Remembering OS/2, And A Warm Blogosphere Welcome To A Friend

July of 2005, I wrote a brief post about IBM OS/2, and the news back then was IBM had announced it will be ending support for the operating system. In its time, OS/2 had potential, and was supposed to have been a strong alternative to MS Windows, which was just starting to gain ground.

An old friend of mine, Michael Balcos, had just emailed me recently to tell me he’s now blogging. Mike was my batchmate and classmate back at elementary in Claret and at the Ateneo High School. He was the one who introduced me to Bulletin Board Systems, and I can pretty much credit him for helping start my fascination with all things online. You see, it was Mike who inspired me to set up my own BBS back in 1995, when email and the Web were still not widely and commercially available here in the Philippines. He ran the Student Union BBS, and I ran the Cyber County BBS. We were members of our respective BBS networks (he was part of Fidonet, and I was part of smaller, loca-based networks).

Balky was such an OS/2 enthusiast. And while he has decided to move on to other things (particularly Slackware), he still has fond memories of being “warped” (reference to OS/2 Warp, of course).

That friend of mine showed me a little of OS/2 Warp 3’s capabilities. He formatted a diskette, executed several recursive “dir” commands in different OS/2 command shell windows, played an audio file, opened Windows 3.1(yes, it can run that!), and did a host of other things. The OS did all of that smoothly at the same time! When I got my own copy of OS/2 Warp 3, I crossed my fingers that it could give what I wanted in an OS. During that time, I wanted my OS to smoothly multitask between my BBS(I used Maximus for OS/2 for the software), word processor(MS Word 6 for Windows 3.1), DTP software (Aldus PageMaker 5 for Windows 3.1) and other applications. And it did so with flying colors!

IBM has ended support for OS/2 effective end of 2006, and apparently there are no plans to open-source the code. Balky thinks there might still be hope for OS/2, if IBM were to open-source the OS. I believe a lot of financial institutions and banks still use OS/2 to date, because of the security and perhaps because of the cost of migrating to a different system. Time to move on to other things, too, I guess.