do you remember in the old star trekepisodes at one point captain kirk wouldalways say engines at warp speed scottyand scotty would answer back but theengines can't take it anymore captainwell ever since then the word warp hasstood for fast and powerful no surprisethen when ibm was looking for a new popname for os2 it decided to adopt theword warp is os2 fast and powerful is itmore powerful than the new windows 95we'll try to get answers to thosequestions today as we take a look at thenew os2 on this edition of the computerchronicles[Music]computer chronicles is made possible inpart by hewlett packard working withindustry leaders to ensure compatibilityacross the board and across the networkhppcs you're looking at partnership in awhole new lightadditional funding provided by the spapresenting the excellence in softwareawards march 13thhi and welcome to the computerchronicles i'm stuart chaffee and withme today is nicholas petrelli executiveeditor with infoworld labs nick welcomethank you nick i guess the issue on theminds of most users is should i try os2warp most people are using windows 31right now should i wait around and buywindows 95 we have both of them up andrunning here this is a beta version ofwind 95 os 2 warp over here give us justa brief introduction to those twointerfaces okay windows 95 is for peoplewho are sold on windows and they want torun windows applications the 95 refersto the year they expected to ship itechnologically i would call it aboutwindows 92it's more like windows 3.1 on steroidsit's based on a very easy to useinterface it's got a bunch of cascadingmenus where you select the applicationwhen you have applications running itputs it on the taskbar here so you canit's easy to go up and back from app toapp exactlyos 2 on the other hand is is moredifficult to get used to at first but ithas a more powerful desktop it's veryobject oriented in its nature built alot around things like templates whereif you want to create a new folder onyour desktopyou would drag you'd pull off a stickyfolder there and create it on thedesktopand do you drop drag and drop your itemsinto the desktop now this can be turnedinto a template so that if you're usinga template type style letteryou can tell itthat that's now it's a template so takeanything you've created make it atemplate exactlyand so you can just drag and drop thisacross and you create a new letter withthe basic properties of the first lettersame thing with the folder there aresettings you can use to change thebehavior of a folder so if you want thisto become a work areaand you have this letter open whileyou're using this folder you close thefolder and it closes the letteropen the folder it opens the letterso it restores you to whatever state youwere when you actually close that folderand you get all kinds of cool warpsounds exactly okay today we'll look atos2 warp to see what everyone's talkingabout and help you decide if you shouldconsider using warp now ibm has made alot of noise about warp trying to takeadvantage of the delay in the release ofwindows 95. we're going to start with alook at how a basically boring thinglike an operating system can become thesubject of a worldwide publicitycampaigni gotta tell you when i first heardabout kodiak island alaska the image ofhigh tech didn't exactly come to mind imean it is the second largest island inthe united states but there's almost asmany bears as there are peoplewhen ibm was ready to launch its latestversion of os2 the company's approachwas hardly low-key instead ibm mounted amassive advertising and public relationscampaign including a trip around theworld to visit os2 users and a splashynew york stage show that featuredleonard nimoy and a star trek themecomputer computer ready lock on tocoordinates for ibm senior vicepresident and group executive boblabontewhy all the noise to introduce a newversion of an existing product ibm saysthat's just what they had to counternoisewe arestillcompeting in ina market thathas a lot ofnoise aboutabout the next version of windows thathas a lot of anticipation andandwedelivered it firstand so how do you announce that in in ain an environment where there's lots ofnoisewhat do you do to tell the world we'rehere firstibm also faced the challenge ofconvincing end users that the new os2warp was not a big complicated productbetter suited for corporate andscientific work than everyday smalloffice jobs but the emphasis on ease ofuse was so effective that some peoplestarted to wonder about the new versionkind of an interestingconsequence of that is that there werethere was someperception in the market after thelaunch that that somehow it was lessthan it used to bewe were so successful atat reaching end users with a messageabout aboutthis is why it's why you want to usethis product that that some of ourourcorporate customers said now iseverything still there that used to bewhile ibm's main goal may be to showonce reluctant to users that os2 warp isnow a genuine alternative to windows thecompany also saw the windows 95 delay asa rare opportunity a chance to fill agap left wide open by microsoftwhat microsoft is doing with windows 95is creating a gap in the market you'rebasically tellingall the all the users of windows allthose 60 million users those famous 60million users thatwhat you haveisn't goodso you need something newthey're telling everybody thatso they're telling the marketwhat you have is not good enoughyou need something new and that it youknow all the market researchers callthat a chasm or a market gapand that's when things can happen that'swhen a smart competitorcan take sharefor the computer chronicles i'm gilesbateman[Music]so let's take a careful look at os2 warphere to help us is ibm's warp guru theman they call mr os2 david barneswelcome david thanksall right well we talked a little bitbefore with nick nick was a fan of os2he thought warp was pretty cool but