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

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.

Comments

WTF is "positivism"?

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

>> The OS/2 community has taken this news with positivism

WTF is "positivism"? It sounds like a drug advertised during football games.

Re:WTF is "positivism"?

[KermodeBear]

positivism
päztivizm noun
PHILOSOPHY
1.
a philosophical system that holds that every rationally justifiable assertion can be scientifically verified or is capable of logical or mathematical proof, and that therefore rejects metaphysics and theism.
2.
the theory that laws are to be understood as social rules, valid because they are enacted by authority or derive logically from existing decisions, and that ideal or moral considerations (e.g., that a rule is unjust) should not limit the scope or operation of the law.

So Sayeth Google.

Re:WTF is "positivism"?

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

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.

Re:WTF is "positivism"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Positivism is philosophy of science that holds that true knowledge can only be derived from empirical facts using sensory input and analysed through logic.

Re:WTF is "positivism"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, come on, cite the Marxist definition, it's so much more fun:

A trend in bourgeois philosophy which declares natural (empirical) sciences to be the sole source of true knowledge and rejects the cognitive value of philosophical study. Positivism emerged in response to the inability of speculative philosophy (e.g. Classical German Idealism) to solve philosophical problems which had arisen as a result of scientific development.

https://www.marxists.org/refer...

See, a bourgeois operating system for a bourgeois philosophy.

Re:WTF is "positivism"?

[FatdogHaiku]

Introducing New Positivism

Positivism can help with feelings of negativity, despair, hopelessness and issues arising from low self esteem. Positivism is not for everyone, ask your doctor if they are stupid enough to prescribe Positivism for you. Positivism may cause sudden sexual arousal and should only be used around really good friends. Test subjects also reported uncontrollable urges to lick someone's ear. Other reported side effects include sudden explosive flatulence combined with diarrhea, random rectal bleeding, finger and or toenails turning orange, and the desire to write computer code no one will ever use. If you experience any of these side effects don't say we didn't warn you. Talk to your doctor before discontinuing Positivism. Try to see him while you have the explosive flatulence combined with diarrhea, as studies show most doctors will allow you to discontinue Positivism if you go crap up their office...

BigPharmaConglomicon
Building a better life for our upper management.

Re:WTF is "positivism"?

[0xdeaddead]

drivers in OS/2 are 16bit.

Re:WTF is "positivism"?

[arglebargle_xiv]

WTF is "positivism"? It sounds like a drug advertised during football games.

It's taken from the word "to posit", meaning "put forward for consideration", as in "I posit that no-one will give a toss about an attempt to resuscitate a decades-old 32-bit-only non-SMP OS for modern 64-bit SMP hardware".

Re:WTF is "positivism"?

[SpectreBlofeld]

It means someone meant to say 'positivity' and used the wrong word. Perhaps it's because Chrome's spell checker seems to think 'positivity' isn't a word (it's underlined in red as I type this post).

Re:WTF is "positivism"?

[tehcyder]

It means someone meant to say 'positivity' and used the wrong word. Perhaps it's because Chrome's spell checker seems to think 'positivity' isn't a word (it's underlined in red as I type this post).

They should just have written "The OS/2 community has reacted to this news positively" which has the advantage of being normal English.

Re:WTF is "positivism"?

[coldsalmon]

Logical positivism holds that "only statements verifiable either logically or empirically would be cognitively meaningful." They reject any metaphysical entities that have no basis in reality, such as "the OS/2 community."

Re:WTF is "positivism"?

[Existential Wombat]

It’s a branch of logic that Bruce is in charge of.

Re:WTF is "positivism"?

[ITRambo]

There is much truthiness to what you say.

Re:WTF is "positivism"?

[ITRambo]

Someone has to make up the new words. They don't create themselves.

Re:WTF is "positivism"?

[Dareth]

The correct "translation" may be more like "guarded optimism".

Re:WTF is "positivism"?

[angel'o'sphere]

Drivers ... the most misunderstood things on /. ... and amoung the windoofs enthusiasts.

