6 ms·

What's the market for something like this? It seems every few years somebody is releasing a new OS/2. Who is buying it and why?

walterbell 10y ago
Some customers are listed at http://ecomstation.com http://ecomstation.com, probably they have complex enterprise apps that work reliably and are cheaper to maintain than rewriting code and retraining users: 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, USA
- Spooky23 10y ago
  Trustco Bank made me chuckle. I had a mortgage with them as they didn't require PMI or escrow (probably because they couldn't calculate it) They 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.
  - jacquesm 10y ago
    I wished my banks were that reliable. I'm not sure whether 'open all the time except when DDOS'd' is a real improvement over a predictable paper based bank that simply always works. 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.
    - nickpsecurity 10y ago
      "I wished my banks were that reliable. I'm not sure whether 'open all the time except when DDOS'd' is a real improvement over a predictable paper based bank that simply always works." 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.
    - Spooky23 10y ago
      All this stuff was old school batch processing, probably on some shared mainframe somewhere, or more likely an ancient AS/400 in a closet somewhere. As a customer, it wasn't necessarily more reliable, just slow and difficult to deal with, and reliant on finding an employee with a clue. 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.
  - orionblastar 10y ago
    I used to debate a Commander Spock on CNet almost a decade or more ago. 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.
    - Spooky23 10y ago
      That was definately true. I think people with that need switched to Excel with macros or SAS.
ams6110 10y ago
Lots of companies were "IBM" shops. They bought only IBM hardware, from mainframes to printers to PCs. The PCs would run IBM PC-DOS, or later OS/2. There is still legacy from those days.
Apocryphon 10y ago
Still being used by the NayC MetroCard subway system (last page): http://techland.time.com/2012/04/02/25-years-of-ibms-os2-the-birth-death-and-afterlife-of-a-legendary-operating-system/ http://techland.time.com/2012/04/02/25-years-of-ibms-os2-the...
- smcnally 10y ago
  from the linked article: > “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 …

walterbell 10y ago

Some customers are listed at http://ecomstation.com http://ecomstation.com, probably they have complex enterprise apps that work reliably and are cheaper to maintain than rewriting code and retraining users: 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, USA

Spooky23 10y ago
Trustco Bank made me chuckle. I had a mortgage with them as they didn't require PMI or escrow (probably because they couldn't calculate it) They 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.
- jacquesm 10y ago
  I wished my banks were that reliable. I'm not sure whether 'open all the time except when DDOS'd' is a real improvement over a predictable paper based bank that simply always works. 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.
  - nickpsecurity 10y ago
    "I wished my banks were that reliable. I'm not sure whether 'open all the time except when DDOS'd' is a real improvement over a predictable paper based bank that simply always works." 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.
  - Spooky23 10y ago
    All this stuff was old school batch processing, probably on some shared mainframe somewhere, or more likely an ancient AS/400 in a closet somewhere. As a customer, it wasn't necessarily more reliable, just slow and difficult to deal with, and reliant on finding an employee with a clue. 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.
- orionblastar 10y ago
  I used to debate a Commander Spock on CNet almost a decade or more ago. 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.
  - Spooky23 10y ago
    That was definately true. I think people with that need switched to Excel with macros or SAS.

ams6110 10y ago

Lots of companies were "IBM" shops. They bought only IBM hardware, from mainframes to printers to PCs. The PCs would run IBM PC-DOS, or later OS/2. There is still legacy from those days.

Apocryphon 10y ago

Still being used by the NayC MetroCard subway system (last page): http://techland.time.com/2012/04/02/25-years-of-ibms-os2-the-birth-death-and-afterlife-of-a-legendary-operating-system/ http://techland.time.com/2012/04/02/25-years-of-ibms-os2-the...

smcnally 10y ago
from the linked article: > “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 …