THE OS/2 WARP WEEKLY - A production of PSP Worldwide Marketing Support Covering information relevant to OS/2 Warp and LAN Server ISSUE 23- 7/07/95 (A real collector's item) ----****----$$$$----****----$$$$----****----$$$$----****----$$$$----**** ----****----$$$$----****----$$$$----****----$$$$----****----$$$$----**** The OS/2 Warp Weekly is now available on the Internet. See PSPINFO to find out how to get to the Internet version of this newsletter. ----****----$$$$----****----$$$$----****----$$$$----****----$$$$--- ----****----$$$$----****----$$$$----****----$$$$----****----$$$$--- CONTENTS 1. OS/2 WARP "INSURES" SUCCESS 2. IBM RESULTS SYSTEM SETS RECORD 3. IBM'S INTERNET PUBLISHING EDITION FOR OS/2 4. OS/2: PART OF THE FABRIC OF YOUR LIFE 5. IBM PREPS OS/2 WARP SERVER FOR BETA 6. FEEDBACK FROM PC EXPO: COLORWORKS AND OS/2 WARP WOW CROWD 7. NEW UTILITIES FOR OS/2 8. TCP/IP RESOURCE ON THE WORLD-WIDE WEB 9. SECANT TECHNOLOGIES RELEASES OS/2 CONTROL PACKAGE 10. WARP'D HUMOR ----****----$$$$----****----$$$$----****----$$$$----****----$$$$----**** ----****----$$$$----****----$$$$----****----$$$$----****----$$$$----**** 1. OS/2 "INSURES" SUCCESS The following comments were overheard on the Canopus forum on COMPUSERVE: "I believe OS/2's penetration into the banking and insurance industries is driven by: a) OS/2's general reliability in comparison to the competition, and b) OS/2's ability to integrate very well with IBM mainframe software and systems. Those are two reasons why we use OS/2. We occupy a small niche in the insurance industry and are nowhere near the size of State Farm, Allstate, BlueCross etc. We have about $5 billion of insurance inforce. OS/2 has worked great for us and we're still running OS/2 2.11 with Netware 4.1. We've tested version 3.0 and it works even better. We have no intention or desire to use anything else." Tony Curran-Dorsano North Central Life Insurance Company ----****----$$$$----****----$$$$----****----$$$$----****----$$$$---**** 2. IBM RESULTS SYSTEM SETS RECORD AT LAKE LANIER NATIONAL ROWING CHAMPIONSHIPS Gainesville, GA, June 22, 1995 . . . When 1,000 athletes compete in over 40 US Rowing National Championships races this week, the Results System that will time 1996 Olympic Games sports will be put through its paces in a tower overlooking the Lake Lanier rowing course. A team of professionals from The Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games (ACOG) and Integrated Systems Solutions Corporation, an IBM subsidiary, developed the results application which assembles, calculates and distributes sports results to officials and scoreboards. Final tallies are collected at the venue on an IBM personal computer Local Area Network (LAN) server using OS/2* and DB2* database software for OS/2. The data is transferred 55 miles south to the Atlanta IBM System/390* central Results System, which in turn distributes the information to highspeed document printers for reports to the media. The 1996 Centennial Olympic Games will feature 26 sports, 37 sporting disciplines groups of related competitions) and 271 medal events. Most activities will be centered in and around Atlanta, but some of the competition venues will be located in other Georgia cities as well as Tennessee, Alabama, Florida and Washington, D.C. Beyond the requirement for sub-second speed and uninterrupted service, a further challenge to Results System developers is that Olympic sports come in four categories -timed, judged, head-to-head and team -- and each has its own design and technology requirements. "During this event, we're testing -- for the first time -- our Results System's link to the mainframe and to the Xerox document printers that provide information to the press and competition management," says Bruce Taylor, IBM Results project manager for ACOG. "We'll upload the results from our PC venue server to the S/390* server at ACOG's Atlanta data center. The system automatically sends commands to the printers at Lake Lanier to provide printed results information for the media covering the event." Input to ACOG's IBM Results System comes from SWATCH** Timing devices activated by field judges at the 500, 1,000 and 1,500 meter marks and at the finish line. "The IBM/ACOG Technology team has a very challenging responsibility to develop software for 37 different Olympic Games sporting disciplines," says Namik Djumisic, ACOG program director, Results Services. "The team not only has to make sure that our system is operational now, they must be able to adapt to rules changes and any new conditions that pop up during these test events." IBM Timed Sports project manager Jim Thompson