My serial port is only one bit ... hope that helps.

Re:WTF is "positivism"?

[jeremyp]

From TFS

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.

Re:WTF is "positivism"?

[jeremyp]

Positiveness?

Positivitanity?

Negativenessless?

Re:WTF is "positivism"?

[arglebargle_xiv]

From TFS

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.

That's the /. version of the summary. The original says:

Work on correcting SMP support, among other features, is also planned.

That sounds an awful lot like "don't hold your breath".

Re:WTF is "positivism"?

[lsatenstein]

>> The OS/2 community has taken this news with positivism

WTF is "positivism"? It sounds like a drug advertised during football games.

OS2/warp was at its time, a multitasking priority preemptive scheduled operating system, that was way ahead of its time. The IBM directors never thought that the PC would take off, and so, let MS steal their business. Had IBM directors been astute, we would know of the existance of MSoft.

Re:WTF is "positivism"?

[gzuckier]

It means someone meant to say 'positivity' and used the wrong word. Perhaps it's because Chrome's spell checker seems to think 'positivity' isn't a word (it's underlined in red as I type this post).

They should just have written "The OS/2 community has reacted to this news positively" which has the advantage of being normal English.

Although once you've written "the OS/2 community" you're pretty much in undefined territory anyway.

Re:WTF is "positivism"?

[cthulhu11]

Clearly the bizarre cfengine guy is one of them

Re:WTF is "positivism"?

[Blaskowicz]

Isn't it a free-for-all where everything can overwrite or crash everything? Cool but impractical.

OS/2 was great

[Anonymous Coward]

I never used anything past Warp 3, but it was great running Win 3 software alongside OS/2. This was also stated as its biggest downfall, although this is really overplayed. I don't think any party not inclined to develop for OS/2 was influenced by this at all.

The DOS compatibility was exceptional.

Wine is really good now. I don't see this impacting Linux development in the slightest.

Re:OS/2 was great

[NotDrWho]

I remember being so blown away by OS2/Warp's ability to multi-task so many applications at once, with such a clean UI. That was in the Windows 3.11 days, before Win95 changed everything. I had a friend who migrated to OS2, and I was seriously considering it myself. But in the end, I decided to wait for Win95. I think if OS2/Warp had come out just a little earlier and gotten more promotion in non-geek circles, it may have become the dominant OS and we would be looking at a very different desktop landscape today.

Re:OS/2 was great

[dunkelfalke]

OS/2 Warp was, if anything, then a bit too early. It had steep hardware requirements (8 megabytes of RAM to run properly) when memory was very expensive.

Re:OS/2 was great

[xdor]

The OS/2 UI was completely unusable.

Mouse movement stuttered and input regularly stalled as foreground and background processes took over. While you could occasionally get the same effect in Windows 95 or Windows NT – on OS/2 it was normal operation. Hair pulling frustrating.

Re:OS/2 was great

[hey!]

I remember being so blown away by OS2/Warp's ability to multi-task so many applications at once, with such a clean UI.

As an older programmer, let me suggest one ought to be reticent about saying things like that. I know that by any reasonable standard it should make you sound experienced and therefore worth listening to, but if you have any gray in your hair it's bound to have a very different effect. Like the time I sat next to a guy at a banquet who was reminiscing about when his department got an IBM 701. "Yep," he said with evident satisfaction, "that was a stored program jobbie."

Employers are looking for programmers who were in diapers while you were being blown away by OS/2, so ixnay on that kind of alktay. Instead practice saying things like "Node.js is so 2015." And when someone asks you what you mean, turn to them, raise one eyebrow, then literally turn your back on them.

Re:OS/2 was great

[tehcyder]

OS/2 Warp was, if anything, then a bit too early. It had steep hardware requirements (8 megabytes of RAM to run properly) when memory was very expensive.

Even Windows 95 recommended 8 megabytes, although it would theoretically run on 4, if you weren't bothered about speed, usability or anything like that. The hardware wasn't really the issue.

