Only a couple of hours after the official closing of our OS/2 CONNECT for the July edition, I managed to get my PC up and running again. What happened? Did you ever encounter a hard disk that works for about ten minutes and starts a general strike afterwards? No? You may have mine now. It was replaced by another (new) disk and that one wasn't able to remember the MBR (Master Boot Record) after rebooting. So another replacement was required. Finally I had the chance to load Warp 4.0 and install the FixPak afterwards. OK, I admit this takes some time, but loading my Warp 4.0 looks a lot better than what happened to a friend of mine, who had to install an operating system that works only 95% of the time. Of course, most problems he encountered were caused by the other 5% and that gave him the opportunity to do it 14 times. Each time something else happened and now he knows a lot of problems that can occur during all this try and learn phase. Installing Warp 4.0 doesn't give you the opportunity to learn a lot. Why? No problems, no nothing, no chance to learn. Really? Not really: Due to the damage of my hard disk(s), I lost everything that was in my Internet environment: adresses and the URL's I visited regularly and of course all e-mail.
Those of you, who have send me e-mail in the last two months, should contact me again. I remember, having received e-mail from Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, Switzerland (of course) and other countries.
Now let's come back to what OS/2 CONNECT is all about: OS/2. This month John Soyring visited Switzerland. Unfortunately I wasn't able to hear his presentation, but what people told me, it must have been very interesting. Most of his time John Soyring seems to be busy correcting misunderstandings caused by other people from IBM and the non-existing behaviour of IBM's marketing. One of the statements he gave, was the most important: "OS/2 will survive" guarantee. This, in spite of some PR campaigns in the past. Talking with PC users, showed me, that the czech nuns where accepted as being good entertainment, but the message of the product OS/2 was not understood and not to mention the pictures seen in the press last year with the enormous corpses, microscopical heads and the stupid sayings did not support OS/2 in any way.
Thanks to Team OS/2 in Germany and the OS/2 user association here in Switzerland, OS/2 remains alive. Is that all? Absolutely not. A major bank here in Switzerland, decided to go to NT some time ago, but some departments simply refuse to go the same way.
Other companies also believe, that NT is the operating system of the future and will become the mission critical operating system. Is this realistic? No, surely not. During the Common European Congress in Strasbourg (France) in the first week of June, one of the speakers was Frank Soltis, Mr. AS/400. In his presentation, he mentioned that Microsoft does use NT as their mission critical operating system, or why would they have installed 23 AS/400 systems? We all may understand that M$ doesn't use OS/2 as their PC operating system, but the mission critical environment still comes from IBM.
In the short time that was available, this is all the news from Switzerland currently available. If you want to know more about what is going here, you should visit the new home page of Common Switzerland (http://www.common.ch) where, you can also find an extract of Frank Soltis's presentation and the home page of the OS/2 user association (http://www.inserto.ch/os2ua/index.html) where you will see, that the next monthly meeting will be held on July 1st and will concentrate on "Peer to Peer Networking." Hope to see you there or at the next Common Switzerland meeting to be held on July 3, also concerning the networking topics.
Please do not hesitate to send me any news and information pertaining to Switzerland you would like mentioned in this column. I'll take correspondence in English, German and Dutch (and will respond in the same language).
Rene is an AS/400 technical consultant, an IBM Certified OS/2 Engineer, and a proponent of OS/2 on the PC. Rene also serves on the board of directors for the 'COMMON Switzerland' (AS/400 user group).