adds, "Because we'll have several hundred more athletes competing in the Nationals than in the Olympic Games, this is an excellent opportunity to test as many functions and systems as we possibly can. For example, the IBM Results operation must be flexible enough to accommodate a series of different progressions -- heats, semi-finals and finals -- based on numbers of crews entered." The Olympic Games Results team is testing its central Technical Operations Center (TOC) link to the rowing venue at Lake Lanier. The system automatically alerts technical experts in Atlanta to any problems at the venue so they can help on-site TOC staff people fix them as quickly as possible. As the central information "warehouse" and server for ACOG's multi-tiered, multi- platform client/server architecture -- spanning the entire Olympic enterprise -- the S/390 host in Atlanta functions as the primary DB2 database repository for the Results System. Mara Keggi, ACOG Rowing Competition manager and former Olympic competitor, recalls that ACOG/IBM development team leaders became familiar with the sport and its rules by attending a number of competitions including the World Rowing Championships. "It was good for us to see that the people who are developing our software -- and the interfaces with television and SWATCH Timing -are so committed to understanding the sporting events," she says. As the worldwide information technology sponsor, IBM is providing systems and people to help plan, manage and run the Olympic Games through the year 2000. For more information about the company's integrated information solutions, the IBM Home Page can be found at http://www.ibm.com on the Internet World-Wide Web. As the Official Internet Information Systems Provider for ACOG, IBM provides information on the 1996 Centennial Olympic Games at http://www.atlanta.olympic.org on the WWW. ### ** Trademark of SWATCH Timing. ----****----$$$$----****----$$$$----****----$$$$----****----$$$$----**** 3. IBM'S INTERNET PUBLISHING EDITION FOR OS/2 IBM has announced the release of the IBM Electronic Publishing Edition for OS/2 Version 2.0. The IBM Electronic Publishing Edition, a function of IBM WorkGroup, will enable customers to provide entire libraries of documents via the Internet World Wide Web (WWW). The past several years have seen dramatic growth in the use of the Internet as a medium for electronic publishing. With IBM Electronic Publishing Edition for OS/2 customers can create and serve information to Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) browsers connected to the WWW or their own internal corporate networks. The information is stored in a virtual library which is composed of books, bookshelves, and collections. This book metaphor provides an easy to understand and intuitive model for readers who may not be familiar with online viewing tools. Compared to the use of standard HTML and GIF files in other WWW libraries, IBM Electronic Publishing Edition for OS/2 offers significant advantages to customers: * The capability of building books and bookshelves from a wide variety of input sources. * Support for many document elements, including those not directly supported in HTML, such as complex tables. * Fuzzy and morphological full-text searching across entire documents and bookshelves (not just the currently loaded HTML file). * Easier navigation within documents, via a button bar with intuitive icons. * The ability for a single server to serve books and bookshelves from its own or from multiple file storage via remote file systems. The actual location is not part of the Universal Resource Locator (URL) of the document and is transparent to the reader. * Books can be viewed across the WWW or by LAN connected workstations on multiple platforms from the same library. * The BookManager book format allows much more content (up to 10 times more) to be stored on the same amount of disk space. * Each electronic book is a single readily portable and self- contained file, reducing the need to manage many separate HTML and GIF files. WHAT DO YOU GET FOR UNDER $2000? IBM Electronic Publishing Edition for OS/2 comes with everything you need to create and distribute your documents on the WWW: * IBM BookManager BUILD/2 Version 2.0 - for building books from popular word processor (Microsoft Word, WordPerfect, AmiPro, and FrameMaker) files * IBM BookManager BUILD SGML for OS/2 Version 2.0 - for building books from documents authored in Standard Generalized Markup Language * Language Dictionaries - for building your books in multiple national languages * IBM BookManager BookServer for World Wide Web for OS/2, Version 2.0 - for serving