OS/2 is an operating system created by Microsoft and International Business Machines and later developed by IBM exclusively. The name stands for "Operating System/2", because it was introduced as the preferred operating system for IBM's "Personal System/2 (PS/2)" line of second-generation Personal Computers. OS/2 was intended as a protected mode successor of MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows. Notably, basic system calls were modeled after MS-DOS calls; their names even started with "Dos" and it was possible to link text mode applications in such a way that they could work on both systems ("bound" programs). Because of this heritage, in terms of look, feel and features, OS/2 is not unlike Windows in many ways; but it also shares similarities with Unix and XENIX. ==Development history== ===Enthusiastic beginnings=== IBM and Microsoft signed the Joint Development Agreement in August 1985. OS/2 1.0 was announced in April 1987 and released in December, as a text mode-only OS. It however featured a rich API for controlling the video display (VIO) and getting keyboard and mouse events, a sort of a protected-mode BIOS. Not surprisingly, the video and keyboard APIs were also available to "bound" programs on MS-DOS. The promised GUI, Presentation Manager, was introduced with OS/2 1.1 in November 1988. Version 1.2 introduced the HPFS filesystem. OS/2 and Windows-related books of the late 1980s acknowledged the existence of both systems and promoted OS/2 as the system for the future. ===Breakup=== The collaboration between IBM and Microsoft unravelled in 1990, between the releases of Windows 3.x and OS/2 1.3. Initially, at least publicly, Microsoft continued to insist the future belonged to OS/2. Steve Ballmer of Microsoft even took to calling OS/2 "Windows Plus". The public; however, decided it wanted Windows, not OS/2. The increasing popularity of Windows prompted Microsoft to shift its development focus from OS/2, and IBM grew concerned about delays in development of OS/2 2.0. Initially, the companies agreed that IBM would take over maintenance of OS/2 1.0 and development of OS/2 2.0, while Microsoft would continue development of OS/2 3.0, then known as "NT OS/2", which supposedly stood for New Technology. However, Microsoft decided to recast NT OS/2 as Windows NT, leaving all future OS/2 development to IBM. Windows NT's OS/2 heritage can be seen in its initial support for the HPFS filesystem (although write support was dropped in Windows NT 4.0 and read support was dropped in Windows 2000) and text mode OS/2 1.x applications (support dropped in Windows XP). ===Competition with Windows=== OS/2 2.0, released in 1992, was touted by IBM as "a better DOS than DOS and a better Windows than Windows". Indeed, because of the limitations of the Intel 80286 processor, OS/2 1.x could only run one "DOS box" at a time, and did this in an insecure way by ping-ponging the entire processor between real and protected modes, using the undocumented LOADALL machine instruction. A problem in DOS mode would crash the entire computer. In constrast, OS/2 2.0 could benefit from the virtual 8086 mode of the Intel 80386 processor in order to create a potentially totally secure virtual machine for DOS to run inside. However, such a secure VM incurrs a significant performance hit compared to original hardware, and unsecuring some parts of the VM (OS/2 was very configurable in this area) to make it more usable again allowed DOS programs to crash the computer. Just like Windows, OS/2 could not run protected mode DOS programs using the older VCPI interface; it only supported programs written according to DPMI. Compatibility with Windows was achieved by adapting Windows GUI code to run inside a 16-bit OS/2 process, rather than above the original Windows kernel. For this reason, Windows could not run in the so-called "386 enhanced" mode (which did not matter very much, since OS/2 managed virtual memory and DOS virtual machines independently). Originally, Windows code was included in the distribution, but later ''red'' OS/2 versions reused whatever Windows version the user had installed previously, patching it on the fly. This process containing Windows could either run full-screen, using its own set of video drivers, or "seamlessly", where Windows programs would appear directly on the OS/2 desktop. Again, this required specially enabled drivers. To achieve isolation between Windows programs, OS/2 needed to run several copies of Windows in parallel. This