The Computer Chronicles - OS/2 Warp (1994)

do you remember in the old star trek episodes at one point captain kirk would always say engines at warp speed scotty and scotty would answer back but the engines can't take it anymore captain well ever since then the word warp has stood for fast and powerful no surprise then when ibm was looking for a new pop name for os2 it decided to adopt the word warp is os2 fast and powerful is it more powerful than the new windows 95 we'll try to get answers to those questions today as we take a look at the new os2 on this edition of the computer chronicles [Music] computer chronicles is made possible in part by hewlett packard working with industry leaders to ensure compatibility across the board and across the network hppcs you're looking at partnership in a whole new light additional funding provided by the spa presenting the excellence in software awards march 13th hi and welcome to the computer chronicles i'm stuart chaffee and with me today is nicholas petrelli executive editor with infoworld labs nick welcome thank you nick i guess the issue on the minds of most users is should i try os2 warp most people are using windows 31 right now should i wait around and buy windows 95 we have both of them up and running here this is a beta version of wind 95 os 2 warp over here give us just a brief introduction to those two interfaces okay windows 95 is for people who are sold on windows and they want to run windows applications the 95 refers to the year they expected to ship i technologically i would call it about windows 92 it's more like windows 3.1 on steroids it's based on a very easy to use interface it's got a bunch of cascading menus where you select the application when you have applications running it puts it on the taskbar here so you can it's easy to go up and back from app to app exactly os 2 on the other hand is is more difficult to get used to at first but it has a more powerful desktop it's very object oriented in its nature built a lot around things like templates where if you want to create a new folder on your desktop you would drag you'd pull off a sticky folder there and create it on the desktop and do you drop drag and drop your items into the desktop now this can be turned into a template so that if you're using a template type style letter you can tell it that that's now it's a template so take anything you've created make it a template exactly and so you can just drag and drop this across and you create a new letter with the basic properties of the first letter same thing with the folder there are settings you can use to change the behavior of a folder so if you want this to become a work area and you have this letter open while you're using this folder you close the folder and it closes the letter open the folder it opens the letter so it restores you to whatever state you were when you actually close that folder and you get all kinds of cool warp sounds exactly okay today we'll look at os2 warp to see what everyone's talking about and help you decide if you should consider using warp now ibm has made a lot of noise about warp trying to take advantage of the delay in the release of windows 95. we're going to start with a look at how a basically boring thing like an operating system can become the subject of a worldwide publicity campaign i gotta tell you when i first heard about kodiak island alaska the image of high tech didn't exactly come to mind i mean it is the second largest island in the united states but there's almost as many bears as there are people when ibm was ready to launch its latest version of os2 the company's approach was hardly low-key instead ibm mounted a massive advertising and public relations campaign including a trip around the world to visit os2 users and a splashy new york stage show that featured leonard nimoy and a star trek theme computer computer ready lock on to coordinates for ibm senior vice president and group executive bob labonte why all the noise to introduce a new version of an existing product ibm says that's just what they had to counter noise we are still competing in in a market that has a lot of noise about about the next version of windows that has a lot of anticipation and and we delivered it first and so how do you announce that in in a in an environment where there's lots of noise what do you do to tell the world we're here first ibm also faced the challenge of convincing end users that the new os2 warp was not a big complicated product better suited for corporate and scientific work than everyday small office jobs but the emphasis on ease of use was so effective that some people started to wonder about the new version kind of an interesting consequence of that is that there were there was some perception in the market after the launch that that somehow it was less than it used to be we were so successful at at reaching end users with a message about about this is why it's why you want to use this product that that some of our our corporate customers said now is everything still there that used to be while ibm's main goal may be to show once reluctant to users that os2 warp is now a genuine alternative to windows the company also saw the windows 95 delay as a rare opportunity a chance to fill a gap left wide open by microsoft what microsoft is doing with windows 95 is creating a gap in the market you're basically telling all the all the users of windows all those 60 million users those famous 60 million users that what you have isn't good so you need something new they're telling everybody that so they're telling the market what you have is not good enough you need something new and that it you know all the market researchers call that a chasm or a market gap and that's when things can happen that's when a smart competitor can take share for the computer chronicles i'm giles bateman [Music] so let's take a careful look at os2 warp here to help us is ibm's warp guru the man they call mr os2 david barnes welcome david thanks all right well we talked a little bit before with nick nick was a fan of os2 he thought warp was pretty cool but he said you do have to learn how to use it so you've got to justify to me number