your books across the WWW In addition, to provide these same books to your readers who are not connected to an Internet Protocol network the customer will be entitled to a total of 10 licenses of the following products: * IBM BookManager READ/2 Version 1.2.2 - for viewing your books on an OS/2 workstation * IBM BookManager READ for Windows Version 2.0 - for viewing your books on a Windows workstation For further information, please contact Bob McMullan at rlmcmul@ibm.net or at (612)786-1313. In addition, visit their Web Site at "http://booksrv2.raleigh.ibm.com. ----****----$$$$----****----$$$$----****----$$$$----****----$$$$----**** 4. OS/2: PART OF THE FABRIC OF YOUR LIFE Did you know that 85 percent of the world's coffee is traded on OS/2? Sources tell us that J. Aron and company, a commodity trading firm in NY and a subsidiary of Goldman Sachs, trades 85 percent of the world's coffee. Their trading system of choice? OS/2| ----****----$$$$----****----$$$$----****----$$$$----****----$$$$----**** 5. IBM PREPS ENTRY-LEVEL WARP SERVER FOR BETA Mary Jo Foley, PCWeek, 7-2-95 IBM this month will start beta testing the entry-level version of its Warp Server, which will be followed closely by the advanced Warp Server version. ----****----$$$$----****----$$$$----****----$$$$----****----$$$$----**** 6. FEEDBACK FROM PC EXPO: COLORWORKS AND OS/2 WARP WOW CROWD Timothy J. Hamilton On of the best booths (OS/2 related or not) at PC EXPO was SPG ColorWorks. Joel, one of the developers, was manning the booth. He clearly likes the product and believes in it. For those of you not familiar with ColorWorks, it is a high-end image editing application that utilizes the true promise of OS/2's multithreading. ColorWorks does things that cannot in principle be done in Windows 3.1 or even Windows 95, but probably only in Windows NT. And ColorWorks has a memory footprint of only 1Mb for the application itself. While I was there, a couple arrived wanting to know what Warp multithreading was all about. So, I took them over to the SPG ColorWorks booth and left them with Joel. Joel showed them what OS/2 Warp is all about without the marketing hype and without any Microsoft bashing. ----****----$$$$----****----$$$$----****----$$$$----****----$$$$----**** 7. NEW UTILITIES FOR OS/2 (UPDATED 1 JULY 1995) These files (and many more popular utilities for OS/2)are available via FTP from hobbes.nmsu.edu or ftp.cdrom.com In Europe look to ftp.leo.org Blackout A DPMS (Green) Monitor ftp://hobbes.nmsu.edu/os2/unix/black093.zip DMaster 2.21 File/Disk Manager ftp://hobbes.nmsu.edu/os2/diskutil/ilgdm221.zip FileBar Shell Replacement ftp://hobbes.nmsu.edu/os2/wpsutil/fileb205.zip File Manager/2 File/Disk/Archive Manager ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/.4/os2/incoming/fm2-233a.zip PMDiff Text File Comparison ftp://hobbes.nmsu.edu/os2/diskutil/pmdiff30.zip SIO Replacement Comm Drivers ftp://hobbes.nmsu.edu/os2/drivers/sio150.zip WPSBackup Save/Restore WPS Desktop ftp://hobbes.nmsu.edu/os2/wpsutil/wpsbk401.zip ----****----$$$$----****----$$$$----****----$$$$----****----$$$$----**** 8. TCP/IP RESOURCE ON THE WORLD-WIDE WEB The Web page at the following URL lists all known shareware/freeware /demoware TCP/IP applications for OS/2 and is broken down into categories: http://wc62.residence.gatech.edu/sorensen/tcpip.html ----****----$$$$----****----$$$$----****----$$$$----****----$$$$----**** 9. SECANT TECHNOLOGIES ANNOUNCES RELEASE OF OS/2 CONTROL PACKAGE Secant Technologies has released the ObjectPM Control Pack library for OS/2. This package offers over a dozen control types that extend the set of controls supplied by OS/2 Presentation Manager. It is also the first control package to support the PMCX control window specification allowing these controls to be used with products such as the IBM Universal Resource Editor and Prominare Designer. The PMCX specification is the latest control extension similar in concept to the VBX specification in Windows. "These controls will be a welcome addition to any OS/2 programmer's tool set" according to senior architect Michael Flis. The product includes features such as multi-column list-boxes and edit masks. For more infomation contact Secant Technologies, 23811 Chagrin Blvd. Suite 344, Beachwood, OH, (216) 595-3830. Additional information and samples are available from the Secant World Wide Web home page at http://www.secant.com, or email at info@secant.com. ----****----$$$$----****----$$$$----****----$$$$----****----$$$$----**** 10. WARP'D HUMOR Ever stop to think, and forget to start again? ----****----$$$$----****----$$$$----****----$$$$----****----$$$$----****