approach provided poor stability. For example, switching between the OS/2 desktop and the Windows desktop could easily hang the machine and required considerable system resources, especially memory. Microsoft used a simpler approach in Windows NT, translating Win16 system calls to Win32 ones by the means of a ''Windows-on-Windows'' adaptation layer. OS/2 2.0 also provided a new GUI called the Workplace Shell and a 32-bit API for native programs, though the OS itself was a mixture of 16-bit and 32-bit code (as Windows 95 would be). OS/2 Warp 3, released in 1994, was a fully 32-bit OS. It offered a host of benefits, notably broader hardware support, greater multimedia capabilities, Internet-compatible networking, and a basic office application suite. In 1996, Warp 4 added Java programming language and voice recognition software. IBM also released server editions of Warp 3 and Warp 4. The UK-distributed free demo CD-Rom of OS/2 Warp essentially contained the entire OS and was easily, even accidentally cracked, meaning that even people who liked it didn't have to buy it. ===Fading out=== Overall, OS/2 failed to catch on in the mass market and is today little used outside certain niches where IBM traditionally had a stronghold. For example, many banks, especially Automated Teller Machines, run OS/2 with a customized user interface; French SNCF national railways used OS/2 1.x in thousands of ticket selling machines. Nevertheless, OS/2 still maintains a small and dedicated community of followers. IBM, unlike Microsoft, charged ISVs for the OS/2 development kit, while Microsoft gave the Windows SDK away free. Although IBM began indicating shortly after the release of Warp 4 that OS/2 would eventually be withdrawn, the company has only recently published a definite end-of-support date (December 2006). The latest IBM version is 4.52, which was released for both desktop and server systems in December 2001. A company called Serenity Systems has been reselling OS/2 since 2001, calling it eComStation. The latest version is 1.2, released in 2004. IBM is still delivering fixes and updates on a regular basis. IBM urges customers to migrate their often highly complex applications to e-business technologies such as Java programming language in a platform-neutral manner. Once application migration is completed, IBM recommends to migrate to a different operating system without giving any specific recommendations. ===Security niche=== OS/2 is virtually free of computer viruses, but this is not due to its architecture. Its design could make it as vulnerable as Windows, if not more so, because of its extensive scriptability, but its reduced mind and market share probably discourage virus writers. There are, however, OS/2-based antivirus programs dealing with DOS viruses and Windows viruses that could go through an OS/2 server. ===Future=== There is a community of OS/2 users and developers, along with loyal company customers, hoping that IBM will release OS/2 or a significant part of it as open source. It is unlikely, though, that the entire OS will be open because it contains third-party code, much of it from Microsoft. Still, the community has suggested that, even if only the IBM portion of it is made open, the missing parts could be written by the same community to form a next-generation version of the OS. There is a onging petition to open parts of the OS. See [http://www.os2world.com/petition/ Petition to open] With the possibility of an open source future for OS/2, the OS may be given a new lease of life. IBM's current and heavy involvement with several open source projects indicate that opening parts of OS/2 will not be difficult for the company. But until then, OS/2's future remains in limbo. ==Technology== Technically, OS/2 2.0 is often believed to be IBM's own work, a development stage, accompanied by an SDK, had already been released by Microsoft in the second half of 1990; OS/2 32-bit executable files have almost exactly the format of Windows 3.0 VxD device drivers (older 16-bit executables have the format of Windows executables). IBM also seems mostly responsible for the GUI part of OS/2 (notably, the Presentation Manager API did not change in 2.0), and probably for the divergence in syntax and semantics compared to Windows. This was an underlying cause for the breakup between IBM and Microsoft when Windows 3.0 became much more successful than OS/2. However, open source operating systems such as Linux have already profited from OS/2 indirectly through