Spring is here and things have been happening for OS/2.
First there was a big effort by France Telecom, our telecom state monopoly. They will upgrade about 48000 workstations from OS/2 2.1 to Warp 4. And they are not upgrading their hardware so they will be installing Warp 4 on 486 SX33 systems, and they are happy with it. They will also migrate about 3000 servers from LAN Manager to Warp Server, and they are standardizing development on the VisualAge family of tools. When they announced this at an IBM event about VisualAge, where IBM was emphasizing their presence on NT, it was quite a shock when they said, "we are going VisualAge, but we prefer OS/2 to NT!"
And on April 2nd there was the birthday party, celebrating 10 years of OS/2. About 100 people, plus many IBMers, attended that afternoon. It was fun to meet almost all the people involved 10 years ago, some of them I had not seen for a long time. Christian Hironde was the host, which was only fitting as he has been our own David Barnes (and more) during those 10 years. He showed us part of his 40+ collection of OS/2 branded t-shirts, as well as some very special underpants. He also did some quick demos of OS/2 1.0 (a couple of seconds to boot!), OS/2 1.2 EE and Query Manager and OS/2 2.0. And we got to see again the videos from various launches: the cowboy cartoon for OS/2 2.0 (which I believe was used worldwide) and the French only video for the launch of Warp, based on clips from the Star Wars movies with the OS/2 2.1 and Warp Jedis fighting the forces of Dark Windows.
Pierre Milcent then did a Warp 4 demo. Instead of the usual flashy demos done on shows for the general public, we got a very precise and scientific tour, and even the best experts in the room probably learned a new trick or two. It was then time to move from memories to forward thinking. Michel Granger (also one of the early OS/2 advocates) introduced the IBM Network Computing strategy, with 3 key points: safeguarding existing investments, providing modularity, and reducing operational costs. We were then treated to a demo of early code of the Thin Client OS, by Pierre Milcent and Elizabeth Poigin (who was leaving her job as OS/2 brand manager to go on assignment to Austin, Texas, where she will make sure that the developers know that European users have different needs than their American counterparts). TC OS is a slimmed down OS/2, remotely booted from a server under Warp Server. It can be set up to use different shells. We saw it with the Lotus Notes client as a user interface for example. And we also saw it using a very simple shell, barely more than an application list, which is centrally administered on the server. So we saw the shell first restricted to only offer the user a telnet 3270 session, a Windows 3.1 Paintbrush session and a Netscape for OS/2 session. And then the administrator on the server gave more rights and the list was refreshed to show some DOS applications as well, and then, with a Citrix Winframe server added to the network, the Windows 95 versions of Word and Excel were also available. Quite impressive and promising for corporate use! Of course we also learned that there will be more improvements coming this year, and new releases for Warp and Warp Server next year, for those who like to use the power of real personal computers with the full edition of OS/2.
On April 10th I had the opportunity to listen to John Landry talking about electronic business and the Internet, during a Lotus event. Formerly chief technical officer at Lotus (and leader of the Domino development) John is now Technology Strategist at IBM, kind of a "visionary consultant" for Lou Gerstner. His presentation was very interesting. Although I did not really learn anything new I was impressed by the level of thought that IBM is giving to the cultural and social impact of the Internet and electronic business on the world. Things like market facing information systems (as opposed to staff facing ones), new roles for the intermediary (often it means no role left), mass customisation (using mass production and mass marketing techniques with the personal contact allowed by the Internet technologies), going from products to services, or the threat to the Wintel hegemony are clearly identified and clearly phrased. My only complaint is that when John said that IBM supported Java on all its operating systems his list only included MVS, OS/400 and AIX, omitting the first Java enabled OS (IBM or not): OS/2 Warp 4.
I actually learned from John Landry's talk that Microsoft (you know, the people who said that network computers are just dumb terminals, not worth looking into,...) just bought Web TV Networks (you know, the people who made the first commercial network computer to surf the Web on your TV set...). As an aviation buff I sometimes wish I was a grown man in the fifties to have my share of inventing modern aviation and aerospace, but boy, the late nineties are going to be exciting times!
Please do not hesitate to send me any French specific news and information you would like mentioned in this column.
Vincent Delaruelle is a Technical Consultant at OS/2 boutique in Paris. He is also the editor of an OS/2 newsletter, la Lettre d'OS/2 Magazine.
