Very slow booting and running and braindead OS's 4527

All kinds of things. The OS-2 desktop itself uses something like 35 concurrent threads, and I tend to run a fair number of things in the background. A semi-complete list of what I'm running now would be:

* TCP-IP Networking * Peer-To-Peer Filesharing with other Windows-Linux boxes on my LAN * Six fullscreen command-line consoles where I do a lot of my work * Clipboard servers for each console so I can cut-and-paste between them directly (like CLIPIT for DOS) * A couple of specialized process monitors-process priority adjusters * A custom task switching app so I don't have to switch to the GUI just to flip between fullscreen sessions * UPS Monitoring Software (shuts down the box if power is out for more than three minutes, and also shuts down my Linux servers) * An X server (Hummingbird Exceed) for displaying X programs. * A virtual desktop application for the GUI * A multiple-clipboard application for the GUI desktop * A sticky notes application for the GUI. * An MP3 player playing in the background * An FTP client sitting in the background idle (I've been moving files back and forth between my CD-ripping box and the music server) * The newsreader I'm using to read this, plus the message pre-post processer and this text editor * A cron application (starts background tasks at specified times) * Two taskbars on the GUI desktop * A GUI special effects utility (NPSWPS) * A pair of POP mail monitors on the GUI desktop * A TCP-IP throuput monitoring utility for the GUI desktop * A couple of other GUI desktop enhancement utilities * The OS-2 print spooler

Etc.

It's good for high-volume applications where people are either needing simple information requests or requesting-editing-submitting database updates which generally don't exceed more than a few pages in length.

Airlines use such systems heavily, for example. If a flight dispatcher signed into a transaction system wants to see the current weather at Minneapolis, he would type:

and see the end results displayed on his terminal in under a second.

If someone wants to fill in a hypothetical form, they would first do a fill-in form request:

the system would generate a predefined display mask for them to fill in:

FILLED MASK NAME RANK SERIAL NUMBER

and they would do the local editing on their terminal screen (which can enforce things like cursor positioning, justification, and even general data types like numeric or alpha):

FILLED MASK NAME Rich S RANK Private SERIAL NUMBER 123456

and transmit from the bottom of the last item to submit the data.

The concept works very well for all kinds of applications.

An OS2200 box is typically used for transaction, batch, or timesharing work. It all depends on how a given customer chooses to use it.

In the airline industry, transaction stuff tends to dominate, but I know OS2200 boxes were used to power library systems (PALS) and were also used by the government in all kinds of different roles.

-- Mainframe-Unix bit twiddler by day, OS-2+Linux+DOS hobbyist by night. WARNING: I've seen FIELDATA FORTRAN V and I know how to use it! The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.