IBM's release of the JFS file system, which was ported from the OS/2 code base instead of the AIX operating system original. The graphic system has a layer named Presentation Manager that manages windows, fonts and icons. This is similar in functionality to a non-networked version of X11. On top of this lies the Workplace Shell (WPS), introduced in OS/2 2.0, which is an object-oriented shell (computers) allowing the user to access files and printers, and launch programs. WPS follows IBM's Common User Access user interface standards. In recent years, IBM decided not to support the plethora of graphic cards, and licensed a reduced version of Scitech drivers. WPS represents objects such as disks, folders, files, program objects, and printers using the System Object Model (SOM), which allows code to be shared among applications, possibly written in different programming languages. A distributed version called DSOM allowed objects on different computers to communicate. DSOM is based on CORBA. SOM is similar to, and a direct competitor to, Microsoft's Component Object Model. SOM and DSOM are no longer being developed. OS/2 also includes a compound document technology called OpenDoc, which was developed with Apple. OpenDoc is also no longer being developed. The multimedia capabilities of OS/2 are accessible through Media Control Interface commands. The last update (bundled with the IBM version of Netscape Navigator plugins) added support for MPEG files. Support for newer formats like PNG, progressive JPEG, DivX, Ogg, MP3 comes from third parties. Sometimes it is integrated with the multimedia system, but in other offers it comes as standalone applications. The TCP/IP stack is based on the open source BSD stack. ==See also== * History of the graphical user interface * REXX * eComStation ==Quote== "During the next 10 years, millions of programmers and users will utilise this system" Bill Gates, November 1988 (in the Foreword to the ''Inside OS/2'' book by Gordon Letwin, Microsoft's architect for OS/2). Bill Gates is supposed to have said that in a moment of absent-mindedness... ==External links== * [http://www-306.ibm.com/software/os/warp/ IBM's official OS/2 page] * [http://www.os2world.com/ Community of OS/2 users] * [http://www.os2world.com/petition/ Petition to make OS/2 open source] * [http://www.ecomstation.com eComStation official site] * [http://pages.prodigy.net/michaln/history/ History of OS/2] * [http://www.millennium-technology.com/HistoryOfOS2.html A Short History of OS/2] * [http://www.netlabs.org/ netlabs.org - OpenSource Software for OS/2 and eCS] ** [http://wiki.netlabs.org/ Nikipedia], the Netlabs wiki based on Mediawiki * [http://www.mit.edu/activities/os2/faq/os2faq-toc.html OS/2 FAQ (including version history details and marketing information)] * [http://www.os2ezine.com OS/2 Ezine (for OS/2 evangelism, news updates, and other articles)] * [http://dmoz.org/Computers/Software/Operating_Systems/OS-2/ "OS/2" category in the Open Directory] * [http://eepjm.newcastle.edu.au/os2/concepts.html ''Some fundamental OS/2 concepts'' by Peter Moylan] * [http://www.edm2.com/index.php/Main_Page Electronic Developer Magazine/2], developer information. Currently running on Mediawiki. * [http://pages.prodigy.net/michaln/history/os2ppc/index.html OS/2 Warp, PowerPC Edition], about an aborted port to PowerPC machines. IBM software Operating systems
I have found http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=nl&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&threadm=3c494375%240%2423895%24afc38c87%40news.optusnet.com.au&rnum=6&prev=/groups%3Fq%3Dwikipedia%2Bgroup:comp.os.linux.advocacy%26hl%3Dnl%26lr%3D%26ie%3DUTF-8%26oe%3DUTF-8%26selm%3D3c494375%25240%252423895%2524afc38c87%2540news.optusnet.com.au%26rnum%3D6 this usenet tread about this articel whit contains some comments that possibly can be used to improve this articel. User:Giskart 23:14 Oct 17, 2002 (UTC)
Response:
We clearly need to clarify our positions, the OS/2 FAQ (deemed credible because it was written by an IBM employee) states that 3.1 was an old update, and that Windows 95 code-name 'Chicago' would not compete with it.
http://www.mit.edu:8001/activities/os2/faq/os2faq0106.html
Clearly, IBM released 3.0 without Microsoft, and (also according to the same source) eventually offered to use an existing copy of Windows for compatibility. This suggests that the Microsoft relationship was tenatious, and that they eventually denied OS/2 the prospect of full compatibility.
