OS/2 for PowerPC had gone into its first proper beta-test phase, says IBM Corp. The ‘confidential’ beta (no we have not seen it) is said to be pretty complete, including the abilty to run iAPX-86 MS-DOS and Windows applications under emulation, the full graphical user interface, SOM, System Object Model, 2 support and so on. An IBM source said that the main areas missing from the first beta release are some network support, and OpenDoc – which is not shipping with OS/2 Warp yet anyway. The first beta release comes with a set of cross-development tools – including IBM’s Interactive Presentation Manager Debugger, MetaWare Inc’s C++ and a new set of linkers and loaders. On the networking side, the beta has limited Ethernet and Token Ring support, which will enable file transfer, but exclude full client-server connection capabilities. A second, wider beta release is planned for March or April with full networking capabilities and support for multimedia, pen, and speech. Slightly confusingly, though, IBM said OS/2 for the PowerPC will roll out as a family of products to parallel the OS/2 Warp family on the iAPX-86 system, and added: The first product shipped will be an integrated OS/2 Warp LAN client, with local area network transports (NetBIOS, Internet Packet Exchange, TCP/IP and Systems Network Architecture) and local area network requesters for LAN Server and NetWare. It will also include 3270 support, SOM objects and system management, as well as human-centred features such as speech and pen recognition capabilities. It will also include a BonusPak. This goes well beyond today’s Warp edition of OS/2 which currently lacks any form of built-in local area network support.