Re:OS/2 was great

[TwoEyedJack]

For me, Warp was a love-hate thing. I loved it compared to Win 3.11 for how it ran multiple programs and made good use of memory. I hated it because of the Matrox video card driver and having so many problems with networking. Hand editing net.cfg was so fun! I worked at HP at the time, and running OS/2 at work was an exercise in courage.

Re:OS/2 was great

[freeze128]

It should work OK now....

Re:OS/2 was great

[dunkelfalke]

Well, the point is that Windows 95 was released a year later when RAM prices were lowered. And it certainly ran faster on the same hardware, even though not nearly as stable.

Re:OS/2 was great

[CanadianMacFan]

I remember that WordPerfect ran faster under OS/2 than it did under Windows. This would have been in 1994 so I don't remember what version of OS/2 that was. I always liked OS/2 but thought the UI lacked a lot of polish.

Re:OS/2 was great

[jellomizer]

was is the key word here. OS/2 has been out of commission for so long. That I don't see any benefit of starting it back up again, other than for fun. But I wouldn't expect there will be any wide acceptance. Because it will behave a lot like the old version, and be dated, or if it were updated it wouldn't be distinguished as OS/2. Compare Windows 3.1 with Windows 10 or try to release a major Desktop Linux distribution with FVWM as the default Windows manager.

Re:OS/2 was great

[jellomizer]

I think it was more due to really bad advertising from IBM. I remember OS/2 Warp Commercials, I was computer savvy enough to know OS/2 was an Operating system. Others at that time had no idea what they were trying to sell. Just a bunch of psychedelic colors and people looking amazed at the screen... Without actually showing the OS or its features.
Microsoft actually showed the product and what new features it could do, although many of such features were inferior to what OS/2 can do, people actually could see them.

Re:OS/2 was great

[thinkwaitfast]

OS/2 Warp. It will destroy your computer. By IBM.

Pretty sure that was a real commercial.

Re:OS/2 was great

[thinkwaitfast]

Funny how IBM didn't want to change that because it could have potentially led to problems like push or radio buttons being drawn on the screen after the window frame was drawn and they were afraid that might confuse people. I was thinking about this exact case last week as I watched firefox draw the screen with with exactly this effect. I wonder what those IBM people (many of whom i suspected of secretly working for Microsoft) would say to that. Maybe it was ahead of its time for the market it was going for.

Re:OS/2 was great

[Dog-Cow]

Windows 95 ran just fine on 4 MB. I did so on both 386 and 486 hardware, and it never felt particularly slow compared to the alternatives.

Re:OS/2 was great

[omnichad]

I could only imagine it's legacy proprietary software with no affordable modern equivalent. I mean, there's still DOSBox and Win3.1, but maybe this is better somehow.

Re:OS/2 was great

[Cyberax]

Win95 could run with 4Mb and was quite usable with 6Mb. Microsoft did a great job optimizing memory use (by essentially sticking with 16-bit kernel).

Re:OS/2 was great

[Greyfox]

Yeah. I was doing tech support at the time and volunteering at tech conferences and ham radio shows. We set up a Compaq quad-processor system that had an astounding 16 MB of RAM with 4 video players running side by side, at the '95 summer COMDEX. One of my demos was to format a disk and run a print job at the same time. You had to be careful how you set that one up, though. It wouldn't work if you did the format through the GUI, you had to do it from the command line.

Another problem with the OS was that it was actually multitasking but goddamn everyone wrote their apps in a single thread, and the system input queue would get stopped up. Even IBM did this -- ironically the windows version of their document viewer ran better in OS/2 than the OS/2 version did. Windows apps couldn't block the system input queue, so you could still do things with your computer when the app froze up during long processing jobs.

OS/2 was extremely advanced for its time, but under the hood it was very MIcrosoft-flavored. I started switching over to Linux almost as soon as Slakware came out. Funnily enough I could run OS/2 with it's GUI on a 16 MhZ 386SX with 4 MB of RAM, but X11 was way too slow. So my first couple years of Linux was switching between console terminals on that machine.

