A 21st-century version of OS/2 Warp may be released soon
tech.slashdot.org
tech.slashdot.org
> 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 Hasn't it be basically dead and superseded by LibreOffice for years?
More like April 1st, IMO.
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.
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.
This should be j retesting to check out.
I would expect some companies to still support software on these platforms, so Blue Lion does make sense.
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.
mirror: https://archive.is/U1eTf
Still got a boxed set of IBM OS/2 Warp complete with 3.5" disks sitting around here somewhere...
[1]https://www.arcanoae.com/arcaos-5-0-launch-on-hold-for-a-few...
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, USAThey 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
He claimed to be CIO of a European bank.
> “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 …