On Wed, 24 Jan 2007 14:44:04 -0800 (PST), Bob Blick wrote:

> 
> > I'm not advocating that everyone moves to OS/2, but it is much easier/more
> > intuitive than Linux, and it's infinitely more secure than anything
> > beginning
> > with "Win" !  :-)
> 
> Hi Howard,
> 
> Isn't OS/2 way too old to support things like PCI bus and USB? What about
> drivers for 10/100/1000 ethernet? Even BeOS is newer than OS/2, and not
> much modern hardware will run it.

Sorry Bob, but your information is way out of date.  While BeOS was created after OS/2 (as was Win95 onwards) OS/2 has been continually updated, 
and while it won't run all the hardware there is (largely due to some manufacturers ignoring industry standards and designing things that would only 
run with their own drivers, which rely on Windows) pretty much anything that conforms to the standards will work.  The only exception is Firewire, 
which seems not to have caught anyone's attention, and no drivers have been written for it as far as I know.  But the mainstream stuff, PCI, USB, 
dual-core processors (they are treated as a multi-processor system), all the versions of ATA, SATA, Ethernet and so on, are all there.  Sometimes 
you have to choose hardware that is known to have drivers (RealTek are a favourite for ethernet chips up to Gigabit speeds,  for example).  WiFi is a 
bit of a lottery because of the non-standard nature of the PC side of it, but there is work ongoing on this - at a recent conference in Cologne I used 
my Thinkpad with its built-in WiFi facility with no problems (once the organisers got the system working, which took them some time! :-)

There is a small army of people doing ports of things that are written only for other operating systems, and an awful lot of Linux compatible stuff is 
available for OS/2 too.

I have been using OS/2 and its descendant, eComStation, since before Win95, and it has been my main daily operating system for about 10 years (I'm 
using it to type this :-)   I must declare an interest: I'm the UK reseller of eComStation, but I don't "push" it because of that, rather the other way 
round: I sell it because I like and believe in it (and because nobody else in Britain is daft enough to try to sell it :-)))

Rob Hammerling has done some great work creating OS/2 versions of PIC software (free!), so even the small niche of PICsters can us OS/2!

Cheers,


Howard Winter
St.Albans, England


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