With a few exceptions, marketing types were absent (or, if they were there, they were incognito). Conference organizers Wayne and Peggy Kovsky routinely decline offers from vendors who want to help underwrite the event so that commercialism and hype won't compromise its technical value. A measure of their success is that most of the IBM technicians attending and/or presenting say they feel free to be more candid at ColoradOS/2 than they would at a company-sponsored event. IBMers were there because they asked to be, not because they were told to go. Some even took personal vacation time to attend. The quality of the technical content and the value of the personal networking is that good.
One of the few marketing types present was IBM Personal Software Products Division's Director of Strategic Relations, John Soyring. He's one of those who took vacation time to make his keynote presentation and to stick around for personal enlightenment and networking. Soyring, as well as most of the conferees, is still fighting brush fires ignited by IBM Chairman Lou Gerstner's faux pas that fueled an "OS/2 is dead" mantra. The Gerstner comment, quoted out of context by a major national publication, suggested that IBM has given up on the desktop as a target for its flagship operating system. Soyring told the group that "We (IBM) must make our communications on OS/2 clear and concise. IBM is 100 percent committed to OS/2 on the network and on the desktop. Period." He then candidly addressed a few of the key components envisioned for the technological evolution of the next decade.
Using the equation "Cost of Ownership = acquisition + testing + integration," Soyring said the recently announced Warp LAN Client and Warp Server packages (along with others yet to come) move the testing and integration costs out of the customers' budgets and make them the supplier's (IBM's) responsibility. The pre-integrated packages also reduce the customers' acquisition costs while simplifying installation and decision making, according to Soyring.
The initial packaging of Warp with networking components emphasizes a strategy that looks well beyond desktop operating system skirmishes. "The network is the platform," was the catch phrase first voiced by Soyring at the conference. Later in the week two other keynote presenters offered the same vision.
Soyring said that issues of paramount importance for developers, both ISV and corporate, include source-code portability and compliance with open standards such as OSF and DCE blueprints.
Between each morning's keynote address, conferees divided their time among 23 lectures. The conference agenda listed 78 distinct topics, ranging from introductory sessions on specific CUA '91 GUI controls to the internals of just about any 32-bit subsystem or C/C++ component. The sessions were presented by the experts who wrote the code or invented the technology, and required listeners to be up to speed with C, 32-bit multitasking, or multithreaded, graphical, event-driven programming.
One impressive subject at this year's event was Object REXX. Fully compatible with classic REXX, O-REXX is like a Smalltalk or C++ command line. Using the rexxtry.cmd script, O-REXX creator Rick McGuire demonstrated what is probably the smallest-footprint, object-oriented programming environment in the world. The size is very misleading. In less than 600 lines of code, McGuire built a sophisticated, "net-centric" application suite which utilized a WWW browser and intelligent agents to conduct a real-time, online auction. Look for O-REXX to appear on all IBM platforms, as well as some UNIX-like environments (including Linux!), sometime in 1996. Under OS/2, it benchmarks about 20 percent faster than classic REXX.
IBM Fellow Mike Cowlishaw (creator of the REXX scripting language) stepped away from REXX this year to talk about Web Browser Internals.
Jay Benayon's presentations on "Heaps, Shared Memory, and Application Performance in C/C++" zeroed in on major enhancements made to the C/C++ compiler's memory-management subsystem with release 3.0. (The compiler is packaged as Visual Age C/C++ with a very nice visual builder and development environment.) Besides tightening up allocations and giving you more control, Benayon's improvements include private heaps on a per-thread basis. Careful exploitation of Jay's improvements should yield dramatic performance improvements for apps coded with the Visual Age C/C++ (VACPP) compiler and libraries.
Speaking of libraries, the Developers' API Extensions (DAX) are in beta and were dissected at ColoradOS/2. This API set will let developers maintain a single set of source code for all platforms. IBM platforms, including AIX and many other UNIX-like implementations, will be directly supported by the same API set as OS/2. The same goes for minis and mainframes from IBM as well as most other open-systems-compliant OEMs. Proprietary platforms, such as Windows 95 and Windows NT, will be supported by extensions to the base API set. To port an app to almost any modern OS, you simply transfer the source code to a target-platform machine and recompile it. Yes, the VACPP compiler and DAX libraries will be, or already are available for non-IBM environments.
Ian Ameline (Jay Benayon's predecessor on the memory subsystem) paired up with Suzy Deffeyes and added OpenGL programming to his presentation suite this year. By popular demand, Ian also repeated some of his "Writing High Performance Apps Using..." presentations. HPFS internals were dissected by one of the key coders of the HPFS subsystem, Doug Azzarito. Mike Kapley's talks on the future of hyperdocumentation showed how documentation will look, behave, and be created in the near future. Steve Mastrianni's talks took his audience to the inner bits of device drivers and the outer limits of exploiting Warp's robust architecture by writing real-time apps. Roger Sessions, writer of SOM and DSOM, who recently retired from IBM to seek a more entrepreneurial lifestyle, updated the conference on SOM, DSOM, and allied disciplines.
As this year's ColoradOS/2 drove toward its close, IBM Vice President Lois Dempfel gave a talk on "The Network as a Server." Dempfel's presentation grew from two predictions about "network-centric" computing:
Dempfel predicted that the headaches of dealing with protocol stacks will soon go away, as protocols will be written into the operating system. She revealed that connectivity software that runs under OS/2 is "the largest revenue generator in IBM." The net-centric talks from Dempfel and others spawned an appreciation of the possibilities of the network-as-server paradigm. Maybe the desktop isn't the alpha and omega after all. Maybe the desktop fad really is dead.
The conference closed with a "Today and Tomorrow" presentation by senior architect and OS/2 2.x lead designer Paul Giangarra and senior product manager David Barnes, in which Giangarra revved up his laptop to show some kernel-level and GUI improvements slated for Warp in the near future.
DDJ