Review: the Book of Eli

"Mad Max" meets "The Name of the Rose". Gary Oldman reprises his role from "The Fifth Element" with a few more wrinkles.

OS/2

So; after some fiddling and finding I needed two updated installation disks, OS/2 Warp Version 4 is up and running. It's been over 15 years since I used OS/2 V2 so I was interested to see how accurate my memory was. The thing I remember most clearly was that after it crashed (which it did fairly regularly since it was running on a PS/2 Model 55 with probably 256k, and I think the minimum requirements were at least 512k) it restarted putting every window back where I'd left it (or rather where it had left me) to the last keystroke. My hunch that the base OS had been designed by some systems programmers from the MVS labs was confirmed many years later by a senior IBM developer. I often wonder how many hours of work we (as a computer using species) would not have lost had we been using OS/2 rather than Windows these last 20 years. The backdrop by the way, is a picture of Steyning Bowl in West Sussex, looking north-east with Steyning itself in the middle distance. It was taken from here: (50.873273,-0.349354)

So it's running under Oracle (Sun's) VirtualBox. VMware gave up on OS/2 about 5 years ago from what I gather, and though I did install it under Player 3.1, networking seems to hang the boot sequence. First impressions are that the screen is tiny. Most monitors back in 1992 were 640x480 and there is no standard SVGA support in OS/2. There may be a way to get round this but for the moment I'm looking at a postage stamp. It's going to take a while to re-learn where things are. The screenshot shows IBM's browser pointed at CNN; as you can see it's having some trouble with modern websites, but at least there's connectivity.

Was it worth it? Probably not, but I do have a sense of nostalgia and some satisfaction to have it up and running again. Reminded me of attending the PS/2-OS/2 announcement in New York in 1986. My first glimpse of Lotus 123's APA GUI for OS/2; it looked really spectacular, and in my mind's eye, clearer, brighter, sharper and more colourful that any of today's offerings (OK so Excel or OpenOffice). I'm sure if I saw it again today I'd be disappointed, but it was way ahead of the character based green on black we were used to a quarter century ago.

I'd tried installing OS/2 native on various systems I've had since 2001 but all were too modern in terms of chip architecture and weren't supported, at least not without a serious investment in time poking around on the web; virtualization makes things very much easier. Indeed, back in the day, that was one of the marketing points for VM.

What next? Don't rightly know, to be honest. Perhaps I'll see what software I can install... but that's for another time.

Reflected Glory

Yesterday, Sam Palmisano, IBM's CEO, was the opening keynote at the National Governors Association annual meeting. Among the usual corporate boiler plate citations of relevant corporate involvement (a rather longer and duller version of "I fell your pain") he thought it noteworthy to mention that among IBM's accomplishments was its involvement with Apollo 13; not the Apollo program, but specifically Apollo 13.

IBM has had a long association with NASA providing onboard guidance computers for the Gemini program, the guidance computer on the Saturn 1B and the and instrument unit on the Saturn 1B and Saturn V not to mention System/360s for the Houston flight control center and systems on Apollos 14, 15, 16 and 17.

I know Apollo 13 is perhaps the best known of the Apollo flights (although I remember 8 and 11 better), but citing the one mission that was almost the most spectacular disaster in NASA's history (not forgetting Apollo 1 and Challenger) doesn't seem like the best way of basking in NASA's reflected glory.

Some computer interfaces I have known

1) Tektronix teletype terminal (300 baud) to some anonymous mainframe - 1981
2) HP basic desktop computer (model unknown) - 1982
3) IBM 5250 into System/34, System/36, System/38, AS400 - 1982-89
4) IBM 3270 into VM/CMS, 4331, 4361, 4381, 3033, 3083 - 1982-89
5) IBM 3270 into ICCF and CICS/VSE 4381 - 1982-89
6) IBM PC DOS -1982-89
6) IBM PC Windows 3.1 - 1990
7) IBM PS/2 and OS/2 -1991
8) Dell Optiplex PC Windows NT 3.5 - 1993
9) Apple Macintosh II System 4 -1996
10) Apple Mac 6100 System 5, System 6, System 7, System 7.5 -1997
11) Dell XPS 5100, Windows NT 3.5, Windows XP Professional, Fedora Core 2, Core 3 - 2000
12) Dell Laptop (model # forgotten) Windows XP Professional -2002
13) Home built Intel based PC Windows XP Professional - 2003
14) Apple Powerbook (Motorolla) OS X -2004
14) Dell 1500 server, Windows 2000 Server, Fedora Core 3, Core 7, Ubuntu 8.04 LTS -2003-09
15) Home built Intel Core 2 duo Windows XP Professional - 2005
14) Apple Macbook Air OS X - 2008
16) Dell server, Ubuntu 9.04, 9.10 - 2009
17) Hosted VM, Ubuntu 9.10 - 2009
18) Home built Intel Core 2 quad Ubuntu 9.04, 9.10. 10.04 LTS, VMware Workstation 6.2, 6.3, 6.4, VMware Player 3.01, 3.1, Windows XP Professional - 2008-2010