OS/2 e-Zine

» see os2ezine.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

OS/2 had already lost the desktop by the time I got a modem. In 1998 it was something you met without knowing it, in a bank back office or behind the screen of a cash machine, and nobody I knew ran it at home. The people who did run it at home had a magazine, and the magazine came out on the 16th of every month for nine years.

OS/2 e-Zine started in November 1995 out of Halifax, Nova Scotia, published by Haligonian Media and edited by Trevor Smith. It was web-native from the first issue, which is worth saying for 1995, and it was also packaged as a downloadable ZIP so you could read it offline on a dial-up bill. The first issue weighed 222 kilobytes. By 2004 some of them were running past three megabytes.

What filled it was reviews, mostly. Somebody had got a scanner working under Warp and wrote up how. Somebody had ported a mail client. IBM had effectively stopped promoting OS/2 to consumers by the late nineties, so the magazine spent its whole second half covering a platform that was being kept alive by its own users and by Serenity Systems, who shipped eComStation out of the same codebase.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ who made it ~

Falcon Networking took the magazine over in 1998, along with the OS/2 Supersite, and Chris Wenham came in as editor. The last editor in chief was Isaac Leung, an electrical engineer who had met OS/2 1.3 on a summer job at IBM and never left. The masthead on the final issue reads like a list of time zones rather than a staff. John Bijnens wrote from a technical university in Belgium, and AL du Pisani's address sat on a South African bank's domain. Every contact on that page is a personal mailbox at Yahoo or at somebody's employer, obfuscated in JavaScript against the spam harvesters of 2004.

~ the last issue ~

There is no farewell in it. The December 2004 issue opens with Leung thanking readers for their patience, explaining that his personal life had been busy and OS/2 had taken a back seat, and then arguing that what the platform needed was not more applications but content for the ones it had. The rest of the issue is a review of Enigmail and part six of a case study on rebuilding the magazine's own website with PPWizard, plus a correction to an article about keyboard codepages.

The warning had been there earlier in the year. There was no April 2004 issue at all, and the May one came back under the editorial title "We're back!". After December the 16th simply stopped arriving.

~ still serving ~

The site is still up. It answers on http and nothing at all on https, which is its own kind of date stamp, and the page it serves is the December 2004 issue with the search box and the forum links intact. The header of the HTML names the tool that built it: PPWIZARD version 03.147, running on OS/2. The whole back issue index is there too, every month from November 1995 onward, with the ZIP files still downloadable.

Nine years of a magazine, and the thing it published about outlasted the publishing.

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