A few years back (around 2008, maybe) I stumbled upon an ATM that had failed to boot all the way and was pretty surprised that it was running OS/2 (and a Rexx script). This was for Brazil's largest bank (Banco do Brasil). Since then I think they've moved to Linux.
25 years of OS/2: the legendary failure that refuses to die.
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Re: 25 years of OS/2: the legendary failure that refuses to die.
#12I spent a little bit of time trying to become an OS/2 fanboy. Remember that this was before Windows NT (and Linux was a gleam in Linus's eye) so a PC that could walk and chew gum at the same time seemed like a miraculous feat for anyone used to DOS. It was a pretty sweet development platform for the time, since you could run multiple DOS and Windows 3.x sessions -- I even set up two Windows sessions to communicate ov…
What version?
I think I gave up before Warp so only OS/2 2.x -- the API bindings were for BP7 I think. There was a German computer magazine that released a patch for the compiler to output OS/2 executables.
Re: 25 years of OS/2: the legendary failure that refuses to die.
#13I really liked OS/2. I could run several varieties of DOS under it and early Windows - very flexible when I needed to develop using several operating systems. The real reason OS/2 was not widely adopted? Maybe this: the first time OS/2 was booted after an install, the bootup time took a very, very long time. I was once in a computer store and some guy was practically screaming at the sales people. He had bought OS/2,…
Huh, funny. I always think it's interesting how boot times have increased over the years regardless of Moore's law. My Apple ][ took about 6 seconds to boot, yet a modern PC or Mac takes much longer (and even longer to shutdown, usually)
Re: 25 years of OS/2: the legendary failure that refuses to die.
#141.44" huh? Not 3.5" 1.44MB maybe?
This is why it never saw mass adoption. Strange, tiny, proprietary distribution method that nobody could use because no companies bothered to make a 1.44" floppy drive. You had to build one from scratch if you wanted to use OS/2. (The best place to start was by harvesting the motor from a larger drive.) Thus, only the true tinkerers and hackers ever made it past "Step 1 - Preparing Your System." (Somebody went and ed…
OS/2 was one of the first CDROMs I ever owned, when 1x drives were on the market.
Re: 25 years of OS/2: the legendary failure that refuses to die.
#15I really liked OS/2. I could run several varieties of DOS under it and early Windows - very flexible when I needed to develop using several operating systems. The real reason OS/2 was not widely adopted? Maybe this: the first time OS/2 was booted after an install, the bootup time took a very, very long time. I was once in a computer store and some guy was practically screaming at the sales people. He had bought OS/2,…
I don't think it was because of the quality of OS/2 itself. It's always the applications that make or break a platform. I remember trying OS/2 Warp and the OS itself did impress me. But most of my favorite games and applications did not run on it. After a while there was nothing that kept my interest so i went back to Windows.
Re: 25 years of OS/2: the legendary failure that refuses to die.
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
I remember my dad having a Zenith MinisPort with a 2" floppy drive. Even as a kid I remember thinking "Ok these are just ridiculously small." The OP is also the author of the article, so I'm not surprised he went and fixed it. But I'm a little miffed he didn't even give me a thank you.
We stumbled upon either a 2" or 2.5" floppy early in my college career. None of us had ever heard of such a beast - it was a bit like alien tech landing in our laps. We figured it was "the future" and that smaller floppies would see mass-adoption, as some sort of CD-killer. Then our professor destroyed our dream world and said they'd died off in the 80s. (And then wisely predicted flash-like memory would kill off all…
There's a wide range of weird floppy sizes. Perhaps one of the best known was sold for the Amstrad PCW - a popular word processing system. (This machine kept CP/M alive during the 80s and into the early 90s.)
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amstrad_PCW).
There were others. Here's a 2" drive - yet another failed Sony media format. (What's their ratio of successful : failed formats?)
Re: 25 years of OS/2: the legendary failure that refuses to die.
#17A few years back (around 2008, maybe) I stumbled upon an ATM that had failed to boot all the way and was pretty surprised that it was running OS/2 (and a Rexx script). This was for Brazil's largest bank (Banco do Brasil). Since then I think they've moved to Linux.
Same thing here, also 2008, but with an Allied Irish Bank ATM in Dublin. The machine crashed as I was using it and permanently relieved me of my bank card, but the up side was that I got to watch the entire OS/2 Warp boot sequence play out.
Re: 25 years of OS/2: the legendary failure that refuses to die.
#18I tried to give OS/2 a try, but what happened was kind of bizarre. I had a DEC PClone with a 486 (cannot remember if it was DX or SX) inside. OS/2 needed a graphic driver for the S3 chip. I called DEC support to ask for the driver and they said they didn't have it but IBM did. The DEC rep kept me on the phone while he called the OS/2 support number. DEC had incredible service at the time.
Then the bizarre happened. The IBM support person said I needed to sign an NDA to get the driver. Both the DEC rep and I tried to explain to him I was a humble end user and not interested in anything but the driver. There must be a mistake as I did not want source code. Nope, just the driver required a NDA and some verification. I said I would think about it, and we hung up. The DEC rep apparently had quite a few people gathered around him and they were laughing pretty hard. He then asked if I would like a nice copy of Win NT with no NDA and all the drivers for my machine.
I really wanted to like OS/2.
Re: 25 years of OS/2: the legendary failure that refuses to die.
#19I realize this is off topic, so please forgive the following rant. I'm not sure if it's out of principle or just stubbornness, but it's gotten to the point where every time I read an article that is paginated (most likely only because whoever runs the website wants more page views), I refuse to continue to the next page and end up reading only a fraction of the article.
My attitude towards pagination wasn't always this way. Over time, however, it's just annoyed me more and more. When I get to the bottom of a page as I'm reading an article and see that I'm going to have to click on these tiny numbers multiple times, wait for a new page to load each time, all while interrupting my train of thought, I get so annoyed that I immediately say "NOPE!" and hit the back button, no matter how good the article is.
And out of principle, I'm not installing any 3rd party software (like readability, etc.) to handle this for me. I shouldn't have to. Site owners who run articles need to find better ways to get page views, ways that aren't inconveniencing everyone using their site. Some might say "well that's just how it is!"... and I say only if you allow it to be.
So as a bit of a followup to this rant, if you submit articles like this to HN and there's a printer friendly version (or even a "view all" version), please submit that URL instead.
Re: 25 years of OS/2: the legendary failure that refuses to die.
#20I realize this is off topic, so please forgive the following rant. I'm not sure if it's out of principle or just stubbornness, but it's gotten to the point where every time I read an article that is paginated (most likely only because whoever runs the website wants more page views), I refuse to continue to the next page and end up reading only a fraction of the article. My attitude towards pagination wasn't always th…
I spent a few minute trying to find an "all pages" version of this article and failed. Even the damned print link just prints one segment!