> Blue Lion, which appears to be in closed beta with March 31st 2017 cited as the target release date, will come with up to date Firefox browser and Thunderbird mail client, Apache OpenOffice, other productivity tools, a new package manager, and software update and support subscription to ensure system stability.
How is OpenOffice still being used in so many different places? Hasn't it be basically dead and superseded by LibreOffice for years?
My guess is: some of the users still attached to OS/2 are big corporates. And they really, really like official things. Having the Oracle name associated with Openoffice, and even the Apache name, makes it much more saleable.
Instead we are now at distributing whole browser engines with a few kilobytes of HTML and JS to 'integrate' into the desktop and call those applications.
I recall using OS/2 as my development platform while at Netscape. Win16, Win32 andOS/2 builds on one platform. Plus it had a much better networking stack.
Continued to run Warp for a few years and recently set up a VM with Ecomstation so I could play the original Galactic Civilizations again.
Look up the old MS OS/2 2.0 SDKs from 1990, as well as the term "NT OS/2". There are a lot of anti-trust exhibits you can read, including PX00307. If you don't know the terms "Microsoft Munchkins" and "Steve Barkto" already, look them up.
The 5500 used to be my dream graphics adapter at some point, for a long time. Dual chip design? They even had SLI capability in the Voodoo 2 iirc. Was so cool at the time :D
How will this be different from eComStation with $300 business and $20 personal licenses, http://ecomstation.com?
Hopefully this updated OS/2 will run as an AWS/Xen virtual machine.
Edit: mirror at https://archive.is/U1eTf says Arca Noae's Blue Lion will support upgrades from both OS/2 & eComStation, will include VM images for "select hypervisors" and can run ported Linux apps.
I was wondering how this was related to ecomstation as well. It looks like this company was founded by ex-ecomstation employees: https://web-beta.archive.org/web/20160324222948/https://www....
>Arca Noae was founded in July, 2014 when several of the developers who previously worked on the eComStation project felt that the future for the platform looked bleak, a feeling which came about due to lack of progress (or any work being done at all), therefor demonstrating a distinct lack of commitment on the part of the projects new owner.
I remember setting up a small BBS back in the '80s using OS/2 Warp - it was about the only OS at the time which could support multiple modems reliably. Total footprint probably smaller than most web pages I visit these days.
Still got a boxed set of IBM OS/2 Warp complete with 3.5" disks sitting around here somewhere...
"Finishing touches can often take longer than expected. Because we want ArcaOS 5.0 to be the best that it can be, Arca Noae has made the difficult decision to delay release two weeks, with a new projected delivery date of April 15, 2017."[1]
Some customers are listed at http://ecomstation.com, probably they have complex enterprise apps that work reliably and are cheaper to maintain than rewriting code and retraining users:
Alstom, Germany
AustriaCard, Austria
Belgacom, Belgium
Bilfinger Mauell GmbH, Germany
Boeing, USA
Bowe, Bell + Howell, USA
Canadian Coast Guard, Canada
Caterpillar, Singapore
Colgate Palmolive, USA
Fujitsu, Japan
Johnson & Johnson, USA
MIT, USA
Max Planck Institut, Germany
Michelin, France
Norwich Union, UK
OCE BV, The Netherlands
Pittsburgh Embossing Services, USA
Qatar Petroleum, Qatar
Siemens AG, Germany
Standard Bank, South Africa
Trustco Bank, USA
US Postal Services, USA
Universal Instruments Corp, USA
Trustco Bank made me chuckle. I had a mortgage with them as they didn't require PMI or escrow (probably because they couldn't calculate it)
They are a regional bank near me whose former CEO's core objective with respect to technology is to stay as backwards as possible to make it overly costly and difficult to acquire them.
They literally as recently as 2013 had no computers in the branches. Only some amber terminals. They were buying TV ads a year ago announcing mobile banking. Their statements were still printed on impact paper, and transactions took 3 days to post.
I think they got fined by the Feds and were forced to modernize. In any case, a bizarre place and not surprising that they remain OS/2 users.
I wished my banks were that reliable. I'm not sure whether 'open all the time except when DDOS'd' is a real improvement over a predictable paper based bank that simply always works.
The only time I missed salary payments (and I still feel bad about that) is when my banks systems were inaccessible on the day we normally pay salaries. In the past when it took 3 days to process the transactions we never missed because we calculated that consistent delay into the date we'd send in the transactions.
So now I do it 'on the day' and if the bank doesn't perform on that day everybody is screwed.
Tricky equation: 3 days, 100% reliable vs instant, 99% reliable.
"I wished my banks were that reliable. I'm not sure whether 'open all the time except when DDOS'd' is a real improvement over a predictable paper based bank that simply always works."
High-assurance engineer, Clive Robinson, and I both recommend paper over computers wherever possible for high-risk stuff. It's unhackable. The leaks require riskier action. They usually only take what they can carry. Destruction is expensive but straight-forward with cross-cut shredders. People know how to protect the stuff because it's same skills they're used to at home.
And so on. Next thing to do is avoid Internet in favor of leased lines over VPN's if you can afford them. Boring-ass transactional processing on boring, well-maintained servers. Straight-up delete code you don't need out of the OS. App memory-safe using simple protocols.
There's ways we can make it better on computers. Paper is still safer, though. Especially after decades of mitigations developed in response to people like Frank Abignale.
All this stuff was old school batch processing, probably on some shared mainframe somewhere, or more likely an ancient AS/400 in a closet somewhere. As a customer, it wasn't necessarily more reliable, just slow and difficult to deal with, and reliant on finding an employee with a clue.
If you're suffering from poor personal banking experiences, seriously look for a credit union. I do most of my banking with a mid-sized credit union, and they are exponentially more competent and better to deal with than any commercial bank.
On the commercial side, my wife was a finance director, and while she didn't handle payroll or borrowing, she did a lot of billing, receivables and some treasury processes at various times. Her employer used a "too big to fail" mega bank, a bigger commercial bank (at that time) and a regional player that was growing. The regional bank was better in every respect, they were hungrier for the business and because it was a newer/growing line of business, their processes were clean and reliable. The "too big to fail" bank was hooking together legacy crap from 5 different merged banks. Their priority was issues with Fortune 50 and .gov clients.
I used to debate a Commander Spock on CNet almost a decade or more ago.
He claimed only Lotus 123 for OS/2 did ERR and IRR economic calculations for banks and the economy. That Windows Excel and,Windows Lotus 123 use ERR as the error function and does not have IRR to calculate those spreadsheets WK1 that OS/2 had.
Lots of companies were "IBM" shops. They bought only IBM hardware, from mainframes to printers to PCs. The PCs would run IBM PC-DOS, or later OS/2. There is still legacy from those days.
> “While OS/2 is not running any visible part of the system, it does serve an essential purpose, and there are hundreds of OS/2 computers in service,” says Neil Waldhauer, a consultant who helps New York City Transit and other clients keep their OS/2 applications running.
I've seen them doing maintenance on the turnstiles and card kiosks and was going to say I saw Windows in both. But, at least in 2012, they were Warped behind the scenes. Wonder if my OS/2 Certified Engineer paperwork from 1995 would help get me a gig with the MTA …
> Blue Lion, which appears to be in closed beta with March 31st 2017 cited as the target release date, will come with up to date Firefox browser and Thunderbird mail client, Apache OpenOffice, other productivity tools, a new package manager, and software update and support subscription to ensure system stability.
How is OpenOffice still being used in so many different places? Hasn't it be basically dead and superseded by LibreOffice for years?