Why am I being cautious? Because the usenet thread is vauge, and the e-mail addresses (some @home.com) are dead.
Sam
Edit details:
*changed the time things started to fall apart to 1.3, since this is when IBM took over fully, according to the FAQ. The Usenet link agrees with me. * An encyclopedia should never (IMO) put things in its articles that are debatable.. so I removed "being 32-bit" and added "eventually supported 32-bit APIs" . My guess is that the usenet poster was failing to distingush between emulators, and the native OS application architecture. In other words, OS/2 supported 16bit applications, but was not 16-bit. [somebody has since edited the article to clarify versioning, stating that 2.0 was 32-bit. This is fine. Thank you.] *added links to websites I looked at, and a note that Windows 3.1 may not have been a response to OS/2. ---- ESR has a good resume of history of OS/2 in [http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/ch03s02.html#os_2 The Art of Unix Programming] User:Davidme ---- What is the purpose of a ==See also== link that does not exist? Seems someone should write the Workplace Shell article before listing it in the ==See also== list. User:Bevo 05:59, 6 Jan 2004 (UTC) :Prompt people to write it, I hope. Is it so uncommon to link to unwritten articles in see also? In See also, I put links that I cannot integrate in the main text yet. -- User:Error 02:05, 7 Jan 2004 (UTC) ::Putting a nonexistent article title in the "See also" list is not good practice! It is OK to occasionally refer to such an article title in the text of an article, but not in the "See also" list. Maybe you can rewrite and place it inside the article? User:Bevo 04:40, 7 Jan 2004 (UTC) :::I still have no problem with empty See-alsos but you prompted me to sketch some of the technology. Now I'd like to add an empty link to VisualAge :) . -- User:Error 02:52, 9 Jan 2004 (UTC) == HPFS is accessible through NT4 == Due my MSCE 4.0 course back in 1998, we learned (and proved in practice) that Windows NT4 can indeed READ HPFS partitions (but not write them, however). : Can you give a source for this? User:AlistairMcMillan 15:23, 5 Nov 2004 (UTC) ::It's common knowledge. Ask anyone with OS/2 skills. It can also be done with Windows 2000. Not sure abut XP though. User:Tannin : Alistair, I can give you the source: Any Microsoft Press Book related to Windows NT4 MCP/MCSE. However, I think I see were the confusion comes from. Windows NT 4 can read/detect HPFS partitions, but you can't install WindowsNT 4 on a HPFS partition. As Tannin says, it is common knowledge. ::: I wasn't disputing the fact. I just wanted to see a source. We are supposed to be dealing in supportable facts here, not personal recollections. User:AlistairMcMillan 13:15, 9 Nov 2004 (UTC) :::: I've made a change. Correct me if I got anything wrong. User:AlistairMcMillan 13:23, 9 Nov 2004 (UTC) ---- The feature I remember most in my brief encounter with OS/2 was "shadows", somewhat like MacOs aliases. Can somebody confirm/deny/annotate the appropriate articles? Thanks! : No problem. Let's work backwards. You are failiar with shortcuts in Windows? Shadows were the thing that MS copied for the shortcut idea, but copied rather incompetently. (Whether IBM hd copied the idea in turn from something else, I don't know. It's a reasonable assumption though.) With a shadow, you can do everything that you can do with a shortcut, but you can ''also'' perform any operation except delete, and have it reflected in a matching change to the real object. Change the properties of the shadow, and you change the prperties of the object itself. ''Much'' more powerful. (Successive versions of Windows seem to have gradually improved, such that Windows shortcuts in (e.g.) W2K are now approximately the same as OS/2 Shadows.) User:Tannin 09:03, 30 Mar 2005 (UTC) Microsoft and this article disagree on why Microsoft switched to Windows. --User:Taejo 10:44, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)
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Words begining with OS/2:
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OS/2
