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Comment by mftb | Hacker News Reader

I remember Rexx. When I first installed OS/2 to try and power my BBS one of the first things I played with was writing Rexx scripts. I was sure I was going to revolutionize the command-line! By automating Presentation Mangager or was the GUI Workplace Shell? Can't remember, but I remember Rexx!

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I've used Rexx a lot on IBM mainframes. 370 series VM/CMS. It took over from EXEC/2 as the "system interpreter" and a lot of system utilities were written in it. The email app was written in Rexx. You could write add-ons/macros to XEDIT in Rexx. The integration with everything was just awesome.

Even wrote a couple of games that ran on graphics terminals (3279???) ... my version of pacman and space invaders...

There was even this whole image processing library built over it...

Very powerful language though also very well matched to the environment and didn't carry as cleanly to others though it was nice to have it in OS/2. Clearly ahead of its time back in the day when IBM actually did cool stuff ;). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Cowlishaw

Similar here....I remember becoming a proper adult, putting my huge PC Magazine DOS Power Tools book away and getting OS/2 Warp running, playing with Rexx. You could do Presentation Manager windows and things direct from Rexx, right? It seemed pretty neat at the time.

Should have kept the DOS batch files around, for all the good it did. I missed all my non-OS/2-compatible games at home, and got hired doing Novell IT all day at work.

(It also didn't help that all the OS/2 admins at work, accountants who worked on an OS/2-based vending system, talked to us Windows / Novell admins as if we were complete morons. Fire phasers!)

Yes Warp! And that was exactly it, I was blown away to control the GUI from the command-line. Good times, similar time-frame I was first playing with Linux, but there I was just excited to get my BogoMips to scroll by, after building it.

And don't forget about ARexx which was Rexx implementation for Amiga.

All you people with your awesome HW! I recall my box just barely running OS/2, but Rexx worked fine.

My only experience with Rexx was on OS/2 trying to get my Multiprise 3000 up and running. I was very pleased that it was a plain text scripting language as the installer kept being annoying about software versions and I could just manually change the version it would accept.

lol, the other end of the HW spectrum! My i486 (could of been a 386, but not a Pentium) and I could only look on with envy!

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