hesaid you do have to learn how to use itso you've got to justify to me numberone why i should spend the time learningand how you make it easy for me to learnto use warp we have done a lot of thingsin this version of os2 in warp to makeit easier to use because we understoodthat and so some of the things thatwe've done that are pretty neatevery object on the screen as he hadmentioned has a pop-up menu so if youclick on anything with the right mousebutton there's a pop-up menu one of themenu items is always help so no matterwhere you are you can click with theright mouse button and get to helpin that same vein if we look into os2all of the documentation is all here onyour hard disk now you could get it offthere if you needed the room but theidea is if you happen to lose the booksthat's all right all your manuals arewith you if you want them with youeverything right now here's the neatestpart for a new user it's a tutorialthat's online and it will introduce youto every aspect of os2from how to run applications how tocustomize thingsand while you're in here now let's say iwanted to learn about changing colorshere's how you do it but i'm a windowsuser and i know how to do it in windowsif you click down here on the windowsicon it says well in os2 the controlpanel is similar to the windows colorsoption so it'll talk to you like awindows user absolutely and if you getto be really good with os2 you click onexpert and it'll teach you tips andtechniques for the special user allright so it is easy to get in there takethe tutorial figure out what you'redoing absolutely let's go to some of thebasics now david launching a program inos2 there's a couple of different waysone i could just double click on an iconi like one click and so what you can dois you can use the launchpad down hereand the launchpad puts on thosefrequently used programs for example ifi want this whole folder of informationthat i showed before i could drop itdown here put it where i wanted it andnow with one click i can open thatfolderif i wanted to put it on other parts icould actually drop it down and put iton one of these so that it's a littlebiteasier to get to there and so i have thethings on my desktop that i use normallyand i get rid of the extra thingsbecause we found out a cluttered desktopis too hard to use for a lot of users sothis makes it a little bit easier forthem all right now one thing you'redoing with warp which is kind of nicenow is you are bundling it withsomething you call the bonus pack so itcomes with a lot of capability built innot just the operating system interfacewhat's in that bonus package well beforewe show the bonus pack i want you toremember that os2 runs your dos programsand if you have windows it runs yourwindows programs and it uses realwindows so it does it really really wellright what comes along with the bonuspack our os2 programs all the way fromwell here's a fax program and i'll showyou a little bit about it in a momentperson to person which allows me to dovideo teleconferencing all packaged inhere's a multimedia viewer and what itwill allow me to do is if i want tolisten to audio now here's an audio fileon my hard disk i can just go ahead andclick on the audio file and while itplays that let me go and look at a filelet's say it's kodak cd-rom and noticethat while i did that i can go ahead andwork so even while i'm off loading onefile i can go ahead and work with thesystem and that's because os2 ispreemptive multitasking the fact that ican be doing these things and it doesn'tinterfere with my other running programsokay other things in the bonus packlet's see the multimedia that comesalong will allow me to record and playback audio and record video record videoyou can go to your local pc store buy acard off the shelf and os2 warp willprobably support it so you can berecording a video and here's the neatpart ibm worksibm works has been for sale in europefor quite a while it's a real wordprocessor spreadsheet database realapplications not little ones and it usessome of the features within os2 warp soif i've wanted to send a fax off nowhere's a fax that i've already gotaddressed to someone i know that becausei've got a little icon in the cornerthat shows it's addressed if i wanted tosay add someone else's address to it idrag and drop and i've just added asecond addressnow when i drag this over to my faxwhich happens to be in the launchpad igo off and fax the document and that'sit and that's it they're live objectsyou don't have to go in there andactually do anything the user doesn'tneed to know this is object technologybut in fact underneath the covers os2warp took the phone number out of theaddress book and put it on the documentall right lastly david one of the coolthings everybody wants to get online andget in cyber world and get onto theinternet how do you do that with warp ithink you guys are focused on that a bitwe have a lot it's called the internetconnection for os2 and what it allows meto do is with a couple of clicks of themouse put in my name address phonenumber i can use ibm's network to get onthe internet or i can use someone elseas a service provider and all of thegraphical tools from gopher in fact i'vegot a web explorer that's running rightnow so all that front end net softwareis in that bonus pack and i never haveto use a unix commandit's pretty neat and i think if you lookat everything that's packaged along withos2 warp especially the internet stuffand look at the price of this product weare definitely bundling it to try tosell masses of the product all rightlooks great thanks very much davidall right now one thing ibm is known foris its speech recognition work so it'snot surprising that one of the firstadd-ons to os2 warp is a utility thatlets you communicate with os2 using onlyyour voice here to show us voice pilotfor warp is david schlechter how youdoing david hi thank you stuart allright david we've seen