IBM PCC: GOOD NEWS, BAD NEWS
At the beginning of March I was told that IBM's PC Company has started to preload OS/2 again on their machines. After a year (or so) with only bad news from that side I was positively surprised. According to my source, Switzerland was one of the major pressure countries and IBM PCC here was slowly loosing market shares due to dropping OS/2 support. I personally know customers thinking of buying machines from other vendors, but are now thinking it over again. That's one side of the coin.
Now, here comes the other side: One day after receiving this PCC news, a customer of mine called his supplier and was told that he could get any IBM PC preloaded with OS/2, but delivery would be somewhere around six weeks. If he would like to get the machines faster, then he could order them preloaded with a two years old operating system from 95.
With this news, the following question comes to mind: When will IBM PCC be delivering PC's with no preloaded OS at all and hand out a software package with the OS of choice to be installed by the customer himself. Most of the companies want to load the machines themselves anyway and do not want to pay for an OS they don't want but are still being forced to buy due to the long delivery schedule. In my opinion, it's better to receive a PC with no OS, than receiving one with the wrong one.
LOTUS: BAD NEWS, GOOD NEWS
Here you get the bad news first: There is still no 1-2-3 for OS/2 available. The complete SmartSsuite will become available in Q4 (this year!) Now you get the good news: Lotus is now accepting orders for a bundle containing WordPro 96 and Freelance 96. A second package that can be ordered is the documentation. The software and the documentation are (or will be) available in English, German, French and Italian. I'm not going to mention the price here, because I think you not believe me. To get all for a fantastic price, you will need to be a member of the OS/2 user association. Even the combination of the membership fee and the product price is still a lot cheaper than other products, that will only run on specific platforms. If you now want to become a member of the OS/2 User Association, here is the link: http://www.inserto.ch/os2ua.
FIXPAK 1 GA: JUST NEWS (IT'S SURELY NOT BAD) AND SOME HINTS
You might have seen in the newsgroups, that IBM released FP1 for Warp 4 on February 26th. For those of you who haven't seen this news, here's the link to get it: http://ps.boulder.ibm.com/. Before you start downloading, get yourself a cup of coffee, etc. because you will get nine (9) files to make the diskettes. Now that you've got it, go and get some more coffee, because it's time for FP1 installation. Be sure to READ the DOCUMENTATION first, specially if you installed the FixPak 1 Beta earlier this year. So far, I installed FP1 on approximately 15 machines without any problem although I first thought, that the machine was hanging on the first diskette. The preparation message will be shown some long time. This is the social aspect of FP1: Go and get some food. You had enough coffee so far. If you have Process Commander installed on your machine (including the available FixPak from Stardock) you should not forget to run PCINSDLL.EXE after successful installation of Warp's FP1.
NETSCAPE AND IBM: GOOD NEWS-THE PRODUCT, BAD NEWS-SUPPORT
Since NS/2's GA, I work work with the Navigator and enjoy it. It's a great product, although I would love to see some functions from the WebExplorer, NR/2 and Ultimail become integrated into NS/2. That's why I still use some of the products from IBM's original Internet package. Now what's the problem? I wrote to the IBM NS/2 support center, that I'm not able to post a message without receiving "couldn't open FCC file." A day later, I received a message confirming the receipt of my message also telling me, that I'm not going to get an answer.
STARDOCK: DECIDE FOR YOURSELF
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote to Stardock Support. As they are not aware of the problem, they asked me (ONE day later!) to package some icons and send it over. Again a (working-day after sending the package, I received the answer. What more do you expect from a support team?
CEBIT FAIR HANOVER: LATEST NEWS
As usual, it's hard to run around at the world's largest computer fair, but it's also very informational. Working in an OS/2 environment, my first walk was to the IBM demonstration places and although IBM never mentioned OS/2 in their press releases, it was good to see what was demonstrated. IBM proved, without a lot of news, that they are behind OS/2 and that there will be a future and I managed to get an informal confirmation that the major European TV stations have switched to OS/2. You want some names? What about ARD and ZDF in Germany and ORF in Austria. According to rumors, also the French TV is switching (or already did) to OS/2. Also a major Asian bank seemed to have switched and I hope that other companies will as well. For those of you who didn't read the German "Computerwoche" magazine it might also be news to read that the major Bavarian bank dropped MS Office and Lotus SmarSuite as their office packages. They were (partially) still working with Word for OS/2 (do you remember?) and wanted a solution for different platforms. Today there is not much left, but Star Office and that's what they choose.
STAR DIVISION: STARting NEWS
The current version of Star Office is 3.1 and it's already available since a long time. Version 4.0 will come out for different platforms this month. First there will be a German version and the English version will be out soon. According to non-confirmed rumors, Star Division is also working on a Java version of their office package.
PAPYRUS: NOT JUST ANCIENT NEWS
If you are looking for a small (but mighty) word processor, you might want to have a look on Papyrus. Most other products are overloaded with functions nobody ever needs. Talking with people who already worked with it, it must be mentioned that the support is fantastic. Because programmers and sales-people build one team they are able to implement request easily. It may be expected that Papyrus will be enhanced with the HTML format soon. The application is very small and still fits on one diskette and very fast. Please ask your your dealer for a demo version of Papyrus. The only limitation is the printing capability. Although you can create multi-page document, only one page can be printed, but full functionality is implemented.
