A sorry little affair was held in Kensington last week, stretching itself to fill Olympia 2 and failing – the OS/2 Show allegedly found the much-maligned operating system coming of age. The hall was dominated by a huge IBM stall in the centre, as it was last year, accompanied by two dozen despondent satellite stalls. Opinions vary as to whether the Show was smaller than last year or the same size – most were agreed that it hadn’t grown. The ambience was certainly subdued and somewhat defensive, as if the participants had just lost a war, which of course hearty Unix opponents might say they had. IBM kicked off its promotional film for OS/2 with the legend More is going on in the OS/2 world than meets the eye. Nobody laughed, but then they weren’t supposed to. IBM was so short of corporate user examples of OS/2 implementations that it showed off its own internal Dealer Warranty Scheme which a male IBMer said was up to 300% faster than the old system and was much easier for the ladies to operate. At the IBM Seminars Dr David McAughtry, director of software development and support for IBM Europe got up and asked the question Is OS/2 strategic, if so where and what are its benefits?. Surprisingly for IBM this was not a rhetorical question. Part of the answer seemed to be that 32-bit versions of OS/2 would be more strategic than the current 16-bit versions and that users would not have to wait much longer for the coming of the 32-bit operating system. Indeed, McAughtry was flagging volume shipment of 4Mb 32-bit standard OS/2 for the first quarter of 1991. In a room nearby a bunch of OS/2 users were waiting patiently for their seminar to begin on OS/2 and Systems Application Architecture. One of them noted wryly that OS/2 users were waiting… – Katy Ring
