SOM within IBM were in later versions of OS/2, which used it for most code, including the Workplace Shell. Object REXX for OS/2 is able to deal with SOM classes and objects including WPS. SOMobjects were not completely shut down by IBM. They were ported to OS/390, and are still available on this OS. One can read documentation on IBM website. In 1996 Tandem Computers Inc. obtained SOMobjects technology. Tandem was sold to Compaq, Compaq was sold to Hewlett-Packard. NonStop DOM and some other technologies eventually merged into NonStop CORBA, but current documentation of NonStop products does not contain signs of SOM technology still powering NonStop products. Fading away With the "death" of OS/2 in the mid-1990s, the raison d'être for SOM/DSOM largely disappeared; if users would not be running OS/2 on the desktop, there would be no universal object library anyway. In 1997, when Steve Jobs returned to Apple and ended many development efforts including Copland and OpenDoc, SOM was replaced with Objective-C already being in use in OPENSTEP (to become Mac OS X later). SOM/DSOM development faded, and is no longer actively developed, although it continues to be included and used in OS/2-based systems such as ArcaOS. Despite effective death of OS/2 and OpenDoc, SOM could have yet another niche: Windows and cross-platform development. SOM 3.0 for WinNT was generally available in December 1996. The reasons for not advancing in these directions go beyond market adoption problems. They involve opportunities missed by IBM, and destructive incompatible changes: The first version of VisualAge C++ for Windows was 3.5. It was the first and the last version to support SOM. It had SOM 2.1 bundled in and Direct-to-SOM support in the compiler. Versions 3.6.5 and later had no trace of SOM. SOMobjects largely relied on makefiles. VisualAge C++ 4.0 introduced .icc projects and removed icc.exe and ilink.exe command line compiler and linker from supply. It is impossible to build any SOM DTK sample out of box with VAC++ 4.0. VisualAge C++ comes with its own samples, but there are no .icc SOM samples even in VAC++ 4.0 for OS/2. vacbld.exe, the only command line compilation tool, doesn't support SOM. VisualAge C++ bundled-in Object Component Library (OCL) was not based on SOM. It was probably meant to be ported to SOM using C++ Direct-to-SOM mode, but in VAC v3.6.5 this mode was abandoned, and OCL has no SOM interface so far.