OS/2 is an operating system created by Microsoft and International Business Machines and later developed by IBM exclusively. The name stands for "Operating System/2", because it was introduced as the preferred operating system for IBM's "Personal System/2 (PS/2)" line of second-generation Personal Computers. OS/2 was intended as a protected mode successor of MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows. Notably, basic system calls were modeled after MS-DOS calls; their names even started with "Dos" and it was possible to link text mode applications in such a way that they could work on both systems ("bound" programs). Because of this heritage, in terms of look, feel and features, OS/2 is not unlike Windows in many ways; but it also shares similarities with Unix and XENIX. ==Development history== ===Enthusiastic beginnings=== IBM and Microsoft signed the Joint Development Agreement in August 1985. OS/2 1.0 was announced in April 1987 and released in December, as a text mode-only OS. It however featured a rich API for controlling the video display (VIO) and getting keyboard and mouse events, a sort of a protected-mode BIOS. Not surprisingly, the video and keyboard APIs were also available to "bound" programs on MS-DOS. The promised GUI, Presentation Manager, was introduced with OS/2 1.1 in November 1988. Version 1.2 introduced the HPFS filesystem. OS/2 and Windows-related books of the late 1980s acknowledged the existence of both systems and promoted OS/2 as the system for the future. ===Breakup=== The collaboration between IBM and Microsoft unravelled in 1990, between the releases of Windows 3.x and OS/2 1.3. Initially, at least publicly, Microsoft continued to insist the future belonged to OS/2. Steve Ballmer of Microsoft even took to calling OS/2 "Windows Plus". The public; however, decided it wanted Windows, not OS/2. The increasing popularity of Windows prompted Microsoft to shift its development focus from OS/2, and IBM grew concerned about delays in development of OS/2 2.0. Initially, the companies agreed that IBM would take over maintenance of OS/2 1.0 and development of OS/2 2.0, while Microsoft would continue development of OS/2 3.0, then known as "NT OS/2", which supposedly stood for New Technology. However, Microsoft decided to recast NT OS/2 as Windows NT, leaving all future OS/2 development to IBM. Windows NT's OS/2 heritage can be seen in its initial support for the HPFS filesystem (although write support was dropped in Windows NT 4.0 and read support was dropped in Windows 2000) and text mode OS/2 1.x applications (support dropped in Windows XP). ===Competition with Windows=== OS/2 2.0, released in 1992, was touted by IBM as "a better DOS than DOS and a better Windows than Windows". Indeed, because of the limitations of the Intel 80286 processor, OS/2 1.x could only run one "DOS box" at a time, and did this in an insecure way by ping-ponging the entire processor between real and protected modes, using the undocumented LOADALL machine instruction. A problem in DOS mode would crash the entire computer. In constrast, OS/2 2.0 could benefit from the virtual 8086 mode of the Intel 80386 processor in order to create a potentially totally secure virtual machine for DOS to run inside. However, such a secure VM incurrs a significant performance hit compared to original hardware, and unsecuring some parts of the VM (OS/2 was very configurable in this area) to make it more usable again allowed DOS programs to crash the computer. Just like Windows, OS/2 could not run protected mode DOS programs using the older VCPI interface; it only supported programs written according to DPMI. Compatibility with Windows was achieved by adapting Windows GUI code to run inside a 16-bit OS/2 process, rather than above the original Windows kernel. For this reason, Windows could not run in the so-called "386 enhanced" mode (which did not matter very much, since OS/2 managed virtual memory and DOS virtual machines independently). Originally, Windows code was included in the distribution, but later ''red'' OS/2 versions reused whatever Windows version the user had installed previously, patching it on the fly. This process containing Windows could either run full-screen, using its own set of video drivers, or "seamlessly", where Windows programs would appear directly on the OS/2 desktop. Again, this