one why i should spend the time learning and how you make it easy for me to learn to use warp we have done a lot of things in this version of os2 in warp to make it easier to use because we understood that and so some of the things that we've done that are pretty neat every object on the screen as he had mentioned has a pop-up menu so if you click on anything with the right mouse button there's a pop-up menu one of the menu items is always help so no matter where you are you can click with the right mouse button and get to help in that same vein if we look into os2 all of the documentation is all here on your hard disk now you could get it off there if you needed the room but the idea is if you happen to lose the books that's all right all your manuals are with you if you want them with you everything right now here's the neatest part for a new user it's a tutorial that's online and it will introduce you to every aspect of os2 from how to run applications how to customize things and while you're in here now let's say i wanted to learn about changing colors here's how you do it but i'm a windows user and i know how to do it in windows if you click down here on the windows icon it says well in os2 the control panel is similar to the windows colors option so it'll talk to you like a windows user absolutely and if you get to be really good with os2 you click on expert and it'll teach you tips and techniques for the special user all right so it is easy to get in there take the tutorial figure out what you're doing absolutely let's go to some of the basics now david launching a program in os2 there's a couple of different ways one i could just double click on an icon i like one click and so what you can do is you can use the launchpad down here and the launchpad puts on those frequently used programs for example if i want this whole folder of information that i showed before i could drop it down here put it where i wanted it and now with one click i can open that folder if i wanted to put it on other parts i could actually drop it down and put it on one of these so that it's a little bit easier to get to there and so i have the things on my desktop that i use normally and i get rid of the extra things because we found out a cluttered desktop is too hard to use for a lot of users so this makes it a little bit easier for them all right now one thing you're doing with warp which is kind of nice now is you are bundling it with something you call the bonus pack so it comes with a lot of capability built in not just the operating system interface what's in that bonus package well before we show the bonus pack i want you to remember that os2 runs your dos programs and if you have windows it runs your windows programs and it uses real windows so it does it really really well right what comes along with the bonus pack our os2 programs all the way from well here's a fax program and i'll show you a little bit about it in a moment person to person which allows me to do video teleconferencing all packaged in here's a multimedia viewer and what it will allow me to do is if i want to listen to audio now here's an audio file on my hard disk i can just go ahead and click on the audio file and while it plays that let me go and look at a file let's say it's kodak cd-rom and notice that while i did that i can go ahead and work so even while i'm off loading one file i can go ahead and work with the system and that's because os2 is preemptive multitasking the fact that i can be doing these things and it doesn't interfere with my other running programs okay other things in the bonus pack let's see the multimedia that comes along will allow me to record and play back audio and record video record video you can go to your local pc store buy a card off the shelf and os2 warp will probably support it so you can be recording a video and here's the neat part ibm works ibm works has been for sale in europe for quite a while it's a real word processor spreadsheet database real applications not little ones and it uses some of the features within os2 warp so if i've wanted to send a fax off now here's a fax that i've already got addressed to someone i know that because i've got a little icon in the corner that shows it's addressed if i wanted to say add someone else's address to it i drag and drop and i've just added a second address now when i drag this over to my fax which happens to be in the launchpad i go off and fax the document and that's it and that's it they're live objects you don't have to go in there and actually do anything the user doesn't need to know this is object technology but in fact underneath the covers os2 warp took the phone number out of the address book and put it on the document all right lastly david one of the cool things everybody wants to get online and get in cyber world and get onto the internet how do you do that with warp i think you guys are focused on that a bit we have a lot it's called the internet connection for os2 and what it allows me to do is with a couple of clicks of the mouse put in my name address phone number i can use ibm's network to get on the internet or i can use someone else as a service provider and all of the graphical tools from gopher in fact i've got a web explorer that's running right now so all that front end net software is in that bonus pack and i never have to use a unix command it's pretty neat and i think if you look at everything that's packaged along with os2 warp especially the internet stuff and look at the price of this product we are definitely bundling it to try to sell masses of the product all right looks great thanks very much david all right now one thing ibm is known for is its speech recognition work so it's not surprising that one of the first add-ons to os2 warp is a utility that lets you communicate with os2 using only your voice here to show us voice pilot for warp is david schlechter how you doing david hi thank you stuart all right david we've seen a lot of uh voice input stuff in the past on this show and a lot of it is stuff i really wouldn't use to work with i might play with it uh is voice pilot in warp stuff you'd really work with absolutely this was an application