OS/2/Linux

[Amiga_Nut]

OS/2 was superior to Windows 3.x AND Win95 back in the day....as a service manager in the mid-late 90s I also experience in a 20,000 user environment that the OS/2 users had more or less 100% fault free computing...whereas the Windows 95 users....erm yes...less said about Win95 novelty toy OS the better. In fact OS/2 was a better DOS than MS-DOS for gamers as the DOS shell sessions inside the multitasking OS could allocate almost the full 640k of base memory.....something even a full package purchase of DOS 6.22 couldn't do straight out of the box. DOS 6.22 + Win 3.11 + QEMM386 cost a lot more than OS/2 but dumb dumbs didn't get it and still went and got Win95 *sigh*

But IBM did a Commodore and lost their way and eventually OS/2 Warp/Warp4 died a horrible death all alone in the wild. Voice control and dictation was almost feasible on a P2 with OS/2 Warp if memory serves right....is it feasible in a PC with Win7 and quad core Intel CPU today?

I'm surprised IBM don't pimp their OS now, there is total apathy with many people users/businesses now (who if they have any intelligence use CITRIX in a corporate environment) and Lenovo desktops/laptops/netbooks sold with a perfectly pre-configured OS/2 setup would do wonders for the stale OS bloatware market place Apple and M$ hold now alone for retail buyers.

(Windows7 is a joke.It looks worse than Vista and still needs 2Gb just to drag a mouse round the  screen and launch applications without thrashing your hard disk to death....what a joke MS operating systems have become....all the super fast CPUs getting churned out are effectively lumbered with running the tonne of code with each successive bloating of the Windows franchise. FAIL.)

[Amiga_Nut]

@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.)

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.

Driver problems could be a pain on laptops at the time, but other than that at least OS/2 was finished and stable....ie huge chunks of memory didn't go missing requiring more than once daily reboots (GDI memory) blah blah. I had OS/2 and Win95 on my company laptop, I could use both on identical hardware. After my Amiga...a PC with OS/2 was the preferred choice for me.

The OS/2 users just happened to require it for Lotus Domino admin stuff, otherwise it was a hassle training people on both after we burned our Win 3.x configs in the interest of 'progress'.

Windows 95 is fast though, it runs quite happly on the original Libretto in just 8mb with no issues...Linux on it is not so fast. Price/performance & reliability trade off though clearly.

[Amiga_Nut]

Only problem with that is that IBM have no say over what Lenovo do anymore with IBM owning less than 5% in shares of that company Lenovo isn't IBM anymore.

http://books.google.com/books?id=Mg7TdU9E3d0C

Since the takeover the quality of their laptops have taken a downward direction, having supported them the last great laptop that IBM made was the T61 which is around the sametime IBM ditched their retail arm.

But I miss OS/2 alot, if they did release it again and compete with Linux I'd switch



Not sure what Windows 7 you've been running but it has no issues running on a machine with 512MB of RAM, i.e. netbooks. Comparing it to vista who had a 3 minute boot time to windows 7 that took 30 seconds with no issues dragging a mouse around. On my desktop machine it hardly touches the HDD but Vista was a different beast with constant HDD access.

It's replaced my Ubuntu install as I was that impressed. Ubuntu is still running on my server box as a headless LAMP server becuase it does a better job than it's Windows server competitors as a server. Only thing missing is the Domain controller/AD stuff which I don't use at home.

I totally agree with you on Lenovo, and realistically this should have all happened the second public apathy for bloatware upgrade to XP was launched (Vista!!) anyway.

The X62(?) out now is finally of a quality I would call 'IBM' of old but it has been a long time coming between the X40 and the X62 subnotebooks. Then again the number of T40s I had to swap out motherboards for IBM was a shock. Don't ever buy a T40 off ebay...lovely machines but most of them need a new motherboard (randomly freeze if you pick them up whilst on sometimes etc). The T41 with a Radeon9000 is a nice super light 14" laptop...had one for 3 years.

Vista/Windows7 just sometimes sit there and chug chug chug that VM rubbish at random...running on Core Duo/Centrino v1 and v2 laptops. I do have the thing running for as long as possible between reboots (because Win7 insists on uninstalling and reinstalling my 3G mobile internet adaptor) and it's probably the way it works. Win7 looks pretty pants though like Windows ME...at least Vista has a nice professional looking GUI...ipso facto I use XP with a Vista exact replica skin + transparent windows mod too

(SP1 on Vista is the fastest, and you can edit the resources allocated to startup and easily get it up to 30 seconds....it's just stupid that users had to do this manually. Seriously Win7 is just a SP and GUI downgrade pack for Vista IMO...YMMV )

[Amiga_Nut]

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.

Point taken but I'll give you an example of why CITRIX was a solution for us personally.....

Not very astute assistant manager in some financial dept takes laptop home.....son puts on AOL free trial....employee comes in on Monday and complains network is down.

or

Employee installs Doom on work desktop PC, overwrites/changes various setting on PC trying to get it to work over office network.

These are just a handful of examples why people at work don't require more than the facility to access the specific applications they need to complete their financial tasks in the business. So for us it was the right way to go (I left in 99 but I'm pretty sure they went ahead with it anyway after fantastic trials). No offence but people are there to work not download MP3s and burn CDs on their desktop machines or install internet free trials on their laptops. I'm sure you know that the IT Dept was usually the first to get shafted as far as resource allocation goes...so if they want the extras the company needs to build in 50% redundancy for staffing resource in our dept to fix these type of non work related problems

Of course nowadays there are other compromises inbetween to get the same sort of effect but more resilience in your IT delivery solution to the users.

[Amiga_Nut]

Haven't watched it yet myself, but here is a whole episode of Computer Chronicles dedicated to OS/2 Warp.

http://www.archive.org/details/OS2Warp