a lot of uh voiceinput stuff in the past on this show anda lot of it is stuff i really wouldn'tuse to work with i might play with it uhis voice pilot in warp stuff you'dreally work with absolutely this was anapplication that we designed fromscratch to be used in the day-to-daybusiness environment not as a toy allright so let's do a demo here again yourhands aren't no mouse no keyboard okayexactly you're just going to talk to thecomputer exactly and show me some realworld practical uses of voice pilot withwork okay here we gocomputercalendaraprilnext yearlastyear this monthreview weeknext weekthursdayaddtime10o'clockend timetime1115descriptionengagemeeting periodimportant meeting with richard todiscuss our pending contracts with ibmperiod i'll stopno noi'll stopcomputer pmokayfinishedfinishedaddress bookfupdate addressaddressenter930spacemain space s tr e e tinfoengagethis is an important entry into myaddress book period i'll stopcomputer okayfinishednotepadnewengagei wanted to write a note to my dad commabut i had a bad pad period that is toobad comma because now i have a betterpad to write to my dad period i'll stopall right so let me let me talk for awhile while it's doing its thing you'redictating one word at a timebut you can go a lot faster than itappears the computer is at itsrecognition point because it's storingyour voice input catching up doing thethe analyzing and coming out with itabsolutely correct all right let's see iwanted to write a note to my dad but ihad a bad pad that is too bad becausenow i have a better had one mistake towrite to my dad pretty good 99okay what i want to ask you nowis there's something about the os2platform is there something about thatenvironment that makes this stuff workbetter is it better to do voice pilot inwarp you chose to do it in warp ratherthan a windows or a dos or whateverabsolutely it was not an accident whenwe decided to write this application weconsciously chose os2 warp because wefelt it was a much more powerfulenvironment gave us the tools to be ableto create all the things that you'veseen in this applicationin windows it would have been a muchmore difficult task to be able toaccomplish yeah i might say david barnesbefore just said he actually does usethis to dictate yes he does long memosnot short memories yes he does becausethat's the most efficiency there yesdavid thanks very much all right most ofthe world does use windows these daysand of course there's lots of softwaresupport for windows so why would you buyos2 over windows we visited a small lawfirm in san francisco and asked them thesame questionat the law firm of colette and ericksonin san francisco large picture windowsreveal spectacular views originalartwork decorates the office walls andcorridors and almost every office hassome kind of computer connected to anetworkall of the machines are dawson windowsbased all except one the network serverwhich sits on attorney john o'neill'sdesk and runs os2 warp what i found wasthatit does multitaskand i found that it had advantages notjust in[Music]not letting the network crash but also icould domore than one thing at a timei tend to do a lot of research and ihave cd-romresearch materialsthey're they're dos programsand i run those and when i launch aninquiry to search the cd-rom i'll launchthe inquiry and then go do somethingelse while it's spinning the cd-rom andlooking for the material that i've askedfor attorney o'neill was also lookingfor a way to overcome the dos 640kmemory barrier he discovered that os2warp would let him allocate as much oras little memory as he chose for windowsdos and os2 applicationswhile the operating system is slower tostart and uses over 30 megabytes of harddisk space john decided that os2'sgreater stability tipped the scales inits favornow he would like to increase the os 2presence in the office well i think it'seasier to use than windowswe haveseveral secretaries here in the officewho are used to using dasprograms onlyandwe've switched them over to windows anda lot of them have a problem with doubleclicking to invoke an icon to invoke aprogram andi can see a launchpad being very usefuland that's probably something microsoftmay come out with but for right now ithink that would be a big advantageand since we do use dos programs hereos 2 does a great job of running dosprograms for the computer chronicles i'mgiles batemanone thing we all want from our pc thesedays is better management of multimediaand fewer problems running this stuffone solution from a company called spgis a product called color works writtenfor os2 joel krautheim is here to showit to us hi joel hi i want to ask youabout multi-threading that's one of thefeatures we hear about os2 and it's ahard concept for some people tounderstand your program really takesadvantage of that in a nice waydemonstrate how color works takesadvantages advantage of multi-threadingsure be happy tolet's turn an effect on real quickbecause then you'll be able to actuallysee what's going on in this image let'spick an inversion because it's easy toseesee our circle tool is selected and whatwe'll do is we'll define a fewcircles to draw with the inversioneffect on this image you'll see that wecontinue to draw select our tools we cango off to the menu bar reconfigure ourtools with additional effects open animage send a print job basically we'regoing to test the task the task andwe're not seeing an hourglass andwaiting for something to happen exactlythat's the promise os2 is a liberationfrom thatokay beyond the what we've demonstratedhere which is singleprocessormulti-threading we can also multi-threadacross multiple processors dynamicallyon an s p computer so if you had sayfour processors in your computerand 10 megabytes with the image data toprocess color works would send two and ahalf megabytes of datasimultaneously across each cpu for a 400increase in total program performance soit's dynamically