Jeff,

On Tue, 05 Feb 2008 10:34:48 -0800, Jeff Latta wrote:

> It was a good OS.  It had a weakness in its design, relating to single 
> input queue, that could cause it to hang.

That's true, but it was solved a number of years ago.  It was basically caused by buffering keystrokes and mouse-clicks.  It seems Windows gets round it by not 
doing so.

> But its Workplace Shell 
> desktop was great.  IBM's System Object Model was technically advanced 
> although I don't know of any program, other than the Workplace Shell, 
> that really used it.

There were some, but generally a bit specialised.  I think there was a scanner/OCR program that used it rather well.

> It had a scripting language (REXX)

Designed by a single person - as a lot of Great software is, and used on IBM mainframes, as a built-in part of OS/2, and as add-ons to DOS and Windows.  Not sure if 
it ever made it to Unix/Linux.  It was my first experience of OS/2, in the early 90s, where I had to write a program in REXX to read data passed from a Visual Basic 
application and schedule a batch-program to send and receive data at given times unattended.  It worked pretty well, I'm glad to say!

> and a defined 
> API so REXX could be used to integrate different applications, provided 
> they supported the API.  The structure was there to automate business 
> functions.  Unfortunately very few applications where ever written that 
> really incorporated these technologies properly.  

The program I'm using for email (PMMail/2) uses REXX user-exits, to process emails at various stages, so handling things like spam and virus-detection are easy to 
integrate.

> Without superior 
> applications it merely became a better Windows than Windows, which was 
> one of its marketing slogans due to the fact that Windows 3.1 programs 
> could run in a protected session and not bring down the whole OS when 
> they misbehaved.

Yes, and most Windows-95 programs could be run that way too.  There was much discussion - some of it overheated - about whether it would be better to have 
OS/2-only software to encourage people to use it, or software that would run under OS/2 and Windows, so people could move between them.  As it turned out, the 
latter meant a lot of people moved to Windows and didn't bother to move to OS/2, but I still don't know if having a lot of OS/2-only software would have made a 
difference.

> I remember there was always a cloud of uncertainty 
> hanging over OS/2 regarding IBM's commitment to it.  

No doubt some of it spread by purveyors of Other Operating Systems...

> Publicly they 
> always maintained they were committed to the product but there seemed to 
> be a lack of support for developers and then they came out with a 
> migration strategy for their customers which confirmed the suspicions 
> and it died a slow death.  But I guess it's not quite dead yet.  

Indeed!  Can I take your order?  :-)))

> It's kind of a sad story for technically inclined people who saw the vision 
> for what could be done with the technology.

Quite - it's another case of Beta/VHS - and a sad indictment of the mob mentality...

Cheers,

Howard Winter
(Off to ride my Sinclair C5, fitted with an 8-track cartridge player next to the Betamax VCR connected to a Squarial*... :-)

* Gargoyle knows

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