El Presidente has been remiss in his duties to do the Presidents Column. Work has managed to intrude into my life of leisure and I figured that Ink articles were more useful.

Anyhow, a couple of thoughts on our 'dead' operating system. First, I just put together two systems that use the VIA Southbridge chipset which has onboard AC '97 sound. One was a Soyo 133 mobo, and the other a Shuttle 266. By golly, there are real out-of-the-box OS/2 drivers for these chipsets, and both my computers are happily talking back to me as I write. When I did my latest installs, I didn't worry about video drivers, either - SciTech Display Doctor automatically took care of all the ugly details and the video simply works. And if you haven't noticed, Mozilla has just gone GA - a very nice, stable browser for OS/2.

Well, you get the picture. With all the open source driver help from our friends using Unix/Linix/BSD, we are keeping up. Not to mention the cross-platform Watcom compiler goodies currently being released as open source.

And whether it's Warp 4 with fixpacks, WSeB, or eComStation with Chuck McGinnis's neat updater program, we are all running a stable operating system that has been incrementally updated, instead of some flavor of Windows that builds in millions of lines of new code, instability, and deliberate incompatibilities with each new version.

At work, we're still 'upgrading' to Windows 2000 servers, to match our Windows 2000 desktops. So far, most times a workstation is upgraded, profiles get lost resulting in default desktops without all the custom features that users painstakingly built on their desktops, email folders mysteriously go away, drive mapping permissions go bye bye, and in short, we're looking forward to 250 workstations of individual pain for the tech staff.

All this so that we can use Outlook as an email client and get the flavor of the week new virus, and Microsoft Office, with one of the worst word processors ever 'developed.' In addition, all my 'old' software that works like Paradox 5 Win, Word Perfect 6, and some DOS programs, won't load under the new Windows versions. Sigh.

I'll take OS/2, thank you very much.

Questions, comments, ideas for any presentations, contact me at tony@scoug.com.

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SCOUG, Warp Expo West, and Warpfest are trademarks of the Southern California OS/2 User Group. OS/2, Workplace Shell, and IBM are registered trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation. All other trademarks remain the property of their respective owners.