eComStation

» see ecomstation.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

eComStation was a commercial operating system based on OS/2 Warp 4.5, sold by Serenity Systems and Mensys BV under a license from IBM. version 1.0 shipped in July 2001, when IBM had already stopped marketing OS/2 to new buyers but had not yet dropped support. the deal let a third party keep selling a packaged, patched, hardware-aware OS/2 to the customers who refused to migrate.

the buyers were banks, ATM networks, transit ticketing systems, a small German automotive supplier base, and a long tail of home enthusiasts who had been on OS/2 since the early 1990s. by 2014 the cumulative sales were estimated at thirty to forty thousand licenses. small numbers by any modern standard, but enough to fund a small team for a decade.

os/2 enthusiasts used eComStation. that was not my crowd. in 2001 i was an engineering student running Windows 98 SE on a home PC and Slackware on a second partition for compilers. os/2 was the operating system my older relatives talked about as the one IBM should have won with. i never installed a copy. the first time i read about eComStation was years later, in a thread about why ATM networks still booted into Warp.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it actually was ~

technically eComStation was OS/2 Warp 4.52 with newer drivers, newer Java, a refreshed installer, and a curated set of open-source utilities. the underlying kernel was IBM's. the value Serenity added was hardware support, since OS/2 itself had not been updated for modern motherboards or storage controllers in years.

this was a sustaining business, not a growth one. each release made it possible to keep running OS/2 on slightly newer machines so that customers could defer the migration they did not want to do. version 2.0 in May 2010 added support for ACPI and modern SATA. version 2.1 in May 2011 was the last release that ever shipped under the eComStation name.

~ the long tail ~

Mensys ran into financial trouble in 2012 and ownership of the eComStation product transferred to XEU.com, later renamed PayGlobal Technologies. development effectively stopped after that. the user base that needed continued support fragmented. some stayed on 2.1 forever. some migrated to mainline Linux. the rest waited for whoever would pick up the IBM license next.

that role went to Arca Noae, which launched ArcaOS 5.0 in May 2017 under a fresh IBM agreement. ArcaOS is the operating OS/2 distribution today. eComStation is the bridge between the 1990s OS/2 install base and that 2017 reset. it kept a dead operating system in production for ten more years than anyone outside the bank-and-ATM circuit would have predicted.

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