OS/2 -The Sadness Of It AllOS/2 is dead and for years I worked diligently and with devotion to help the OS/2 user move forward. From Wikipedia: "Although IBM began indicating shortly after the release of Warp 4 that OS/2 would eventually be withdrawn, the company did not end support until 2006-12-31. Sales of OS/2 stopped on 2005-12-23."
The reality of OS/2 is that IBM owns it lock, stock and barrel and their decision to cease development and to stop selling it means that no matter who or what promises you they can extend the life and keep your OS/2 system viable, it simply isn't true.
Those few people using OS/2 today (2008) are now so far behind the "computing norm" that they are considered relics. OS/2 users were once ahead of the pack and today, if they exist, are tottering along far back over the horizon it isn't funny.
They are going to have to move on. To believe a third party one-man company is going to save their operating system is not only foolish but downright stupid - and I know OS/2 users are not innately stupid. The longer they wait to move forward the harder it is going to be.
For me, I had to look at the options. There was Windows which was the natural enemy of the OS/2 user. Linux, with no corporate support to speak of and entirely dependent on cranks and geeks (we have enough of them here, MI5 is a fine example as well as Marty), and OS X. The latter is not only a fully certified Unix OS but it has an assured future and is currently beyond the scope of any other operating system out there and available today.
Apple's move to Intel made OS X even more important and viable for the OS/2 user because it meant, with a little help from the VPC developers, I could still run my OS/2 apps until they either failed to work for me or I found an OS X equivalent. So my investment inn OS/2 was not lost, it was carried forward with me to OS X. I also knew that OS X was an object oriented operating system, just like OS/2, so that transition over was going to be very easy whereas a Windows- centric user would find the transition very frustrating. Microsoft has implied repeatedly that Windows was object oriented but it is not by any means. What Windows does is fake the object oriented features.
Within two weeks of buying a Mac the only application that I missed under OS/2 was a handy little program called PMView. I wrote to author to encourage development of a universal version of PMView for the Mac community because I felt it would be a profitable project and application. Today I don't feel that way at all. OS X comes with so many built-in graphical programs that edit, adjust, convert, etc., and does all those things so easily and intuitively that I doubt PMView for the Mac would be profitable.
The future: The optical drive is on the path of the floppy. This year (2008) we're going to see laptops and desktops released without built-in DVDRW/CDRW hardware. Impossible! Can't happen! But remember - people said the same thing about the floppy drive and today you don't give floppies a second thought. The iPhone is already one such device. And Apple is about to announce (and compete head on with NetFlix) a new iTunes Movie rental business with such heavy hitters as 20th Century Fox, Disney, Paramount, Sony, Miramax and a slew of independent movie distributors. The same day a movie is released to theaters you'll be able to download it directly to your computing device (iPod, iPhone, iMac, Mac Book, Mac Pro, AppleTV) and watch it as many times as you want over a 24 hour period.
Apple will probably announce an "ultra" thin laptop on January 15th at MacWorld. It won't have an optical drive per se but they'll offer the option of adding an external that can be connected via USB. The hard drive will be replaced with a flash drive(s). Replace the standard hard drive and remove the internal optical drive and you're going to see a very thin laptop more powerful then anything on the market today, equipped with Penryn dual core Intel chips, 802.11n (high speed) WiFi, BlueTooth, paper thin-backlit displays and more. You won't stick a stack of DVDs in your luggage when you travel, you'll load up your keychain ThumbDrive with all of your favorite programs, TV Shows, and movies and plug them into your Ultra-Thin MacBook's USB port.
So do you see where computing is going? OS/2 will never be able to go there no matter what a minor one-man company tells you. The longer the OS/2 users keep their heads buried the more frustrated and disillusioned they are going to be.
The best advice I can give to *all* former and current OS/2 users is to accept the fate of OS/2 and commit yourself to another OS. Preferably OS X.
