EComStation

eComStation or eCS is an operating system based on OS/2 Warp for the 32-bit x86 architecture. It was originally developed by Serenity Systems and Mensys BV under license from IBM. It includes additional applications, and support for new hardware which were not present in OS/2 Warp. It is intended to allow OS/2 applications to run on modern hardware, and is used by a number of large organizations for this purpose. By 2014, approximately thirty to forty thousand licenses of eComStation had been sold. Financial difficulties at Mensys in 2012 led to the development of eComStation stalling, and ownership being transferred to a sister company named XEU.com (now known as PayGlobal Technologies BV), who continue to sell and support the operating system. The lack of a new release since 2011 was one of the motivations for the creation of the ArcaOS OS/2 distribution. Version 1 of eComStation, released in 2001, was based around the integrated OS/2 version 4.5 client Convenience Package for OS/2 Warp version 4, which was released by IBM in 2000. The latter had been made available only to holders of existing OS/2 support contracts; it included the following new features (among others) compared to the final retail version of OS/2 (1996's OS/2 Warp version 4): IBM-supplied updates of software and components that had shipped with the 1999 release of OS/2 Warp Server for e-business, but had not been made available to users of the client version. Key among these were the and the logical volume manager. Operating system features and enhancements that had been made available as updates but never offered as an install-time option. These included an updated kernel, a 32-bit TCP/IP stack and associated networking utilities, a firewall, updated drivers and other system components, newer versions of Java, SciTech SNAP Graphics video support, and more. IBM-supplied updates that had previously only been offered to customers with maintenance contracts, such as UDF support and a new USB stack. eComStation provided a retail channel for end users to obtain these updates.