Re:OS/2 was great

[Darinbob]

OS/2 Warp was great. Windows at the time was junk. OS/2 would have been Windows if Microsoft hadn't abandoned the partnership and gone their own way. True, IBM wasn't the greatest of companies at times but they did have a better grasp of the big picture beyond a simplistic "make it run applications".

Re:OS/2 was great

[SQLGuru]

The year it was released, I actually did a 6-month co-op with IBM. I even got to go to COMDEX in Las Vegas that year. During the keynote (by Bill Gates) all of the IBMers were wearing shirts that said "OS2/Warp - Up and running, not up and coming". I still have that shirt (probably one of the oldest shirts I own and still occasionally wear).

Re:OS/2 was great

[jeremyp]

Win95 had a 32 bit kernel. You are thinking of the GDI which was 16 bit and was essentially identical to the Win 3.1 GDI.

Incidentally, it was all written in assembler.

Re:OS/2 was great

[jeremyp]

True, IBM wasn't the greatest of companies at times but they did have a better grasp of the big picture beyond a simplistic "make it run applications".

So it's unfortunate that "make it run applications" has always been the most successful approach.

Re:OS/2 was great

[ArhcAngel]

OS/2 has never been out of commission. It hasn't been a mainstream desktop for a while but government and banks were still using it as a desktop until recently. And bank ATM's were predominantly OS/2 until recently as well. Now I'm not sure from this story but if they are going back to an old Warp 4.x kernel then yeah it's been a long time.

Re:OS/2 was great

[Cyberax]

No, it was 16-bit. And all kernel the drivers (VxD) were also completely 16-bit. In essence, Win95 was just a very complicated DOS application. The 32-bit layer was built on top of it.

Re:OS/2 was great

[Darinbob]

Well, you could make it run applications in a smart way, or a better way. Or you could just be DOS and forget about it.

Re:OS/2 was great

[Spugglefink]

"FOSS *nix" games were doomed to a small niche before WINE, and they were doomed to a small niche before Steam. Much of what drove WINE was people who wanted to play games, because it was the one thing you just couldn't do on Linux. I never thought about Steam being responsible for the fact that there is an increasing amount of proprietary, commercial software available for Linux now, but it probably is.

I stopped playing games when I switched to Linux, because the native offerings were all half finished and most of them just sucked. I went 15 years without playing a game, because the Intel video drivers just work, and the proprietary drivers are a horrible pain in the ass. I thought it was a fair trade.

I finally bought a new NVIDIA card, waded through a day of hell to get it working, and I could finally buy stuff through Steam that would run. Holy shit, games have come a LONG way in 15 years! As a guy who has run a FOSS project for 10 or so years, I can say there is no way in hell I would ever recruit that much talent and get that much work done on a volunteer basis. There is no way in hell. People willing to volunteer usually aren't that talented, and then there are the personalities. If I tried to get one of these games written with a volunteer team, it would end up forked at least six times, and everybody would wrestle and argue and yell at each other, and 10 years after the project's inception, it would still be little more than a proof of concept demo.

On the other side of that coin, Steam's existence probably explains why I am able to buy and run so much commercial software for Linux now. The FOSS community had 15 years to get this stuff done, and it doesn't exist. I enjoy having the option to stay on Linux, take a crowbar to my wallet occasionally, and get work done.

Re:OS/2 was great

[gzuckier]

For me, Warp was a love-hate thing. I loved it compared to Win 3.11 for how it ran multiple programs and made good use of memory. I hated it because of the Matrox video card driver and having so many problems with networking. Hand editing net.cfg was so fun! I worked at HP at the time, and running OS/2 at work was an exercise in courage.

OS/2 is another example of the apparent axiom that the market will adopt the lesser of any two or more competing technologies. (i.e. windows). for instance, vhs; ibm PC architecture, and its corollary intel CPU, ms-dos , audio cassettes, 18 khz subcarrier FM radio, NTSC color TV, 40khz audio CD, etc.

Fools!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll stick with my Amiga, thank you.

Re:Fools!

