3 ms·

If I remember well, Trenitalia POS and many European banks still use OS/2. A lot of mainframes have OS/2 as a frontend to boot (IPL) the big iron. Got heartbrok

• gattilorenz 7y ago
  Trenitalia upgraded most of their machines a few years ago, I don't think there are still OS/2 machines around for that. I was amazed the first time I saw one of these crashed, showing the OS/2 Logo (Warp 3 or 4 I think). From the GUI it was impossible to tell, they had relatively high resolution and even, at some point, videos embedded. I wonder who developed and updated the GUI, and using what.
• unixhero 7y ago
  That mainframes need a standard computer of some sort to run as a controller to reach IPL boggles my mind.
  • dfox 7y ago
    It is done in this way on almost any platform that is classified as mainframe. Originally one would IPL such platforms by manually toggling in either some simple code that would somehow DMA the OS bootloader from some external device. This was not exactly user friendly and replacing the front panel blinken lights with some sort of interactive monitor/debugger running on separate smaller CPU was common approach (for example many PDP-10s have PDP-11 in them used as "console processor"). For more recent systems (IBM mainframes, Sun/SGI large machines, etc.) the controller also handles things like power sequencing, hardware configuration (e.g. physical partitioning of interconnect buses, resource allocation...) and mainly also enforces the hardware licensing policies.