OS/2/Linux

[Trev]

This was Slashdotted about an hour ago:

http://searchdatacenter.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid80_gci1508584,00.html

Granted, I'm not much involved in the IBM space, but in my 15 or so years of experience, I've only ever seen one OS/2 system in the wild. Our AS/400 administrators use Windows and TN5250, and like many companies that still use IBM mainframes, we lease our software and hardware from a third party.

Regardless, this could lead to an interesting OS/2 revival and reinforce the idea of using the Linux kernel as a solid foundation for disparate operating environments. Whether or not it sparks a community revival, however, depends how IBM decides to license the product. If it's only available to current mini and mainframe customers, it won't be of much use to IBM punters like me.

[Trev]

@Amiga_Nut

In the mid to late 90's, I was part of the distributed systems crowd, led admirably by Novell. Oddly enough, though, the majority of the systems we supported were Windows 3.1 systems with both twinax and Ethernet adapters, the twinax network providing access to our AS/400 systems. Anyone (un)fortunate enough to have worked with twinax or token ring or anything else out of IBM predating UTP and modern hubs and switches knows the exquisite and singular joy of tracking down a single unplugged node, often among hundreds.

Re: Citrix, you're reaching. ;-) Like everything else, you use the best tool for the job, always taking into account the cost-benefit. A poorly written single threaded application can turn any well-intentioned Citrix server into a single user system, assuming you haven't throttled the application in some way. Still, I'm a Citrix advocate. They fill the void left by Novell when NetWare lost relevance in the distributed space. (EDIT: The love of technology void. NetWare and WinFra--er, MetaFra--er, Presenta--er, XenApp (WTF Citrix?) are obviously very different products.)

@bbond007

Amusing. I didn't realize this was actually Amiga topical. ;-)

[Trev]

And people complained when Wikipedia said they'd restrict editing....

[Trev]

With twinax, yes..
Token Ring?  No way....  That is one of the most elegant protocols ever!

Our problems with token ring were mostly related to faulty--and they were all "faulty" at some point thanks to flimsy construction--MAUs that wouldn't close relays when a station was disconnected. Folks were always kicking the STP data connectors out of the socket.

[Trev]

I was really only talking about our IT environment at the time, and specifically about the number of 'problems' users had depending on whether they were required to use OS/2 or Windows on their desktop/laptop. The number of stupid little pathetic problems that Win95 has was a major pain in the butt and M$ never bothered to fix the worst of them...."it's a feature" bullshit constantly. And for us...CITRIX killed off all the problems with people buggering up their desktop Windows machines anyway. Remember this was in the late 90s, and it was really putting the control back to the IT people a la mainframe/terminal days of the 70s IT corporate environment.

People have a tendency to bugger up whatever you put in front of them. ;-) Yes, properly implemented, XenApp and its predecessors are perfect for application configuration management.

Maintaining a stable and productive environment does not require wresting control from users. I'd argue exactly the opposite, in fact, as the business conducted by those users lines my pockets each pay period. It's our job to enable users, not cripple them, and a good technologist should excel at successfully balancing everyone's requirements. (I'm still annoyed by stupid user tricks, of course.)

Plus, putting all your eggs into one basket a la mainframe computing is always a bad bet.