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Jun. 20, 2010

If you can believe them, there's been some rumors in the last few days that have emerged suggesting that IBM may be considering an OS/2 comeback.

Of course there are naysayers that think IBM won't be recommitting to its classic OS/2 but something a bit different. But what exactly? Well that's just the question...

Like a lot of great systems of the 1990s, such as the Amiga or NEXT, IBM's dated OS/2 operating system would look laughably out of place now next to, say, the latest Linux KDE or even MS' Windows 7 OS.

But of course, a lot of its advantages back then, such as its industry leading DOS support, are now irrelevant today and most of its other cool features of the time have been greatly superseded in later systems.

As could be expected, you can argue that some ex-users of OS/2 tend to view the user interface through such rose tinted glasses... For that era, it was OK, but users today wouldn't want to give up niceties such as a modern file manager in Linux's KDE to go back to what OS/2 had in those days.

If IBM wants to get back into the world of desktop operating systems, maybe the most likely plan is for a custom Linux distribution, perhaps reviving the old OS/2 name, if Big Blue still cares about that moniker.

That's because even a big IT company as huge as IBM with all its many resources and large R&D capital spending would still cringe at investing in the resources needed to create an entire operating system from the ground up, and upgrading the OS/2 source code would probably be an even larger job, considering the many security features that would have to be integrated into the OS.

Remember that OS/2 was put together just as the Internet was starting to take off, but security patches were not part of the OS landscape in those days.

Like the OS/2, IBM has done something like this before in the form of Lotus Symphony, an update of the DOS application suite, by re-branding and adding to Open Office.

A standardised corporate Linux distribution with the backing of IBM might be welcomed by software development firms as it would help to work around one of Linux's biggest failings in the view of commercial developers, the lack of a standardised platform target.

Yes, in case you have forgotten, there are still people out there that believe there is still too many Linux distributions available today.

Of course, if, and that's a BIG if, Big Blue wants to go ahead with OS/2, let's just all hope that it will keep everything in the open source fashion of Linux.

IBM can still make its money from the support side of the software, just like Red Hat and Ubuntu with Linux. If it does go ahead with its newly proposed plans (but remember it's still just a rumor), in the manner that we've outlined, who knows what could come out of this...

After all, keeping pressure on Microsoft can only be a good thing for the average corporate user. So this could be an exiting prospect, (if it happens that is) or will it just be another distribution to add to the rapidly growing pile list of available OSs?

It will be interesting to see if IBM does in fact move ahead with this, after all.

A lot of the technology that underpinned OS/2, such as the memory management and hardware support, is now so old and obsolete that it would have to be rewritten from the ground up to support today's modern hardware and increasingly RAM hungry applications.

Worse, the whole operating system is proprietary (read IBM owned and managed) and legally encumbered some would say. Trying to convince companies and IT shops to develop for OS/2 would be almost impossible as the OS isn't compatible with anything else, well almost anyway.

To put that into perspective, just think how difficult it can be convincing some mainstream developers that the Linux market is big enough to support the application.

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Source: OSNB.

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