Well not quite Paul.

 PR> This is an OS that IBM "EOL'ed", what, 5 years ago?  ;-)
 PR> I suppose you've got an independent source for drivers of
 PR> the new mobo hardware?

Smiley noted with pride!

There are so many driver updates coming from IBM for everything now it is
really confusing to keep track of it all.  Seems like updates come every
couple months for more and more and more stuff.  At this point the
published promise date is December 31, 2006.  They did take the device
driver library support off line.  But, depending on who you are and what
you are doing .. people still are talking.

At WarpStock San Francisco, it was noted that major European clients have
TCO agreements with IBM for OS/2 under contract through 2019.  And at
WarpStock Austin the year before that it was reinforced that of IBM's
roughly 83 Billion gross for the year, only roughly 1500 customers
accounted for about 90% of that total!

Plus only about 2.5% of the world's CPU's run IBM's op systems...

Of OS/2, in particular, that same thread of information also noted that the
problem is that the average customer with OS/2 (One has to extrapolate that
is in reference to the 1500!) was spending over a quarter million a year
internally within their dominion outside of IBM in handling the interface
and hardware/software issues. The reason that the MCP/ACP convenience packs
were said to have been released was to coordinate the kernel development
and service work so as to unify that into a common kernel between all the
server/client and SMP arenas.  It was needed to cut down on the client's
load, while at the same time reduce the IBM cost to support these people.

If you go to the public TestCase, which anyone can visit, I think about six
or eight kernel revisions have been released for even open bashing and
report back to IBM as to problems seen in just the last month or so alone! 
It is a really stunning example of open conduct from a major vendor to try
to get bugs found and worked out before releasing the stuff to real mission
critical use still very much an issue with OS/2.

Yes, you have to work to work with OS/2.  It can be a minor mess.  But it
has been a real joy to me to see even the current MCP code still running on
496's, and in some cases, for command line purposes, even it still is
running on what, 16MB of memory?

Just a few months ago it was officially noted that IBM is still actually
supporting a known over six million installed DOS systems!  Don't ask me
where .. I sure dunno.

But this is REAL antique computer support for heritage applications. Sure,
I may have to at some point change to Linux.  But not yet,fortunately for
an old antique box user..


--> Sleep well; OS/2's still awake! ;)

Mike {at} 1:117/3001

--- Maximus/2 3.01