required specially enabled drivers. To achieve isolation between Windows programs, OS/2 needed to run several copies of Windows in parallel. This approach provided poor stability. For example, switching between the OS/2 desktop and the Windows desktop could easily hang the machine and required considerable system resources, especially memory. Microsoft used a simpler approach in Windows NT, translating Win16 system calls to Win32 ones by the means of a ''Windows-on-Windows'' adaptation layer. OS/2 2.0 also provided a new GUI called the Workplace Shell and a 32-bit API for native programs, though the OS itself was a mixture of 16-bit and 32-bit code (as Windows 95 would be). OS/2 Warp 3, released in 1994, was a fully 32-bit OS. It offered a host of benefits, notably broader hardware support, greater multimedia capabilities, Internet-compatible networking, and a basic office application suite. In 1996, Warp 4 added Java programming language and voice recognition software. IBM also released server editions of Warp 3 and Warp 4. The UK-distributed free demo CD-Rom of OS/2 Warp essentially contained the entire OS and was easily, even accidentally cracked, meaning that even people who liked it didn't have to buy it. ===Fading out=== Overall, OS/2 failed to catch on in the mass market and is today little used outside certain niches where IBM traditionally had a stronghold. For example, many banks, especially Automated Teller Machines, run OS/2 with a customized user interface; French SNCF national railways used OS/2 1.x in thousands of ticket selling machines. Nevertheless, OS/2 still maintains a small and dedicated community of followers. IBM, unlike Microsoft, charged ISVs for the OS/2 development kit, while Microsoft gave the Windows SDK away free. Although IBM began indicating shortly after the release of Warp 4 that OS/2 would eventually be withdrawn, the company has only recently published a definite end-of-support date (December 2006). The latest IBM version is 4.52, which was released for both desktop and server systems in December 2001. A company called Serenity Systems has been reselling OS/2 since 2001, calling it eComStation. The latest version is 1.2, released in 2004. IBM is still delivering fixes and updates on a regular basis. IBM urges customers to migrate their often highly complex applications to e-business technologies such as Java programming language in a platform-neutral manner. Once application migration is completed, IBM recommends to migrate to a different operating system without giving any specific recommendations. ===Security niche=== OS/2 is virtually free of computer viruses, but this is not due to its architecture. Its design could make it as vulnerable as Windows, if not more so, because of its extensive scriptability, but its reduced mind and market share probably discourage virus writers. There are, however, OS/2-based antivirus programs dealing with DOS viruses and Windows viruses that could go through an OS/2 server. ===Future=== There is a community of OS/2 users and developers, along with loyal company customers, hoping that IBM will release OS/2 or a significant part of it as open source. It is unlikely, though, that the entire OS will be open because it contains third-party code, much of it from Microsoft. Still, the community has suggested that, even if only the IBM portion of it is made open, the missing parts could be written by the same community to form a next-generation version of the OS. There is a onging petition to open parts of the OS. See [http://www.os2world.com/petition/ Petition to open] With the possibility of an open source future for OS/2, the OS may be given a new lease of life. IBM's current and heavy involvement with several open source projects indicate that opening parts of OS/2 will not be difficult for the company. But until then, OS/2's future remains in limbo. ==Technology== Technically, OS/2 2.0 is often believed to be IBM's own work, a development stage, accompanied by an SDK, had already been released by Microsoft in the second half of 1990; OS/2 32-bit executable files have almost exactly the format of Windows 3.0 VxD device drivers (older 16-bit executables have the format of Windows executables). IBM also seems mostly