that we designed from scratch to be used in the day-to-day business environment not as a toy all right so let's do a demo here again your hands aren't no mouse no keyboard okay exactly you're just going to talk to the computer exactly and show me some real world practical uses of voice pilot with work okay here we go computer calendar april next year last year this month review week next week thursday add time 10 o'clock end time time 11 15 description engage meeting period important meeting with richard to discuss our pending contracts with ibm period i'll stop no no i'll stop computer pm okay finished finished address book f update address address enter 9 3 0 space m a i n space s t r e e t info engage this is an important entry into my address book period i'll stop computer okay finished notepad new engage i wanted to write a note to my dad comma but i had a bad pad period that is too bad comma because now i have a better pad to write to my dad period i'll stop all right so let me let me talk for a while while it's doing its thing you're dictating one word at a time but you can go a lot faster than it appears the computer is at its recognition point because it's storing your voice input catching up doing the the analyzing and coming out with it absolutely correct all right let's see i wanted to write a note to my dad but i had a bad pad that is too bad because now i have a better had one mistake to write to my dad pretty good 99 okay what i want to ask you now is there's something about the os2 platform is there something about that environment that makes this stuff work better is it better to do voice pilot in warp you chose to do it in warp rather than a windows or a dos or whatever absolutely it was not an accident when we decided to write this application we consciously chose os2 warp because we felt it was a much more powerful environment gave us the tools to be able to create all the things that you've seen in this application in windows it would have been a much more difficult task to be able to accomplish yeah i might say david barnes before just said he actually does use this to dictate yes he does long memos not short memories yes he does because that's the most efficiency there yes david thanks very much all right most of the world does use windows these days and of course there's lots of software support for windows so why would you buy os2 over windows we visited a small law firm in san francisco and asked them the same question at the law firm of colette and erickson in san francisco large picture windows reveal spectacular views original artwork decorates the office walls and corridors and almost every office has some kind of computer connected to a network all of the machines are dawson windows based all except one the network server which sits on attorney john o'neill's desk and runs os2 warp what i found was that it does multitask and i found that it had advantages not just in [Music] not letting the network crash but also i could do more than one thing at a time i tend to do a lot of research and i have cd-rom research materials they're they're dos programs and i run those and when i launch an inquiry to search the cd-rom i'll launch the inquiry and then go do something else while it's spinning the cd-rom and looking for the material that i've asked for attorney o'neill was also looking for a way to overcome the dos 640k memory barrier he discovered that os2 warp would let him allocate as much or as little memory as he chose for windows dos and os2 applications while the operating system is slower to start and uses over 30 megabytes of hard disk space john decided that os2's greater stability tipped the scales in its favor now he would like to increase the os 2 presence in the office well i think it's easier to use than windows we have several secretaries here in the office who are used to using das programs only and we've switched them over to windows and a lot of them have a problem with double clicking to invoke an icon to invoke a program and i can see a launchpad being very useful and that's probably something microsoft may come out with but for right now i think that would be a big advantage and since we do use dos programs here os 2 does a great job of running dos programs for the computer chronicles i'm giles bateman one thing we all want from our pc these days is better management of multimedia and fewer problems running this stuff one solution from a company called spg is a product called color works written for os2 joel krautheim is here to show it to us hi joel hi i want to ask you about multi-threading that's one of the features we hear about os2 and it's a hard concept for some people to understand your program really takes advantage of that in a nice way demonstrate how color works takes advantages advantage of multi-threading sure be happy to let's turn an effect on real quick because then you'll be able to actually see what's going on in this image let's pick an inversion because it's easy to see see our circle tool is selected and what we'll do is we'll define a few circles to draw with the inversion effect on this image you'll see that we continue to draw select our tools we can go off to the menu bar reconfigure our tools with additional effects open an image send a print job basically we're going to test the task the task and we're not seeing an hourglass and waiting for something to happen exactly that's the promise os2 is a liberation from that okay beyond the what we've demonstrated here which is single processor multi-threading we can also multi-thread across multiple processors dynamically on an s p computer so if you had say four processors in your computer and 10 megabytes with the image data to process color works would send two and a half megabytes of data simultaneously across each cpu for a 400 increase in total program performance so it's dynamically multi-threaded all the way up to 64 processors if you happen to have that many okay show us some of the other features of color works for os2 sure our toolbar is a completely configurable toolbar meaning there's no preset functions any tool can be used to draw with a color selected from the color palette or a custom