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

In Soviet Russia, Amiga, er, Amiga sticks to, um...well, you play a shit-ton of Tetris on it anyway!

Re:Fools!

[RabidReindeer]

Lemmings Thankyouverymuch!

Re:Fools!

[Dog-Cow]

In Soviet Russia, whoosh flies over you!

Re:Fools!

[khelms]

Ooooh, Lemmings! I loved that game series!

My goodness, what fortuitous timing!

[kheldan]

Draconic, fascist Windows 10 comes out and Microsoft proceeds to try to force it down everyone's throat, and out of left field comes, after what seems like a geologic age, a new version of OS/2. Wow. Not sure what to think of that timing.

Re:My goodness, what fortuitous timing!

[Ol Olsoc]

Draconic, fascist Windows 10 comes out and Microsoft proceeds to try to force it down everyone's throat, and out of left field comes, after what seems like a geologic age, a new version of OS/2. Wow. Not sure what to think of that timing.

This was prophesised in Revelations.

Lo, and the huge and evil beast with 10 horns was smote by the small usurper, bent over twice in rebirth, and cast out of the heavens into the fiery pit.

Yea and verily, not until this comes to pass shall the chip be righted, and a thousand years of peace come to pass.

Re:My goodness, what fortuitous timing!

[LichtSpektren]

The chances of OS/2 achieving a significant binary compatibility with Windows NT, or even make a dent in Windows 10's usershare, is unlikely. If you want that to happen, contribute to ReactOS. OS/2 will likely just be used to replace a few ATMs.

Re:My goodness, what fortuitous timing!

[kheldan]

'contribute'

I think I'm done paying for any OS, and I have no interest in 'donating' money either, as if I have any to spare anymore. I've got an old P4 laptop I got for free that's still running XP, I think I'll be picking out a Linux distro of some sort and learning how to use that, then when I build a new desktop finally I'll be all ready to load it up with that. The one or two pieces of software that I need to use that only have Windows versions will run just fine under WINE, from what I'm told.

Re:My goodness, what fortuitous timing!

[squiggleslash]

Don't get too excited, it probably means, like Windows 10, GNOME, and Unity, they're going to graft a hybrid tablet+desktop UI onto OS/2 as well...

Re:My goodness, what fortuitous timing!

[gzuckier]

Don't get too excited, it probably means, like Windows 10, GNOME, and Unity, they're going to graft a hybrid tablet+desktop UI onto OS/2 as well...

I for one welcome our new OS/2 smartphone overlords.

OS/2 is still alive?

[grimmjeeper]

I remember 2.0 back in about 92 or 93 and it was alright but not really special. And then it pretty much died. I can't imagine there are any significant projects still using it. Though I'll probably be told about several who never gave up on it. After all, there are still projects running Motif...

Re:OS/2 is still alive?

[91degrees]

It was used by banks. No idea if any of them are still using it. It's probably lurking in a few ATMs still.

Re:OS/2 is still alive?

[interval1066]

Yeah, I used 2.0 about that time. I liked it, and REXX was very powerful, a very good scripting language. But, yeah, time to move on I think. OS/2 is relegated to neckbeard's still maintaining their Amigas and C/64 machines playing block/character graphics games.

Re:OS/2 is still alive?

[Jahta]

I remember 2.0 back in about 92 or 93 and it was alright but not really special. And then it pretty much died. I can't imagine there are any significant projects still using it. Though I'll probably be told about several who never gave up on it. After all, there are still projects running Motif...

Well quite a few big companies bought into and built their own apps on it. And IBM of course continued to ship apps for OS/2. And there has also been a loyal geek user base which has ported a fair amount of open source projects to the platform. It is Posix compliant so porting isn't that difficult.

I must say, I liked OS/2 - especially Warp. It ran well on the hardware of the day and was way better than Windows. But IBM weren't as smart at marketing as Microsoft!

Re:OS/2 is still alive?

[operagost]

I remember 2.0 back in about 92 or 93 and it was alright but not really special.

