OS/2 e-Zine - The Best OS/2 Reading Anywhere!

August 16, 2004

Isaac Leung (P.Eng.) got a degree in Engineering Physics followed by a Master's in Electrical Engineering after which he promptly got a job as a product engineer at a company which makes high speed datacom chips. He is old enough to have cut his computer teeth on Commodore 64's and first played with OS/2 1.3 EE while at a summer job with IBM. The first PC he ever owned came with Windows 95, but he soon slapped on OS/2 Warp 3 and has been Warping ever since. He has agreed to work for Transmeta while he continues plotting to take over the world.

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From The Editor

It's summer, another August and it's time for the Olympic Games again. Was it that long ago that IBM and OS/2 seemed to run the show at the summer games? What's happened?

Still chugging away...but where?

Obviously OS/2's faded a bit from the limelight, but I'm actually worried less and less now as my OS/2 keeps plugging away on new hardware and I've stopped thinking "Gosh, how long can I keep using OS/2?" because since the whole computer world seems to have slowed its "innovating" for a bit, I seem to be able to do what most of my friends use their PC's for, and they don't even know if I'm not using Windows.

Hmm...fact is, I'm not sure who is using OS/2. Remember when one Sun Microsystem's executive claimed there were several million OS/2 users still out there? (This was just a few months ago). Many people thought he might have been smoking something strange.

Windows XP SP2 came out (sort of) this month. Among the list of fixes, a couple pertaining specifically to OS/2. Hey, isn't OS/2 supposed to be dead? What is OS/2's arch-enemy doing fixing up OS/2 related bugs? One might surmise that Microsoft has some really, really big and important customers for them to warrant such an effort. They're surely not doing it out of the goodness of their hearts! Are they?

Another thing that got me wondering, back when Google Zeitgeist still posted hits based on browser and platform (this was active as of a few weeks ago, until Google pulled the plug on it), it showed something like 5% of the platforms as "other", with the other categories being the usual suspects of Linux, Windows, Mac OS, etc. That got me wondering. What's in that other 5%? Who would be doing a lot of browsing and Googl'ing? Irix? BSD? BeOS? VMS? Not terribly likely. If you're not on Windows, Mac or Linux, then Mozilla is pretty much the only choice given that it's pretty damned hard to browse properly nowadays with an old browser. (I've tried)! So, just head on over the the Mozilla ports page and see who has a port, which may give a good clue as to the contents of that other 5%. Solaris? OS/2...? Kind of makes me curious...

Variety

Anyhow, enough mindless musing. This month is a slightly bigger issue, and shows a wide range of who is using OS/2 on what.

From new hardware, to "hardcore" programming to regular home/office applications. Hopefully this is a sign of things to come. Much like our OS/2 developers, our writers write purely for your enjoyment :-). So, if you like using their software or find their articles helpful, please do drop them a friendly note of encouragement, so they'll have incentive to keep on writing! It's the least you can do for the free service they provide! If they think there are no readers, even the most hardy of writers will soon lose heart in churning out new material for you!

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