Download page

Roman's Download page

To allow you to get to the download pages quickly, I've positioned the download links before the background information, which describes why I'm using the nowadays exotic OS/2 operating system.

Download links

For the OS/2 platform, there are some of my Freeware applications available currently. You can find both of them at ftp.cdrom.com (hobbes) and its shadows:

And (to my knowledge) only available from this site are:

Background information

Probably, you already know that I'm an author of OS/2 based Freeware applications, two of them can be freely downloaded from many sites. I think the PC (personal computer) is the best platform to develop software, just because it the most widely used platform and therefore costs are low compared to other platforms. I also think the OS/2 is the best PC operating system, probably only challanged by Linux.

From the design, stability and usability I find it much better than Mickey$oft's products, the only questionable thing is if it can survive due to IBM's lack and unwillingness to provide an alternative. I don't agree with IBM's current strategy that money earned for Windows and NT based products is also good money, because this will be only a short term success. I also don't agree that OS/2 is a server operating system only, because what rules the Desktop eventually will also rule the server. Once MicroSoft has complete control over the PC desktop, why should it support other competing vendors (just follow their actions against JAVA or NetScape of take a look into a collection of articles bringing their strategies into the light). ?

The signs are on the wall today. IBM has given up the desktop client market, but why should one use OS/2 WARP Server if all the Windows clients are better integrated into an NT Server, which also has the same GUI and thus doesn't need education for a different GUI? Why should one use IBM applications like DB2/NT if the most widely uses office and management applications from MicroSoft just work better together with other MicroSoft products like MS SQL Server (at least partly because MicroSoft is the only one having access to the undocumented internals)? Once MicroSoft is the only alternative, why shouldn't it earn monopolistic profits? Doesn't the strategy to give the Internet Explorer for free just cut into the weakness of competitor NetScape, which must sell its products as it can't ship them with an operating system easily?

Even if IBM gives up the complete PC platform, MicroSoft isn't stopping there! They are attacking the workstation, AS/400, RS/6000 and Television markets with aggressive strategies and cooperations and mergers with key partners like Intel and HP.
In the long term, this development will cause significant problems for IBM I'm afraid, a more strategic vision should replace the short sighted tactical profit optimization.

You may wonder why I'm programming for OS/2 which is (thanks to IBM) a nice platform. Well, as not just I'm working for IBM, but also my father has been, I had the chance to take part of the evolution from DOS to OS/2, which used to be IBM's strategic operating system a few years ago.
Therefore, I had access to the DOS and later OS/2 operating system, compilers and toolkits for that platforms and also (not always) state of the art PCs which gave me a excellent starting point to practice programming.

The two major DOS applications were programs that allowed one to find defective memory chips, one for the IBM PC XT and AT platform and one for IBM PS/2 models 70 and 80. Both were written in Intel Assembler, the later in protected mode! 10 years and before ago, storage chips had much less reliability than todays, which caused unexplainable hangs. IBM systems used to ship with diagnostic/reference diskette that also contained memory test programs, but they often couldn't find the defective memory (or just told which memory SIMM was defective, which prevented repairing the SIMM). So, inspired by a good friend at IBM, I wrote the two memory test programs, that not only could tell the failing chip(s) (even on the SIMM memory modules, which allowed me to replace them with a hot-air soldering iron - that really worked!), but also were more stressing than IBM's tests, and found more defective chips therefore. However, the protected mode test was my last DOS application before I switched to OS/2.

The Future

The major thing I've learned is that one should not rely on statements that were supposed to be valid forever. I really thought that OS/2 and MCA (MicroChannel Architecture) were and are technically supperior and that alone should make them winners, however I was wrong.

I spent year becoming very familiar with OS/2 and now the interest in OS/2 software is vanishing unfortunately so it might be time to look for alternatives. For me this alternative may be Linux as I will never do anything that helps the monopoly of the Evil Empire to persist (and I don't say monopoly here for bashing them, but as they have a real monopoly in the sense of economics, which was part of my studies so I know a little bit about that), even when WIN32 is the current strategic platform for IBM (I only hope that to WIN32 the same happens as when OS/2 was strategic for IBM ;-).

What really annoyed me was that while IBM started to do really marketing for OS/2 in 1995 (you remember the nuns talking about Warp?) the corporate leaders had already decided to kill OS/2 (ok, they don't name it killing but everyone can read between the lines that IBM does not want new OS/2 customers and the existing ones are urged to switch to another platform, neglecting here that non cooperate customers like SOHO users are not even counted as OS/2 customers for years).

So, I still will do anything to promote OS/2 and still have many ideas for new OS/2 programs, but I will also try to spend some time to learn Linux also (XFree-OS/2 seems to be a good starting point). Now that I've learned how fast IBM loses interest in something that was strategic the day before I no longer will trust what they say but draw my own conclusions. They can do what they want to promote WIN32, but my interest are different now!

At least I did predict one trend years ago (and in the case of PC/2 it was 7 years), that is that open sourcecode will become important in the future. I always found it makes sense to publish the source code as this prevents to reinvent the wheel (and thus spending the time for development and not reverse-engineering) and allows what is called as parallelized debugging as software still has some hills to climb for more stability and usability.


(C) Roman Stangl (Roman_Stangl@at.ibm.com), 10.05.1997
Last update: 22.05.2002
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