Anniversary

Summary: Oh how time flies. This issue marks the third anniversary of OS/2 e-Zine!, and with it Chris Wenham reminisces not only on our own past, but of OS/2's as well.

In November 1995, Trevor Smith uploaded the first ever issue of OS/2 e-Zine! to a $20-per-month web site account tucked away in a subdirectory of his personal account. It contained a couple of editorials, a review of ColorWorks 1.0, ZOC 2.11, a comparison of PMMail and Eudora, and a scattering of other reviews. It sported a nifty looking 3D rendered logo and navigation controls and a layout designed for the old 1.0 version of IBM WebExplorer. It'd been about a year since the release of Warp 3 and the e-Zine! stood almost completely alone in the world of OS/2 publications on the web - which was only just coming into full bloom then too.

Come the second issue in December (we were publishing only once a month back then) we had almost tripled the number of articles. There was a book review, discussions on RAM requirements, and even an interview with Brad Wardell - of the then barely known Stardock Systems. COMDEX had passed and everyone was calming down from the fear that Lou Gerstner would say something bad (or even nothing at all) about OS/2. Pentium 90s had been respectably high-end machines and the holy war with the recently released Windows 95 was hot and high on the minds of many OS/2 users at the time. This was the midst of OS/2's golden age and the month when OS/2 would sell a record 1 million copies.

Time passed. John Soyring spoke for the record when another rumor of OS/2's demise floated up in Spencer Katt's column in PC week, toeing the official IBM company line that has still never deviated even today. Our counterparts in the print-world, OS/2 Magazine and OS/2 Professional fretted in editorials over visions of an imminent demise for Warp - a sign of troubles to come. Somewhere a PowerPC version of OS/2 came and went - slipping quietly into history to emerge later as a sentimental exhibit at Warpstock, but leaving IBM's PSP in a state of low morale for years to come.

DeScribe, possibly the most popular word processor for OS/2, ceased development, only to splutter to life a while later, stagger a few more feet, and die properly once more. MGI promised to port their PhotoWorks graphics software with the new Open32 programming libraries, only to fall through at the last moment (rumors say that a few people actually have a copy of this ghost tucked away). OS/2 Professional ceased publication and handed their subscriber list over to OS/2 Magazine, and for a while it seemed as if the world was coming to an end.

But then things changed. ColorWorks 2.0 was released and it was a killer (I still remember driving in the dark and the rain to get to the FedEx office and wait for the truck to finish its rounds so I could pick up the review copy, T-Shirt and posters that SPG had sent -- having missed the delivery to my home earlier). The Merlin Beta was also released and several thousand OS/2 users, including a few e-Zine! staff members, got their first taste of the new interface, Java integration, and the Voicetype dictation.

Tim Bryce began laying the groundwork for the Connect The World With Merlin demonstration that united hundreds of presenters around the world. With the promise of a free copy of Warp 4 (sans the Lotus Notes Mail client, it turned out), OS/2 users went scrambling to sign up retail outlets as demonstration sites. Overall, the event was pulled of highly successfully. However, I still have a basement full of psychedelically groovy "Get Warped" tote bags to this day. I never did get that many people coming to my demonstration...

And IBM practically ran the entire 1996 summer Olympics, all with the help of OS/2. OS/2 was on laptops toted by the judges and umpires, it managed the turnstiles, ticket sales, scores, everything. This was a showcase for Warp, and it performed beautifully, reports by the press of the 1996 "Glitch Games" notwithstanding.

Netscape Navigator got ported and triggered a huge adrenaline rush in the OS/2 community (and with it we started experimenting with new HTML tricks, like table cell colors). Then Warp 4 was released, just a little bit earlier than the end of Navigator's beta phase. Java started to actually make an impression around this time too, with Corel Office For Java raising a lot of eyebrows. Ultimately this would be canceled, but not before Lotus had got started on e-Suite.

As more time passed we'd see the birth and rise of the Network Computer concept, something that's still being tested for worthyness today. OS/2 would play a part in this as IBM developed BlueBird, now called Workspace on Demand. Java would grow stronger, Voicetype would be reluctantly forgotten for a while, and OpenDoc... well OpenDoc never seemed to get seriously looked at at all.

The last three years have been a growing experience not just for us, but also for the entire industry. In the last three years, the Internet has emerged out of its obscure origins and into a world where even the potted houseplants they sell at K-Mart have URLs printed on the little plastic care-tabs. In the last three years, behemoths like Digital Equipment Corporation got swallowed up by companies that, as early as the mid 80s, were still only making inexpensive PC clones.

In the last three years, OS/2 has patiently used time itself as a way of saying "You're wrong" to all the fallen advocates who said it would die.

What are your favorite memories of the last three years? Talk about them with other "old timers" and even today's newbies in our interactive forum.