Hi! I think about the past year, and only random notes come to mind. Sometimes, it's better that way...
"A Simple Guide to Mesa 2" was started by me and Jim Larson. By the best of my recollection, the first page was uploaded on September 21, 1997. It started as "An Idiot's Guide to Mesa 2," but Jim suggested that not everyone would understand my tongue-in-cheek humor. The title was changed after about four hours on the Web.
The early versions of this site were a mixture of MScript and opinion. All of the extra stuff was added as gravy, especially once this site started getting a lot of exposure.
This site is maintained by me, Michael Semon. Jim is happy with me and this site. He remains a steadfast OS/2 advocate and responds to all of the good threads in the comp.os.os2.* newsgroups on Usenet. Therefore, you won't read his posts very often :-(
"A Simple Guide to Mesa 2" was meant to be a magnet for Mesa 2 information. I hoped it would be a nice place to discuss Mesa 2. I hoped somebody would catch my bad writing style and make a better Mesa 2 site than this one. Everything happened as planned, except nobody tried to replace this site. However, this site gets plenty of hits, and nobody has complained. This is a good thing.
If you look around this site, you'll see workbooks that have been contributed by Mesa 2 users. These are more than just token workbooks. The people who wrote them asked for input and wanted them to be useful.
These people worked hard to make some very unique workbooks good for general tasks on generic OS/2 machines. For instance, Judith Russell needed to leave out some details that were specific to working with her classroom. Dwight Miller wanted to change his REXX script so it would work without the need for 4OS2. And so on...
I hope you'll appreciate the effort and talent of these people.
People have written to me with Mesa 2 questions because they don't want to bother Sundial Support. This is fine by me. I ask people to go to Sundial when I can't answer the tough questions, anyway.
I'm not a Sundial employee, so I can't look at the source code or technical notes. However, I can answer many questions you might have. I'd like to continue this silent tradition.
There's a lot of REXX on this site and in the workbooks. This was an accident. I was hoping for a well-rounded approach here, but it was the REXX that gained all of the interest. This site is led by mob rule, and that's the way REXX retained prominence here.
The lack of a well-rounded scope doesn't bother me much. REXX is a fine language, and the way it works has been consistent with its fine documentation. I wish all programming languages were that way.
Special thanks to to the following people:
If you've written to me or linked to this site, thanks! You give exposure and respect to this place.