responsible for the GUI part of OS/2 (notably, the Presentation Manager API did not change in 2.0), and probably for the divergence in syntax and semantics compared to Windows. This was an underlying cause for the breakup between IBM and Microsoft when Windows 3.0 became much more successful than OS/2. However, open source operating systems such as Linux have already profited from OS/2 indirectly through IBM's release of the JFS file system, which was ported from the OS/2 code base instead of the AIX operating system original. The graphic system has a layer named Presentation Manager that manages windows, fonts and icons. This is similar in functionality to a non-networked version of X11. On top of this lies the Workplace Shell (WPS), introduced in OS/2 2.0, which is an object-oriented shell (computers) allowing the user to access files and printers, and launch programs. WPS follows IBM's Common User Access user interface standards. In recent years, IBM decided not to support the plethora of graphic cards, and licensed a reduced version of Scitech drivers. WPS represents objects such as disks, folders, files, program objects, and printers using the System Object Model (SOM), which allows code to be shared among applications, possibly written in different programming languages. A distributed version called DSOM allowed objects on different computers to communicate. DSOM is based on CORBA. SOM is similar to, and a direct competitor to, Microsoft's Component Object Model. SOM and DSOM are no longer being developed. OS/2 also includes a compound document technology called OpenDoc, which was developed with Apple. OpenDoc is also no longer being developed. The multimedia capabilities of OS/2 are accessible through Media Control Interface commands. The last update (bundled with the IBM version of Netscape Navigator plugins) added support for MPEG files. Support for newer formats like PNG, progressive JPEG, DivX, Ogg, MP3 comes from third parties. Sometimes it is integrated with the multimedia system, but in other offers it comes as standalone applications. The TCP/IP stack is based on the open source BSD stack. ==See also== * History of the graphical user interface * REXX * eComStation ==Quote== "During the next 10 years, millions of programmers and users will utilise this system" Bill Gates, November 1988 (in the Foreword to the ''Inside OS/2'' book by Gordon Letwin, Microsoft's architect for OS/2). Bill Gates is supposed to have said that in a moment of absent-mindedness... ==External links== * [http://www-306.ibm.com/software/os/warp/ IBM's official OS/2 page] * [http://www.os2world.com/ Community of OS/2 users] * [http://www.os2world.com/petition/ Petition to make OS/2 open source] * [http://www.ecomstation.com eComStation official site] * [http://pages.prodigy.net/michaln/history/ History of OS/2] * [http://www.millennium-technology.com/HistoryOfOS2.html A Short History of OS/2] * [http://www.netlabs.org/ netlabs.org - OpenSource Software for OS/2 and eCS] ** [http://wiki.netlabs.org/ Nikipedia], the Netlabs wiki based on Mediawiki * [http://www.mit.edu/activities/os2/faq/os2faq-toc.html OS/2 FAQ (including version history details and marketing information)] * [http://www.os2ezine.com OS/2 Ezine (for OS/2 evangelism, news updates, and other articles)] * [http://dmoz.org/Computers/Software/Operating_Systems/OS-2/ "OS/2" category in the Open Directory] * [http://eepjm.newcastle.edu.au/os2/concepts.html ''Some fundamental OS/2 concepts'' by Peter Moylan] * [http://www.edm2.com/index.php/Main_Page Electronic Developer Magazine/2], developer information. Currently running on Mediawiki. * [http://pages.prodigy.net/michaln/history/os2ppc/index.html OS/2 Warp, PowerPC Edition], about an aborted port to PowerPC machines. IBM software Operating systems
OS/2
I have found http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=nl&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&threadm=3c494375%240%2423895%24afc38c87%40news.optusnet.com.au&rnum=6&prev=/groups%3Fq%3Dwikipedia%2Bgroup:comp.os.linux.advocacy%26hl%3Dnl%26lr%3D%26ie%3DUTF-8%26oe%3DUTF-8%26selm%3D3c494375%25240%252423895%2524afc38c87%2540news.optusnet.com.au%26rnum%3D6 this usenet tread about this articel whit contains some comments that possibly can be used to improve this articel. User:Giskart 23:14 Oct 17, 2002 (UTC)
