Saturday, March 5, 2005

OS/2 Still Around

OS/2, an IBM-proprietary operating system first released in 1987, is still being widely used. A ComputerWorld article relates to us that Wells Fargo has just completed the replacement of their OS/2-based ATMs with a Windows-based platform. A Gartner analyst states that this move will "not great news for the security of the system. I'm sure there's a lot of holes that will be created because of this."

I recall that last year we had some major power outages in my town. If you happened to drive up to an ATM that was restarting you could actually see the OS/2 startup screen. Also, at my company we still run some core applications on OS/2 machines. It's a really stable operating system and one can see why the banking industry would choose to run it for all these years. Only problem is that it's a royal pain to get support from IBM...

No comments: