[267] in OS/2_Discussion
OS/2 Warp Product Introduction review
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Lynn D Gabbay)
Wed Oct 12 18:57:20 1994
Reply-To: ldgabbay@mtl.mit.edu
To: os2partners@MIT.EDU
Date: Wed, 12 Oct 1994 18:56:25 -0400
From: Lynn D Gabbay <ldgabbay@mtl.mit.edu>
a friend of mine was in New York for the OS/2 Warp announcement, and since
he sent me such a comprehensive description of what happened, i thought i'd
forward it to os2partners...
------- Forwarded Message
Subject: OS/2 Warp Product Introduction
Date: Wed, 12 Oct 1994 18:44:37 -0400
I know all of you are JUST WAITING to hear what went on at the OS/2 Warp
product introduction yesterday, which I attended!
It was awesome! They had a space shuttle take off on stage and a big
explosion at the end and they sprayed confetti over everyone! I didn't think
IBM had it in them!
The introduction took place in Manhattan at the Richard Rodgers Theater on
46th St. just west of Broadway.
It was a good presentation. Lee Reiswig conducted it. First of all, there
will be no more boring IBM name for this product! It is actually called "OS/2
Warp". Sure sounds better than "2.2" or "3.0" or "Personal OS/2" or all the
other boring names that were being thrown around.
The presentation consisted of alternating sequences of videotape and ThinkPad
demos. The stage was set up with very large TV screens on the left and right
sides as well as a "TV panel" in the middle (one of those grids of TVs where
each TV displays a part of the image so it looks like one big image).
The videos consisted of customer case studies, narrated by David Barnes. They
were trying to get the point out that OS/2 is used in the most critical
applications, and that it is used WORLDWIDE. There were 4 of these: one
customer in Alaska managing a database, one in Japan using OS/2 to create
multimedia presentations, one in Switzerland (SwissAir) using it to schedule
all aspects of their flights (and the system has not gone down in 2 1/2
years), and a newspaper in England using it to access news services
electronically. They also emphasized that all this can be done NOW, not some
unspecified time in the future. In the last video (England), at the end,
Mr. Barnes said, "Oh, I just checked with Heathrow this morning -- that flight
from Chicago STILL hasn't arrived!"
Between each of the videos was a demo on a ThinkPad, projected onto the large
screens. Firstly, they wanted to prove how much they had improved the
installation process. OS/2 now includes drivers for all the common hardware
equipment in the box, so you don't have to go searching FTP sites to find
drivers for your CD-ROM and other devices. Also, the installation is now
auto-detect as much as possible. So, you don't even have to know what kind of
video chipset or SCSI card you have; it will scan your system and
automatically determine it. This is especially important today when a lot of
stuff is included on the motherboard, so people don't even know what they
have. Also, DOS Settings files are provided for the top 100 DOS games. And
yes, CDs hooked up through sound cards are now supported. [Later on, I
checked the CD device support in the install program and even found the cheapo
Wearnes drive in it... impressive]. Also, Plug and Play is fully supported so
you can install and remove PCMCIA cards WHILE THE MACHINE IS RUNNING. No need
to reboot to install the drivers. Thus, single-slot notebooks are usable
because you can pull the cards in and out at will without stopping your work.
The second demo was of the integrated software called IBM Works, which is now
bundled with OS/2 Warp. Without paying anything extra, everyone will have a
set of object-oriented applications, including word processor, spreadsheet,
database, and personal information manager (which is actually the Arcadia PIM
that IBM has licensed). Mr. Reiswig had one of the marketing people on the
stage with him (sorry I can't remember his name) conduct the demos. He asked
Mr. Reiswig, "How do you use your fax modem in Windows?". Reiswig then went
into the process: "First, I open the application. Then, I open the file I
want to send. Then I do a Printer Setup and tell it to print to the fax
instead of the printer. Then I tell it to Print and wait for the print
spooler to finish. After that, the fax program comes up. Then I have to tell
it who I'm faxing it to, and THEN it finally begins faxing." They
demonstrated how it's done in Warp. Drag a record from your cardfile onto the
icon for your document. (This "addresses" the document to that person). Drag
the document to the fax icon. That's it. Done. Since all the information
about fax numbers is stored in your cardfile anyway, no need to re-enter the
numbers into your fax program's dialing list. No need to change your printer
setup. No need even to open your application. The application is sent a
message to fax a particular document and it does so. [No need even to buy a
fax program since FaxWorks for OS/2 is included]. Actually, the demo was even
better... they purposely did not put the fax modem card in the ThinkPad when
they started the process. After they dragged the document to the fax icon,
then they slid the PCMCIA card into the slot, and it worked!
The second demo was multimedia support. As I mentioned earlier, there is much
better support for sound cards; even the new AWE 32 is supported. All the
MMPM/2 stuff is there just like in 2.1, except that it actually works now.