color an effect or any combination of currently in-use effects applied all at the same time and also if you go into mask mode which is our selection mode any drawing tool can be used as a selection tool so it's completely configurable so let's actually show you some of our effects you'll see that color works has a host of professional photo retouching effects and with some rather unique implementations for instance here we're going to work on the hue channel of the image we see you provide the visual feedback of your in and out values rather than just the numerical values okay if you want to overall shift the values within that channel you simply hit the shift controls it makes for a very easy manipulation of your individual red green blue cyan magenta yellow and hls settings in addition to color map adjustment we do color correction your brightness and contrast dodging and burning now what color works dodging and burning and cloning and redo those types of functions are effects not pre-can tools the benefit is you can apply it with any tool okay we also have a just histogram of human saturation which is another unique implementation with your human saturation shifts and then you get you can limit the actual range of original canvas hues that you will shift on we also have some unique filter labs we have our sharpening smoothing noise reduction edge detection and with color works these what i call meat and potatoes image processing are fully functional laboratories with multiple effects or algorithms to actually perform that simple task an adjustable strength whether or not you want to process all pixels you draw over adjust those with a user set threshold above or below and then within a certain segment of the tonal range for this particular image shadows mid-tones and highlights the tonal range for each image is set independently in the set tonal range so for this particular image this is considered your shadows this segment is your highlight highlights and this is your midtones so we just compressed our mid tones right there for this image so the effect menu commands look towards the set tonal range when you come across those types of settings shadows maintenance highlights here's happens to be the edge detection multiple methods edge detection if inverted if you want set your tonal range color which also does a texturization you can save your own texture files as well as use some of our presets make it look like droplets of water make it look like a a weave et cetera colorworks also does a pixel displacement very powerful stuff obviously the question i have again bringing this back to os2 a lot of the features you're showing me here in color works are really only possible riding on top of os2 right i mean you couldn't do some of the stuff in windows or even under the mac correct stewart that's uh only os 2's multi-threading allows us to do what you're seeing here all right thanks a lot great product all right so what should you do should you buy os2 should you wait around for windows 95. we asked dan gilmore here to give us some answers dan is computing editor for the san jose mercury first question i have for you is as a typical user i'm running my word processor my spreadsheet my database playing a game do i care about this stuff does it matter to me whether i run under os2 or run under windows it does the operating system is really key to how well your computer works so you should care how about your personal opinion i've talked to some analysts some journalists they love ost they think it's great other guys say i wouldn't get near it what do you think i mean go through the the good points in the background okay i'm not into the religious war aspect of operating systems i use it because it works best for me right now if windows 95 when it comes out works better i'll go to that the pluses are really very very good the serious multitasking that you get is wonderful and it's hard to go back to windows once you've experienced that the workplace shell i like a lot as an environment to work in it's nice to configure and the program manager in windows by contrast is awful the internet access kit and the other applications that are bundled with it make it a very good deal and they all work quite well as far as i can tell on the downside the installation is still not good enough it needs to be improved the hardware support definitely needs to be improved there needs to be compression built in disk compression out of the box and like windows itself it really should have eight megabytes not four what's the sort of bottom line advice to a typical computer user consumer i mean should you go out and it's not that expensive go out and try warp is there something there or just sit around wait for win 95. i think it's worth a try but i also also would say i wouldn't buy any brand new operating system for a few months after it was released anyway because i don't like somebody else suffer through version 1.0 that's right finally is this all about trying to get the macintosh interface onto a pc is the is the is the windows os 2 battlefield battle just really trying to get that mac ease of use in some ways yes the ease of use is very important but the mac does not equal the multitasking right now in os2 so there are some actual advantages all right good advice thanks a lot dan glad to be here all right that's our look at os2 warp i hope we helped a little bit in getting you to understand what these operating system wars are all about if you'd like to know more about os2 or any of the software programs on this show drop by our computers on television forum on compuserve the command is go chronicles thanks for joining us i'm stuart shafay see you here next time on the computer chronicles

Channel: The Computer Chronicles

Views: 80,165

Keywords: the, computer, chronicles, stewart, cheifet, gary, kildall, cp/m, vintage, computing, computers, old, ms-dos, dec, vax, mainframe, unix, tv, show, public, access, pbs, bill, gates, ms, dos, microsoft, amiga, commodore, 64, vic20, vic, 20, episodes, full, high, quality, hd, danooct1, tct

Id: mmxabyk0S2M

Length: 25min 45sec (1545 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 01 2013