h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hmm, I've never seen it... or met anybody who uses it...

The built-in voice dictation sounds handy, hmm...

Is it a serious contender for anything much, these days?

(hmm, you want "its", and not "it's", in that last paragraph, by the way)

I've got a boxed set of "Warp" I use as a doorstop occasionally; does that count?

Speaking from experience, I know of at least a couple of companies that still use OS/2, including IBM themselves.
However, there is no official OS/2 support from IBM any more, which means that if anything goes wrong that isn't within the ordinary parameters, the only thing they do is to totally reinstall the machine.

I can't stand the OS, though.

There's a large OS/2 user base out there. Lots of people still use it. I like it. It's got potential, but I don't exactly see it coming out of IBM - they've got their sights on other things. The 3rd party development is still strong, though.

In the early 90s I was a contractor at IBM East Fishkill. We used OS/2 for their internal projects. I never remember having the instability that Windows is known for.

However, we were running specific software designed for mission critical apps, not attempting to run a million differnt pieces of software on it.

Yes, that's true.. We're still using it for a couple of applications that requires OS/2 for them to run, and I just keep the OS/2 machine on 24/7, and it never needs rebooting. So it is stable, but I still don't like it.

Why don't you like it?

I vaguely remember that "The New Hackers' Dictionary"'s entry on OS/2 notes a joke about the '/' sign. It means '÷' (divide sign) on computers, so "OS/2" means "half an OS". (It *is* quite a minor OS)

I remember OS/2 during the 'Warp' era. The default user interface was so ugly that most casual observers took one look at it and dismissed the operating system. It took more experience to see the value of the thing. Is 'Merlin' any nicer to look at? Or will 'Odin' be?

v3 isn't as pretty as v4, that's fer shure.
But v3 wasn't that ugly...but compared to modern standardss...

People certainly do.

There are still several hundreds of thousands of *active* licences, though the vast, vast majority of those are in large commercial organisations, especially the financial sector. (Sun is making a pitch at wooing existing OS/2 accounts to Solaris). Many ATM's still run OS/2 as well, though that is somewhere where it's market share is falling rapidly.

However, fairly recently, IBM licensed OS/2 to Serenity Systems, who have released an OEM targeted at small to medium entrprises, and at individuals. This is know as eComStation ( http://www.ecomstation.com ). It's basically OS/2 V4 Merlin Convenience Pack 2. Or more succinctly, OS/2 v4.52. It comes with updated java (1.4.2 at latest release), updated drivers (USB2, etc), a much improved GUI, Lotus Smartsuite (as an extra), Flash 5 player, Adobe Reader 4.05, free development tools, Scitech SNAP graphics to cater for nearly all current graphics cards) and a host of other nice to haves.

I've been running it in parallel with my Windows box for upwards of 2 years, and I have to say that it's good, very good. I am running a small scale development environment using Apache, PHP4, MySQL 3.x, Mozilla 1.5 RC2, etc, so most of the latest technologies which are open source are available. Using the Odin api (like WINE under Linux), many Win32 apps are being "os/2-enabled" to run quasi-natively.

Another thing - IBM's own version of OS/2 *is* still supported for those customers who bought a Software Choice package, up to the end of 2006. But it doesn't come cheap!

Hope that helps.