Furthermore, new stuff has been added. You can have "picture folders" which
display thumbnail sketches of what's in the file, in the icon. No more
guessing what the picture is and having to load it to find out. And there is
full-motion video. Not just in a window, but full-screen! I could not
believe it but I saw it with my own eyes... At first, I was skeptical of this,
but at the reception later I saw DOOM for OS/2, which I'll describe later.
Furthermore, MPEG support is built-in. So software vendors can feel free to
use MPEG compression in their products, knowing that everyone has an MPEG
decoder! No need to add that to the application... and they claimed that with
MPEG you could even do multimedia with a 1X CD-ROM... well I'm not sure if I
believe that but it's sure nice to know that the typical 2X CD-ROM is
definitely sufficient.
They demonstrated Person To Person/2, the virtual whiteboarding program. You
can run a program and have it appear not only on your machine, but also on
another machine on the network. Then, both people can use it as a whiteboard.
They had a map displayed and people circling various places on it... This was
a rather short demo, and thus they did not fully demonstrate it, so I'm not
sure what the limitations are. But it is exciting technology and it's
included free!
And of course, there is the Internet connectivity. Reiswig introduced this by
saying, "Everyone wants to get on the information superhighway, but how many
people know enough to go into a store and ask for TCP/IP, then go and find
telnet and ftp clients, then go search the ftp sites for gopher and WWW
clients, install all this software properly, and THEN go out and try to find
an internet service provider?" Warp includes all the common internet access
tools (telnet, ftp, gopher, WWW, mail, news) and it's installed with one
button. No more digging through config.tel files, figuring out which user
interrupts (you know, 0x60 through 0x67) are not taken up by TSRs, then
installing winpkt to reflect the interrupts back to real mode (Heh... how many
people even know what a "reflected interrupt" is?) And IBM is an internet
service provider (though you are free to use any provider you wish) so people
who are not up on all the different services available can use Internet
instantly without trying to find a provider. The base version of OS/2
provides only SLIP and PPP connections, however it is possible to connect
directly over Ethernet with additional software, as I found out later at the
reception. The applications are drag-and-drop enabled (of course!); they
demonstrated sending a file to someone by dragging the icon onto the open mail
window. The gopher client maintains a "gopher directory"; you can think of
this as one level above your normal home gopher. So you don't have to
remember addresses or navigate through the worldwide gopher list. You can
have a list of your favorite gopher sites and select them from your local
gopher listing. The WWW is not Mosaic, it is IBM's own WWW client; it's
better than Mosaic as it is fully drag-and-drop enabled. The mail program is
UltiMail and the news reader is NR/2. They did not demonstrate these programs
much during the presentation. But they did bring them up when demonstrating
SLIP's ability to multitask your modem. Of course we know this is because of
SLIP, not OS/2, but this presentation was targeted at a mass audience that may
not know all this is possible. And furthermore, SLIP is normally not that
easy to set up, and it's installed automatically here. So they showed the
ability to be on WWW, mail, and news at the same time, all from your 14.4kbps
modem.
Then they had the explosion that I mentioned, and sprinkled confetti over
everyone.
After that, there was a reception next door at the Marriott Marquis Hotel
(yes, there was free food! [I'm a GRAD STUDENT, what else am I thinking of?]).
There, they had booths set up by various software vendors who write software
for OS/2. Of course, IBM had a few of these booths for their stuff also.
The most impressive thing I saw here was DOOM for OS/2. id was there and
showing off the forthcoming release (it is currently in beta). I mentioned
earlier that I saw the full-motion video demo in the main presentation. At
that time I thought maybe they had some specialized video hardware; after all
how can you do animation in a GUI? It would seem to be impossible! But I saw
DOOM running with just a standard S3 local-bus video card (the one built into
the ValuePoints) and the scrolling speed was just as fast as it was in DOS! I
played it, too, and the response time was JUST AS GOOD AS IN DOS! I know this
is VERY hard to believe, and I don't blame you, if someone had told me that
they could do 3-D scrolling in a GUI environment, I wouldn't believe them
either, but I'm telling you this IS the case, I saw it with my own eyes!
I also saw SimCity for OS/2 there... well that game does not have much action
in it, and it even has a Win version, so technically it doesn't mean much.
But it does mean a lot in a marketing sense, because it means that both id and
the SimCity guys (Maxis? or whoever...), two of the top game software
developers, are writing software for OS/2. Unfortunately, GalCiv wasn't
there, I would have liked to see it!
Stac was there with a booth for Stacker. They were not impressive because
they are still selling that same old FAT-only version they've had for a while,
no new news on that front.
