the day. By that time, Microsoft had pulled out of the OS/2 project and decided to put their energies into improving Windows, and IBM had taken over development of OS/2.

When OS/2 v2.1 came out - about the same time as Windows 3.1 - things got interesting. At the time, it was difficult to tell which technology would dominate. OS/2 tended to be more stable than Windows, but Microsoft worked harder to sell Windows in the marketplace - through working with system vendors to preload Windows, hardware vendors to produce drivers, and software vendors to write software. Much of what happened since then has been chronicled in the DOJ v. Microsoft trial, but needless to say, Windows won out.

However, after more than five years of various claims that OS/2 is dead, it's still around and being used, apparently as much to IBM's horror as its delight! On November 30, 2000, IBM released the "Merlin Convenience Pack," a package containing all of OS/2's latest technology updates and fixes since OS/2 Warp 4's release in 1996. About six months later, Serenity Systems released the first version of eComStation, which takes the OS/2 Convenience Pack and adds a few goodies. Moreover, while IBM is "stealth marketing" its Convenience Pack to its existing large OS/2 customers while ignoring its small ones, Serenity Systems is making eComStation more easily available to anybody.

The plan was that, a year later, IBM would release Merlin Convenience Pack #2, and Serenity follow with the next version of eCS in early 2002. That wasn't quite how it worked, though, with delays of about a year, though I still haven't seen CD-ROMs of eCS v1.1 yet (I did get e-mailed the activation codes, though).

Meanwhile, I had been running eCS v1 on two machines - one a Pentium 133MHz with 96MB RAM at the office and one a 733MHz Pentium III with 256MB RAM, and find it works admirably on both machines. Glitches? Sure, but nothing that gets in the way significantly.

But... why?

Staying with OS/2 technologies over the years takes equal measure of determination and resignation. When OS/2 Warp was released, it had lots of technological advantages over its contemporary Windows for Workgroups or its soon-successor Windows 95: Complete Internet out of the box, including Gopher (who here remembers gopher? <g>), FTP, Telnet, Ping, e-mail client, Newsreader - most with both character and graphical versions - and a native Web browser that worked with either a network connection or dial-up.

At the time, the Internet package was state-of-the-art. Unfortunately, it didn't stay state-of-the-art for very long and IBM couldn't keep up. Developments in World Wide Web technologies grew at a phenomenal rate, with HTML rapidly being enhanced, and add-ons and plug-ins were often written with Windows in mind (with a little afterthought given to Apple Macintosh users). Today, with Mozilla for OS/2 running closely to par with versions for other operating systems, surfing the Web with OS/2 has few impediments. There are some multimedia issues, however, though Innotek GMBH's (now outdated) version of Macromedia's Flash for OS/2 and Acrobat Reader v4 and several other projects help quite a bit, as does the development in Kiev Elephant group of the WarpVision multimedia player (though I hope they get to the point of supporting a Mozilla plug-in version).

The real strength of OS/2, however, is Presentation Manager (PM) and the Workplace Shell (WPS) - OS/2's object-oriented user interface. Outside OS/2, true object-oriented programming hasn't been that obvious to the end user outside, perhaps, the growing use of Java. Objects are nice in that every object of the same type exhibits some of the same behavior, and adds to that behavior. All files behave like other files; all programs behave like other programs in basic behavior.

This was the theory, at any rate. In practice, this has been less true than it should have been, largely because of IBM's decision not to adequately improve its development software (such as Visual Age for C++) which took advantage of OS/2's System Object Model (SOM), roughly similar to Microsoft's Common Object Model (COM) but fully CORBA-compliant. As a result, writing OS/2 programs became a much more difficult chore than writing for Windows.

Attempts have been made to make OS/2 more Windows-friendly. OS/2 v2.1 included support for Windows 3.0 software (but Microsoft released Windows 3.1 which "broke" OS/2's support); then OS/2 Warp v3 added Windows 3.1 support (at which point Microsoft released and aggressively pushed the Win32s v1.30 API library which, due to the design of OS/2, was next to impossible to get support for. Windows 95 continued that trend.

Rather than running the Microsoft update treadmill, IBM decided to attempt to make porting applications to OS/2 easier by creating an OS/2 equivalent to the Win32 API. They managed to get just far enough to port Lotus SmartSuite to OS/2, but gave up shortly thereafter.

However, the gauntlet was picked up by some OS/2 users, first as the Win32-OS/2 Project and now as Netlabs' Odin project. Odin provides both an API set and a way to run Win32 programs as native OS/2 programs. Odin is neither stable nor complete, but most of the most-used APIs work quite well, and quite a few Windows programs now work fairly well in OS/2.

One of the more amazing things about OS/2 is its dedicated and active user base. Those familiar with the Amiga and Atari user base will understand. There are both local OS/2 societies (some, such as the Phoenix OS/2 Society, Inc. (POSSI) and the Southern California OS/2 Users Group (SCOUG) have reached far beyond their local geographical areas), and several on-line communities such as the Virtual OS/2 International Consumers Education (VOICE), OS/2 users on CompuServe's IBM Forum, and the various comp.os.os2 newsgroups. In addition there are at least two world-class OS/2 user conventions, Warpstock and Warpstock Europe, run not by IBM but by the user community.

I served as Local Event Chair for Warpstock 2003 in Burlingame, California, October 18 & 19, then was invited to join the Warpstock national Board of Directors. Click on the Warpstock icon at the top of the page for more info.