Being able to preemptively multitask DOS, 16-bit Windows and 32-bit OS/2 apps was pretty special in 1992. And an object-oriented GUI was pretty much exclusive to OS/2 for some time.

Re:OS/2 is still alive?

[Peter H.S.]

OS/2 is relegated to neckbeard's still maintaining their Amigas and C/64 machines playing block/character graphics games.

I really don't think so. The commercial interest in OS/2 isn't in desktop use or retro computing, but embedded and industrial appliances where OS/2 thrived years after the general public had forgotten it.

This new release is about protecting investments in such OS/2 based equipment.

Re:OS/2 is still alive?

[RogueyWon]

My school had some systems that ran on it in the mid-90s. It also, after the member of staff who brought it in left, had nobody who knew how to use it. Our IT "teachers" were elderly Catholic priests teaching from a series of worksheets that basically had step-by-step instructions on "how to save a document in Word" and so on. There were no dedicated IT support staff, only an off-site support contractor.

I ended up teaching myself to use it and doing a few admin-type jobs for the school, in exchange for a tacit agreement that I'd be excused from the pathetic IT "lessons" and, once I moved into the 6th Form (ages 16-18 for non-UK readers) from Religious Education. Pretty good deal, although I've never used an OS/2 system since I graduated.

Re:OS/2 is still alive?

[U2xhc2hkb3QgU3Vja3M]

Amigas and C/64 machines playing block/character graphics games.

Amiga, block/character games? You obviously haven't grown up with computers from that era, because the C/64 had graphics that were way ahead of the other similar 8-bit computers and the Amiga had the best graphics of them all. The competition at the time was the Color Computer 2, the TI-99/4A, the PC with either Hercules, CGA or EGA graphics, the Mac with black and white graphics or the Atari ST with much fewer colours on the screen.

Both the C/64 and the Amiga were king of their own class of computers. That is, until Commodore sat on their asses and everybody passed way ahead of them.

Fight for your bitcoins!

Re:OS/2 is still alive?

[gstoddart]

Well, yeah, it really didn't catch on.

And that was pretty much Microsoft changing their core APIs to ensure OS/2 broke as much as possible. I think the old saying was "Windows aint done until Lotus won't run", even if it was just a myth.

Which is really a shame, because while Windows was a still a crappy OS without real hardware-level preemptive multi-tasking, crap resource management, and an inability to actually use all of its memory, OS/2 was a pretty solid operating system which didn't let a single crashing application crash the whole damned computer like Windows did. OS/2 was light years ahead of Windows at the time.

But then a bunch of us found Linux and got all that for free.

However, I'm not really surprised it's still entrenched in enough places people still want it; technology which works never really goes away. How often do we still see IBM terminal emulators hooked up to a mainframe?

Obviously people are still using it, even if it is old and busted. Because like any legacy platform, it's often amazingly difficult to get away from it without spending huge amounts of money to get a system which doesn't work a fraction as well.

Re:OS/2 is still alive?

[myowntrueself]

Yeah, I used 2.0 about that time. I liked it, and REXX was very powerful, a very good scripting language. But, yeah, time to move on I think. OS/2 is relegated to neckbeard's still maintaining their Amigas and C/64 machines playing block/character graphics games.

You mean like Minecraft?

Re:OS/2 is still alive?

[grimmjeeper]

So tell me what was so special about it? I ran it on my desktop for going on a year but gave up on it. Sure, it had preemptive multitasking before Windows NT came out. But so what? It was bloated and slow, in large part because IBM paid Microsoft to design a lot of it while paying them per SLOC. And paying your primary competitor per line of code to write your operating system can't end well. Was it the object oriented API? So what? Again, it made the system bloated and slow. OS/2 may have had a few features in place before Windows but it was really horribly done and rightfully never took off.

Re:OS/2 is still alive?

[grimmjeeper]

I think the old saying was "Windows aint done until Lotus won't run"

I had heard the "Windows ain't done until Novell won't run" as well. Microsoft went out of their way to build in incompatibilities that broke all of their competitors. There's no myth about that. It just gets swept under the rug.

