Rest In Peace

"De mortuis nil nisi bonum"
(About the dead [say] nothing but good)

Some of my favorite software has been killed off or dying a slow painful death:

Tritus SPF

Tritus SPF can no longer be purchased and the company has gone out of business.
VX-REXX

I saw this post on comp.lang.rexx:
Title: VX-REXX
Author: "Glenn Holmer"
Date: Sun, 01 Mar 98 11:25:49 +0600

For those who are interested, I just received a letter from Sybase which says, in part:
"Based on extremely low demand for VX-REXX, we have made a decision to discontinue sales of VX-REXX. This letter is a follow-up to the April 1996 announcement in which we indicated that there were no plans to develop any new releases of the VX-REXX products."
OS/2

IBM keeps OS/2 limping along. It's not dead but it's no longer a contender on the desktop. Many banks and other companies run OS/2 to this day. In the early 1990's OS/2 was superior to Windows 3.0 but since there were hardly any applications and IBM couldn't market it. OS/2 was hard to configure which didn't help matters. When Microsoft came out with Windows 95, the first decent version of Windows, the game was already over. Sigh.

The Enigma: Apple

When I started this page, Apple was considered to be dying a slow death. Then one of the co-founders, Steve Jobs, came back to run the company. He introduced the iMac and the best line of laptops in the industry. They have the comparable market share that BMW has in the car industry. No one things BMW should just give up and Apple won't either.

Rex Widmer - d. 14-Jan-1999 - The MVS community has suffered a great loss with the untimely death of Rex Widmer. I knew him mostly through emails and posts on the IBM-Main mailing-list/newgroup but was lucky to have caught one of his sessions at SHARE. I can't put any better than this post on the IBM-Main mailing-list/newsgroup by Giliad Wilf:

As a distinguished authority on language translators & LE/390 issues, which are a constant source of headaches to all of us, Rex has always been of great help, good advice, and valuable hints.

His death is a grave loss to our community.

I can only add this: No one is really dead so long as the people who remember him still live.

It's also a shame that the creator of the (blatant commericial mode) Edge Portfolio Analyzer (end of blatant commericial mode) and IMNSHO "the world's leading authority on MVS load modules" - who has helped so many of us prepare for the Year 2000, didn't live to see the Year 2000. R.I.P. REX