End of an Era: IBM Withdraws OS/2

[Kristijntje]

As of today, IBM is officially withdrawing OS/2 from the market, and product CDs are no longer available.

The move had originally been announced in July and affects the final two versions of IBM's OS/2 effort, OS/2 Warp V4 and OS/2 Warp Server for e-business.

IBM's OS/2 effort originally began as a joint effort with Microsoft in 1985, a deal which ended in 1990 when the development partnership faltered. OS/2 version three, released in 1992, was the first to have the "Warp" moniker attached to it. Version four was released in 1996.

Throughout its life, OS/2 faced competition from Microsoft Windows and never overcame it...

full article: http://news.earthweb.com/dev-news/article.php/3573441

[mandy]

Related article:

After a decade of neglect and increasingly reluctant support from IBM, the manufacturer, the OS/2 community persists. Where users of GNU/Linux or FreeBSD have turned to free and open source software (FOSS) for political and philosophical freedom and software quality, the surviving OS/2 community has been turning to FOSS as a means of defending members' right to use the operating system of their choice. The result is a small but surprisingly diverse collection of projects that, to a GNU/Linux user, is a mixture of the familiar and exotic.

The continued use of OS/2 is made by possible by  eComStation, a third-party version of the operating system developed by Serenity Systems International. Retailing for $259 at BMTMicro (a demo CD is also available), eComStation has kept OS/2 up-to-date with newer technologies, such as USB and FireWire support. It also includes a version of OpenOffice.org 1.1.4, Lotus SmartSuite, and HOBLink X11 server for running X Window applications. The server edition adds a suite of IBM products, including Netfinity, Lotus Domino, and WebSphere...

full article: http://software.newsforge.com/software/0...ml?tid=150&tid=132&tid=16

The ecomstation web site: http://www.ecomstation.com/
OS/2 World resource site: http://www.os2world.com/

related topic: Warpstock 2006: 10th Annual OS/2 Convention http://community.tuliptools.com/index.ph...688.0.html