Re:OS/2 is still alive?

[RabidReindeer]

I liked OS/2 - especially Warp. It ran well on the hardware of the day

As long as it wasn't Enterprise-grade Dell or Compaq running their proprietary disk controllers.

But some day the scars will heal, I know they will.

Re:OS/2 is still alive?

[RabidReindeer]

The object-oriented GUI was one of the few bright stars in an otherwise dismal system. To this day, I don't know of another OS whose desktop system allows you to open directory windows that are customized to show one particular type of object the way that the Warp desktop could. I think that maybe the Mac Finder desktop had some similar capability, but nothing modern that I know of.

Re:OS/2 is still alive?

[grimmjeeper]

Microsoft hired most of the DEC/VMS team to write it.

Re:OS/2 is still alive?

[Solandri]

OS/2 1.3 used to run a lot of ATMs, until machines running Windows began replacing them in the 2000s. Coincidentally, that's when a lot of hacks to steal money from the ATMs started.

Re:OS/2 is still alive?

[ananamouse]

I loved being able to voice dictate a letter on a 486 while goobing chewing tobacco.

Re:OS/2 is still alive?

[DarkOx]

Guys, the actual quote was 'DOS ain't done until Lotus won't run' and that was in reference to Lotus 123.

Re:OS/2 is still alive?

[tlhIngan]

Being able to preemptively multitask DOS, 16-bit Windows and 32-bit OS/2 apps was pretty special in 1992. And an object-oriented GUI was pretty much exclusive to OS/2 for some time.

OS/2 is a special OS - because unlike modern OSes designed for portability, it's one of the few that exploited a lot of x86 specific features. That's how it could not only intermingle 16 bit DOS, Windows and OS/2 apps together, but OS/2 1.x was actually a 16-bit OS. Later versions moved to 32-bit, but had the capability of running drivers in 16-bit mode.

And not just run them, run them pre-emptively. Remember formatting a floppy disk in Win9x and how it would stall out your PC? That was because the Windows 9x kernel called into the BIOS to do that, and when it did, it went to a 16-bit DOS VM to do so (this was how Windows 9x could run DOS drivers as a compatibility mode), but doing so halted the scheduler. Since formatting a floppy disk was a BIOS call, that meant the OS was stalled out into the BIOS.

NT based kernels didn't have this problem because the NT OS has its own 32-bit routines for formatting a floppy disk, which meant the scheduler kept running.

OS/2 did one better - it not only could do this, but it kept the scheduler running as well, which meant the system not only wouldn't stall out, but you could mix in ancient drivers with modern drivers and the system would still be functional. And unlike the terribleness that happened when Microsoft tried to do WDM in WinME, mixing drivers in OS/2 didn't result in the stability or huge performance penalties that Windows had.

So yeah, having a device that would basically never go obsolete since even the oldest of drivers still worked in the newest of OSes... (might be a challenge now since x64 can't run 16-bit code...).

Re:OS/2 is still alive?

[rickb928]

First applied to WordPerfect. Though WP died when Windows incorporated print drivers and Word actually did have an advantage there.

Re:OS/2 is still alive?

[thinkwaitfast]

What else could you buy at the time that had preemptive multitasking? That was pretty special. You didn't have to write your app specifically to cooperate with every other program on the system. And the hardware requirements were no worse than NT which wouldn't even be out for a couple years. The GUI was far superior. The original nt had the same win3 gui and didn't get a win95 gui until 96 or 97.

Re:OS/2 is still alive?

[thinkwaitfast]

from a system's perspective, it's relatively easy to make sure that certain code won't run, even without resorting to

if ( strncmp(argc, "123" ) exit(2);

Re:OS/2 is still alive?

[afidel]

A little over 10 years ago I did a project for IBM where we took a PS/2 running OS/2 and a Netvista running Windows and replaced the HDD and doubled the ram in the Netvista and the new image ran OS/2 in MS VirtualPC 1.0. The client was a large mortgage originator and the cost to build and certify a replacement package in all 50 states was going to be into the 8 figure range so continuing to run OS/2 was by far the cheaper solution.

