The Unexpected Side Effects Of Things

In most bargain-bin Golden Oldies CD collections you'll find a little number called Johnny B. Goode, a swinging piece that modern kids might remember from the movie Back To The Future. It was while listening to this tune that I started thinking about how many things we take for granted have quietly, and sometimes not so quietly, started revolutions, made profound statements, and added considerably more to the world and its culture than the humble engineer, writer or composer ever intended to come of it.

Think about OS/2 beyond its obvious purpose as an operating system. Counting off on your fingers, OS/2's purpose in this world has come to include representing choice, emphasizing reliability over hype, and challenging the assumptions of a mainstream world. It's what you get for your PC when you don't want Windows, it's quietly running in a back room while paint and gloss get applied to the showroom models, or it's the answer that gets the funny look from the salesperson who, up until that point, was in a pushbutton world that had every decision already made for him. What would any programmer have thought if they'd been told in advance that some of OS/2's most important functions would never even need a working installation?

The meaning of OS/2's life is about to change now, reaching beyond the classic role of underdog and alternative and into roles that never even existed a year ago.

Poster Child for an adopted platform

It's a tragedy you could make a movie out of: Father raises child. Father enrolls child in local baseball little-league. Father becomes coach of local baseball little-league and champions a kid with great potential to hit the big time - but it's not his child that he's championing. This is the story of OS/2's life in a nutshell, but from this point onward it's not the father - IBM - who'll be writing the next chapters. It's us, the OS/2 user community.

Warpstock. Warpzilla. Win32-OS/2. Three examples mark a trend, so the pundits say. Well, have three more: OS/2 Netlabs. 21 Warp. OS2Support.Org.

I guess the users want the emotionally orphaned kid to win the World Series after all, or at least play in the pro-league. One very important thing we all must do is make noise. Start churning it out again like Team OS/2 did in the old days, get attention, write letters, and make OS/2 the poster child for what grassroots can really do. It's important because it not only affects OS/2, it affects every product in existence. Like the Molly Maguires of the computer age, the union we build will be copied by thousands more until it's people driving the industry, not majority stock holders.

A hybrid of Free and Commercial software

Warpzilla isn't just the only example of why OS/2 users should see fit to embrace open-source or free software. If you want to scan today in OS/2, you'll probably be grateful for the OS/2 port of SANE (Scanner Access Now Easy), an open-source product ported to OS/2. The OS/2 Roadrunner cable-modem login client (or at least the one for my area) is a port of an open source Linux program. So is GIMP, a Photoshop-like paint program.

OS/2 could possibly become one of the best examples of how both free (open source) software can coexist with proprietary or commercial software. There are benefits to both and there are the facts of having to live with both. So, lets turn OS/2 into a showcase platform where the two worlds come together. Windows is too driven by commercial software, Linux is just the opposite, it's time for us to define the middle ground again.

A teacher in the art of survival and longevity

And OS/2 could enter the textbooks again in another role: As a teacher to movements, platforms and communities about the art of survival. It's been 11 years, it's been pronounced dead by a hundred quacks, perhaps someone at Harvard Business School can tell us why... or perhaps we already know.

Personally, my favorite side-effect purpose of OS/2 is the one of challenging assumptions. Every now and then someone will send me a program in an e-mail attachment or other mechanism and a few minutes later, before I have a chance to respond, will say "Well? What do you think of it?" I experience unnatural pleasure in responding: "I don't." and waiting for them to trouble-shoot the wrong problem. I don't know why I'm not the least bit disappointed that I can't run the program. I think maybe, for me, that's not the important part at all. I like popping little bubbles of arrogant assumption.

Oh, and as for Johnny B. Goode, it was the song that got Rock 'n Roll started. That's one of the little jokes Spielberg was trying to milk in his movie. And just one of those things that did far far more than it was originally created to do.

If you know of what OS/2 does or has done besides just run programs and talk to hard drives, then talk about it in our interactive forum with me and other readers.