I've admitted before to being an OS/2 fanatic for a few years, but seriously, I think we should let it die and just savour the memories!
One of the great things about the OS/2 community way-back-when is that it was a total geek-out (memories of the OS/2 Devcon in 1992 - still have the bag tag!). Linux has I think long taken that mantle.
It's a bit of a laugh to find some of my OS/2 detritus still kicking around the Internet, like:
- My article in EDM/2: REXX - The Developer's Best Friend
- A few tools still up in the os2 collection at hobbes:
- xeol for text file format conversion
- A Workplace Shell Command Shell Starter
- INISED - a utility to manipulate Windows-style profile (INI) files
- varc - Visual archive utility front-end, requires VREXX
- dsize - Display file/directory space usage on drives (REXX)
- shlong - Lists non-FAT names on an HPFS drive (REXX)
- .. mostly developed using REXX or my favourite compiler of the time: Borland C++ for OS/2!
I had fun with a couple of other projects that never made it to release (in both cases beaten to the post by the big boys. But dang it, no M&A windfalls in those days!):
- LNDW - Lotus Notes Doorway. I wrote a web server in C++ that provided gateway access to Lotus Notes database under OS/2. Tricky adaptation of the Notes C API to C++ and getting it to work with BC++. Then came Domino...
- OS2IP - a project with a long-lost collegue Bryan Ryan (if you are out there Bryan - drop me a line!). At the time, there was no free TCP/IP stack for OS/2 Warp, so we set about writing one. Got as far as an NDIS packet driver, and a user mode frame interface before IBM finally got their act together and made us obsolete! Nevertheless, good fun hacking around with the Driver Dev Kit in assembler, and bridging to a C++ user-mode API. I don't think it was until then that I really understood Comer in detail. When you are working at that level, it is amazing how exciting exchanging just a few bytes of data in a chat application can be!
4 comments:
I can remember running a gamma ray detector in a research hospital using a PC running OS/2. I was the black sheep of a Windoze/Unix only department. They would not let my PCo on the network - complete isolation. Fear of the unknown I guess :0)
Yes Tim, I know that minority feeling! Except in my case I ran the network so access wasn't a problem;-)
... obviously in the days before we all got huppity about SOD and SOX;)
I loved OS/2, especially Warp. I even was a member of the TeamOS/2 here in Austria :-)
Patrick
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