ACROSS PLATFORMS: THAT'S PROPRIETARY NEWS
Talking with Henry Luebberstedt, who used to be the author of the German Report, he told me about Bill Gates' visit to Germany about a month ago. In the presentation that was held by BG, he told the audience that he doesn't like Java too much as it is a proprietary solution from Sun and nobody wants to be dependent on Sun. That's the reason for inventing ActiveX. Most likely, that Mr. Bill Gates is too intelligent for me, as I cannot follow this logic and I will have to sleep this over a couple of nights.
ELSA NEWS
One of the hardware manufacturers Henry and I visited was ELSA. And what a surprise: Have you ever seen a 20+" monitor in the 16:10 format working smoothly under Warp 4.0? From Elsa you can have it all: Different graphic adapters, the monitor and of course a full functional OS/2 driver with proper working fonts and utilities. The demonstration was specially on DTP. On a monitor like this, you can see two full size pages in the A4 or letter format. It looked great, but I believe, we'll have to wait for this stuff to become available outside the professional environment. The monitor's price is somewhere around $6,000 (U.S.) and the DIPLomat graphic adapter isn't cheap either.
ImpOS/2: IS IT NEWS OR IS IT A NEW VERSION?
It is both. If you're working with version 2.0, you might want to get version 2.0f from your dealer, but what's more important, version 3 will be out soon.
NEON 2D VECTOR AND NEON GRAFIX: SUPERB NEWS
There are no applications for OS/2! Well, that's what I've heard a lot of times and it's simply not true. I wrote already about the new Star Office version 4.0 to come out soon, WordPro and Freelance are available now and here's a new product from the creators of NeoN Grafix. It's called NeoN 2D Vector and it's an application similar to Corel Draw, developed out of the Atari Arabesque program. If you already own the NeoN Grafix software, this might be the addition you were looking for. It looks great and so is it's price. I don't know what the price will be in Dollar or Swiss Francs, but it's only 199 German Marks. In the coming one or two months, also a new version of NeoN Grafix will come out. So, if you want to have more details on these products, please visit http://www.neongrafix.com or http://www.team-multimedia.de. By the way, if you by the Grafix Light version, you'll receive a CD with this and the full version. If you decide to go to the full version, all you'll need is the dongle to be connected to the parallel port. This decision is now a lot easier, as they reduced the price to 399 German Marks.
IBM'S SAN FRANCISCO PROJECT: SECRET NEWS
You may have read above about Sun's proprietary Java language. Okay. Sun owns all Java rights and nobody is supporting it. Well, here are some "nobodies": Corel is making great progress with their Office product, which will be written purely in Java, completely ignoring the open ActiveX standard as they told at the press conference. Another nobody in this case is IBM, who released the first documentation about the San Francisco Project. The San Francisco Project will allow the creation of multi-platform applications, able to run at platforms like AS/400, UNIX, mainframes and of course Intel-based PC servers running OS/2 or NT. If you would like to know more about this project ask your nearby IBM office.
NEWS ON PAPERWORK
If you are looking for books on OS/2, here are 2 of them including the ISBN numbers. From ITSC comes a redbook (which is in fact white) on Warp 4.0 and may be ordered through your local bookstore, thru IBM or even on-line (not possible in all countries). Here's the number you need: ISBN 0-13-842147-1 (sorry, but writing this column, I can't remember the precise name). How to explore and order ITSO Redbooks:
ITSO URL: http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redbooks
IBM Direct URL: http://www.elink.ibmlink.ibm.com/pbl/pbl (must be lower case characters).
The second book, for those of you who read German, comes from Markt&Technik and is called OS/2 Warp 4, Das Kompendium. (ISBN 3-8272-5213-X) The Markt&Technik URL is http://www.mut.de
FINAL NEWS
If you made it to read this column 'till here, my compliments and a last surprise. We had some bad news from Creative Labs last year, but here's a good replacement for it: TerraTec in Germany delivers it's sound cards with OS/2 drivers and Warp includes some already. But that's not all. According to people from TerraTec, the Team OS/2 in Germany is writing drivers and software for their latest (high level) adapter EWS 64XL. I must admit, that the German Team OS/2 is doing a great job this year. First, their book on Warp 4.0 (see my February column) and now they are doing this. If you want to know more about TerraTec products, start on their German home page: http://www.terratec.de where you can also find a link to their British home page.
THAT'S ALL FOLKS
I believe, this will do for this month and the previous March edition I missed. Please do not hesitate to send me any news and information pertaining to Switzerland you would like mentioned in this column.
Rene is an AS/400 technical consultant and a proponent of OS/2 on the PC. He recently completed the test to become an "IBM Certified OS/2 Engineer." Rene also serves on the board of directors for the 'COMMON Switzerland' (AS/400 user group).
