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The Return of OS/2 Warp Set For 2016 (techrepublic.com)

Posted by timothy on from the also-the-return-of-velcro-shoes dept.

An anonymous reader writes: We all know the ill-fated history of IBM's OS/2 Warp, while some others may not know about the first OS/2-OEM distribution called eComStation. Now a new company called Arca Noae, not happy with the results of this last distribution, has signed an agreement with IBM to create a new OS/2 version. They announced a new OS, codenamed "Blue Lion," at Warpstock 2015 this last October; this will be based on OS/2 Warp 4.52 and the SMP kernel. The OS/2 community has taken this news with positivism and the OS2World community is now requesting everybody that has developed for OS/2 on the past to open source their source code to collaborate.

5 of 262 comments (clear)

  1. Re:WTF is "positivism"? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

    I suppose it means they'll believe it when they see it.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positivism

  2. Re:WTF is "positivism"? by xxxJonBoyxxx · · Score: 5, Insightful

    So...some company signed a distribution agreement with IBM to revive an old operating system and the OS/2 community reacted by taking up philosophy instead of developing or porting any software? Seems about par for the course to me.

  3. Re:Change the interface! by drinkypoo · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Perhaps your recollection isn't very good at all, because OS/2 2.0+'s user interface with the object-oriented Workplace Shell was a triumph,

    What? I used 2.1, 3.0, and 4.0, and all of them had shit UI. The defaults were all insane and made you use more buttons for no reason. The GUI elements were all oversized, too, so they wasted screen real estate. OS/2 was contemptuous of computing resources, because it came from the IBM mindset that anything worth doing is worth spending a lot of money on. When Open Source Unixlikes became a thing, it had no more reason to exist.

    --
    "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
  4. Re:Its done put a fork in it by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

    Yeah, I'm not sure what the point of OS/2 would be at this time.

    Because it's an OS that doesn't have systemd?

  5. The ill-fated history of IBM's OS/2 Warp .. by nickweller · · Score: 3, Insightful

    July 1991: 'SteveB went on the road to see the top weeklies, industry analysts. The meetings included demos of Windows 3.1 (pen and multimedia included), Windows NT, OS/2 2.0 including a performance comparison to Windows and a "bad app" that corrupted other applications and crashed the system".'

    'The demos of OS/2 were excellent, crashing the system had the intended effect -- to FUD OS/2 2.0. People paid attention to this demo and were often suprised to our favor. Steve positioned it as -- OS/2 is not "bad" but from a performance and "robustness" standpoint, it is NOT better than Windows.' ref