multi-threaded all theway up to 64 processors if you happen tohave that many okay show us some of theother features of color works for os2sure our toolbar is a completelyconfigurable toolbar meaning there's nopreset functions any tool can be used todraw with a color selected from thecolor palette or a custom color aneffect or any combination of currentlyin-use effects applied all at the sametime and also if you go into mask modewhich is our selection mode any drawingtool can be used as a selection tool soit's completely configurable so let'sactually show you some of our effectsyou'll see that color works has a hostof professional photo retouching effectsand withsome rather unique implementations forinstance here we're going to work on thehue channel of the image we see youprovide the visual feedbackof your in and out values rather thanjust thenumerical valuesokay if you want to overall shift thevalues within that channelyou simply hit the shift controls itmakes for a very easy manipulationof your individual red green blue cyanmagenta yellowand hlssettings in addition to color mapadjustment we do color correction yourbrightness and contrast dodging andburning now what color works dodging andburning and cloning and redo those typesof functions are effects notpre-can tools the benefit is you canapply it with any toolokay we also have a just histogram ofhuman saturation which is another uniqueimplementation with your humansaturation shifts and then you get youcan limit the actual range of originalcanvas huesthat you will shift onwe also have some unique filter labs wehave our sharpening smoothing noisereduction edge detectionand with color works these what i callmeat and potatoes image processing arefully functional laboratories withmultiple effectsor algorithms to actually perform thatsimple taskan adjustable strength whether or notyou want to process all pixels you drawover adjust those with a user setthreshold above or below and then withina certain segment of the tonal range forthis particular image shadows mid-tonesand highlights the tonal range for eachimage is set independentlyin the set tonal range so for thisparticular image this is considered yourshadows this segment is your highlighthighlights and this is your midtones sowe just compressed our mid tones rightthere for this image so the effect menucommandslook towards the set tonal range whenyou come across those types of settingsshadows maintenance highlights here'shappens to be the edge detectionmultiple methods edge detection ifinverted if you want set your tonalrangecolor which also does a texturizationyou can save your own texture files aswell asuse some of our presets make it looklike droplets of watermake it look like a a weaveet cetera colorworks also does a pixeldisplacementvery powerful stuff obviously thequestion i have again bringing this backto os2 a lot of the features you'reshowing me here in color works arereally only possible riding on top ofos2 right i mean you couldn't do some ofthe stuff in windows or even under themac correct stewart that's uh only os2's multi-threading allows us to do whatyou're seeing here all right thanks alot great productall right so what should you do shouldyou buy os2 should you wait around forwindows 95. we asked dan gilmore here togive us some answers dan is computingeditor for the san jose mercuryfirst question i have for you is as atypical user i'm running my wordprocessor my spreadsheet my databaseplaying a game do i care about thisstuff does it matter to me whether i rununder os2 or run under windowsit does the operating system is reallykey to how well your computer works soyou should carehow about your personal opinion i'vetalked to some analysts some journaliststhey love ost they think it's greatother guys say i wouldn't get near itwhat do you think i mean go through thethe good points in the background okayi'm not into the religious war aspect ofoperating systems i use it because itworks best for me right nowif windows 95 when it comes out worksbetter i'll go to that the pluses arereally very very good theserious multitasking that you get iswonderful and it's hard to go back towindows once you've experienced thatthe workplace shell i like a lot as anenvironment to work in it's nice toconfigure and the program manager inwindows by contrast is awfulthe internet access kit and the otherapplications that are bundled with itmake it a very good deal and they allwork quite well as far as i can tell onthe downside the installation is stillnot good enough it needs to be improvedthe hardware support definitely needs tobe improvedthere needs to be compression built indisk compression out of the box and likewindows itself it really should haveeight megabytes not fourwhat's the sort of bottom line advice toa typical computer user consumer i meanshould you go out and it's not thatexpensive go out and try warp is theresomething there or just sit around waitfor win 95.i think it's worth a try but i also alsowould say i wouldn't buy any brand newoperating system for a few months afterit was released anyway because i don'tlike somebody else suffer throughversion 1.0 that's rightfinally is this all about trying to getthe macintosh interface onto a pc is theis the is the windows os 2 battlefieldbattle just really trying to get thatmac ease of usein some ways yes the ease of use is veryimportant but the mac does not equal themultitasking right now in os2so there are some actual advantages allright good advice thanks a lot dan gladto be here all right that's our look atos2 warp i hope we helped a little bitin getting you to understand what theseoperating system wars are all about ifyou'd like to know more about os2 or anyof the software programs on this showdrop by our computers on televisionforum on compuserve the command is gochronicles thanks for joining us i'mstuart shafay see you here next time onthe computer chronicles