Lotus was there demonstrating SmartSuite. This was the first time I had seen
the SmartSuite for OS/2 personally, so I'd heard a lot about it but hadn't
seen it. Since I'm most familiar with Ami Pro, I had the guy show me that
application mostly. The dialog boxes are the same as in the Win version, but
they've been converted into OS/2-style notebooks. But if you know the Win
version, you'll know where everything is. However, it's easier to get to the
stuff. For example, right click on the paragraph text and the Modify style
box comes up. Right click on the margin and the Modify Page Layout box comes
up. And, to import a picture, just drag the icon from the desktop into your
document! No longer do you need to do an Import Picture, specify the file
type (hopefully you get it right!), and then scroll the File Open dialog box
endlessly until you find your file. Now, when you drag the icon onto your
document, it detects the file type automatically, imports it, and makes a
frame for you. You can do the same thing with documents, too. You can drag a
document from the desktop onto the active document window (you have a choice
as to whether you open a new MDI window or insert it into the current
document). I personally like the Insert feature, I've had enough of switch
window/select all/copy/switch window/paste to make me sick... There is
linking to Freelance and 1-2-3 also, so you can type in a table in 1-2-3, make
a graph of it in Freelance, and include it in an Ami Pro document, and it's
all live. Of course, I expected this capability, but I made the guy
demonstrate it to make sure it worked. He claimed you need 12 megs to run
SmartSuite, which makes me feel good because it means if I get 16 megs I
should have enough to run it. However, one should keep in mind that just
because Warp reduces its own memory requirements does not mean it can
magically reduce the requirements of applications. The way I see it, Warp
reduces your memory requirements by about 2 MB. This is spectacular when it
means that the IBM Works will work on a 4 MB machine, but when you're talking
SmartSuite going from 14 MB to 12 MB requirements, the proportion is not as
much.
At one of the IBM booths, I saw a demo of the Personal Dictation System. This
is IBM's speech recognition system. It's very good. The guy demonstrated
"Please write Mrs. Wright right now" and it worked! I guess it's context
sensitive. It was sort of a joint demo with Image Perfect Technology, who has
software to control your desktop with voice commands using the Personal
Dictation System. So you can move and resize windows, change the focus,
etc. all without keyboard or mouse. So with these two products, you don't
need a keyboard or mouse! I got the guy's business card, and on it he has the
motto "Look Ma! no hands!"
At the other IBM booth they were demonstrating Internet. They had 2 ThinkPads
and a ValuePoint; for some reason OS/2 hadn't been installed on the ValuePoint
and they were sort of shoving the disks in while they were doing the demos on
the ThinkPads. But this afforded me the opportunity to see the installation
process, and it's much simplified. It's where I checked the CD device support
list and the sound card device support list. Much better than before. And of
course, video card, mouse, SCSI card, and Automatic Power Management (APM) are
auto-detected. Yes, that's right it has full support of APM which is awesome
because you can have OS/2 on your ThinkPad and just close it up and re-open it
later and continue work. In fact, that's what they were doing at the main
presentation, when they switched from the ThinkPad to a videotape, they just
closed it, and reopened the ThinkPad when the video was over. [Of course, you
don't have to use a ThinkPad, you can use any notebook that supports APM (and
just about all of them do) but the ThinkPad is the best notebook! :-)] Anyway,
this was the booth where I asked the guy about Internet support through direct
Ethernet connections. He said that the network software is not included with
OS/2 Warp, but that there is another product called NTS/2 (around $80) that is
just the base level of support needed to access the network card and he
believed that you could use that to make the Warp Internet support work over
Ethernet. He wasn't sure, though. However, you can definitely use TCP/IP for
OS/2 to provide this support. (NTS/2 is included as part of TCP/IP for OS/2,
he wasn't sure if you needed just NTS/2 or if you needed the whole TCP/IP for
OS/2). Anyway, I also found out that there is another version of Warp coming
out next month called OS/2 Warp LAN Client. This INCLUDES TCP/IP for OS/2 in
it. In my opinion, if you have Ethernet, you'd want TCP/IP for OS/2 anyway
(whether standalone or bought as part of Warp LAN Client) because the TCP/IP
package includes all the daemons; the basic Warp package has only clients, no
daemons.
Well, that's it. That's what happened. I hope it's been informative.
They're also planning a massive advertising campaign and they had a special
reception for the press. This must have worked, because last night, I was
watching the Fox News at 10, and Warp was on it! They showed the big stage
explosion, and a screen shot, while saying "IBM today announced a new software
system called OS/2 Warp. Analysts say it is much more powerful than Microsoft
Corp.'s Windows". Then they had Reiswig saying, "Anybody can use it. You
don't have to be a computer expert or an engineer."
I can't wait to get this... when I get my hands on it, I'll be sure to let you
all know!
Sanjay
------- End of Forwarded Message
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* Lynn D Gabbay * Massachusetts Institute of Technology * ldgabbay@mit.edu *
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"Yeah, MIT is diverse... some people like Star Trek: The * H: (617) 494-9621
Next Generation while others prefer the original series." * O: (617) 253-0726
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