Response:
*changed the time things started to fall apart to 1.3, since this is when IBM took over fully, according to the FAQ. The Usenet link agrees with me. * An encyclopedia should never (IMO) put things in its articles that are debatable.. so I removed "being 32-bit" and added "eventually supported 32-bit APIs" . My guess is that the usenet poster was failing to distingush between emulators, and the native OS application architecture. In other words, OS/2 supported 16bit applications, but was not 16-bit. [somebody has since edited the article to clarify versioning, stating that 2.0 was 32-bit. This is fine. Thank you.] *added links to websites I looked at, and a note that Windows 3.1 may not have been a response to OS/2. ---- ESR has a good resume of history of OS/2 in [http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/ch03s02.html#os_2 The Art of Unix Programming] User:Davidme ---- What is the purpose of a ==See also== link that does not exist? Seems someone should write the Workplace Shell article before listing it in the ==See also== list. User:Bevo 05:59, 6 Jan 2004 (UTC) :Prompt people to write it, I hope. Is it so uncommon to link to unwritten articles in see also? In See also, I put links that I cannot integrate in the main text yet. -- User:Error 02:05, 7 Jan 2004 (UTC) ::Putting a nonexistent article title in the "See also" list is not good practice! It is OK to occasionally refer to such an article title in the text of an article, but not in the "See also" list. Maybe you can rewrite and place it inside the article? User:Bevo 04:40, 7 Jan 2004 (UTC) :::I still have no problem with empty See-alsos but you prompted me to sketch some of the technology. Now I'd like to add an empty link to VisualAge :) . -- User:Error 02:52, 9 Jan 2004 (UTC) == HPFS is accessible through NT4 == Due my MSCE 4.0 course back in 1998, we learned (and proved in practice) that Windows NT4 can indeed READ HPFS partitions (but not write them, however). : Can you give a source for this? User:AlistairMcMillan 15:23, 5 Nov 2004 (UTC) ::It's common knowledge. Ask anyone with OS/2 skills. It can also be done with Windows 2000. Not sure abut XP though. User:Tannin : Alistair, I can give you the source: Any Microsoft Press Book related to Windows NT4 MCP/MCSE. However, I think I see were the confusion comes from. Windows NT 4 can read/detect HPFS partitions, but you can't install WindowsNT 4 on a HPFS partition. As Tannin says, it is common knowledge. ::: I wasn't disputing the fact. I just wanted to see a source. We are supposed to be dealing in supportable facts here, not personal recollections. User:AlistairMcMillan 13:15, 9 Nov 2004 (UTC) :::: I've made a change. Correct me if I got anything wrong. User:AlistairMcMillan 13:23, 9 Nov 2004 (UTC) ---- The feature I remember most in my brief encounter with OS/2 was "shadows", somewhat like MacOs aliases. Can somebody confirm/deny/annotate the appropriate articles? Thanks! : No problem. Let's work backwards. You are failiar with shortcuts in Windows? Shadows were the thing that MS copied for the shortcut idea, but copied rather incompetently. (Whether IBM hd copied the idea in turn from something else, I don't know. It's a reasonable assumption though.) With a shadow, you can do everything that you can do with a shortcut, but you can ''also'' perform any operation except delete, and have it reflected in a matching change to the real object. Change the properties of the shadow, and you change the prperties of the object itself. ''Much'' more powerful. (Successive versions of Windows seem to have gradually improved, such that Windows shortcuts in (e.g.) W2K are now approximately the same as OS/2 Shadows.) User:Tannin 09:03, 30 Mar 2005 (UTC) Microsoft and this article disagree on why Microsoft switched to Windows. --User:Taejo 10:44, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)
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O
OA | OB | OC | OD | OE | OF | OG | OH | OI | OJ | OK | OL | OM | ON | OP | OR | OS | OT | OU | OW | OX | OY | OZ |Words begining with OS/2:
OS/2
OS/2
OS/2_software
OS/2_Warp
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