Re:OS/2 is still alive?

[grimmjeeper]

What else could you buy at the time that had preemptive multitasking?

System V/386 Unix if you wanted to stay on PC hardware, or any of a number of Unix boxen being sold at the time. Or if you don't like Unix, you could always go with IBM, VAX/VMS, etc. It just depended on your needs/budget.

But quite honestly, the real world effects of cooperative multitasking weren't as horrible as the hype would suggest. A vast majority of people hardly noticed the difference because they really didn't (and still don't) work on more than one thing at a time. And cooperative multitasking was more than adequate for the types of work people were doing in Windows. Power users would notice the difference but a lot of them were still doing their real work on big iron back then.

Re:OS/2 is still alive?

[drinkypoo]

(might be a challenge now since x64 can't run 16-bit code...).

It can't? It could originally. It was capable of switching all the way down into a mode that would support it.

Re:OS/2 is still alive?

[styrotech]

What else could you buy at the time that had preemptive multitasking? That was pretty special.

An Amiga? Sure it didn't have memory protection (ie Guru Meditations) but it did have preemptive multitasking.

Re:OS/2 is still alive?

[Greyfox]

Yeah, the saying at the time was that Commodore couldn't market eternal life if they had sole rights. Business viewed the Amiga as a toy or a gaming system, not something you did business on. There are probably still some people out there using them for video processing.

Re:OS/2 is still alive?

[styrotech]

But, yeah, time to move on I think. OS/2 is relegated to neckbeard's still maintaining their Amigas and C/64 machines playing block/character graphics games.

I'm still pissed they never finished the PowerPC version!

(Nah not really. I'm just making that up)

Re:OS/2 is still alive?

[grimmjeeper]

(might be a challenge now since x64 can't run 16-bit code...).

Since when?

Re:OS/2 is still alive?

[angel'o'sphere]

You forget that Windows NT and OS/2 where under the hood of the GUI the same code base.

But MS suddenly ... as so often ... considered it better to destroy "the competition" even if it was the company they had a partnership with.

I wonder when M$ finally gets it ....

Most IBM hardware runs: Unix (either natively, or in VMs on hosts)
Android is: Unix (Linux)
Macs run: Unix
iOs is: Unix
Linux is: Unix

The only majour OS that is not Unix is Windows (facepalm)

The majority of smart phones runs: Unix.

^D

Re:OS/2 is still alive?

[Skuld-Chan]

There's a reason you'd want to emulate an Amiga or a C64 - there are some cool games you can play on it.

One problem with OS/2 is it ran all the same apps that Windows did - other than vertical markets (like ATM's, zOS management etc) OS/2 had the exact same apps Windows does.

Sure OS/2 was more reliable than Windows 3.1 or Windows 95 (when OS/2 Warp shipped), but with Windows NT that all changed.

Re:OS/2 is still alive?

[gzuckier]

OS/2 is relegated to neckbeard's still maintaining their Amigas and C/64 machines playing block/character graphics games.

I really don't think so. The commercial interest in OS/2 isn't in desktop use or retro computing, but embedded and industrial appliances where OS/2 thrived years after the general public had forgotten it.

This new release is about protecting investments in such OS/2 based equipment.

didn't ATMs run OS/2?

Re:OS/2 is still alive?

[Peter H.S.]

ATM's, industrial and medical appliances etc. No personal experience with embedded OS/2, but apparently it was very attractive to use for making GUI's with often critical data input, combined with running on x86 and PPC boards that made it easy to develop for. The underlining OS technology, like the kernel was without doubt the best and most stable running on x86 for quite some time.

You're so mainstream

[Anonymous Coward]

It's some very nuanced shit somewhere between nouveau-modernism and post-primitive relativism that is popular in New York. It has to be viewed through thick black glasses while sipping PBR and smoking American Spirits.

I'd tell you more about the movement, but at 42, I can't skateboard as fast as I used too.

Gotta get home!

Change the interface!

[Aethedor]

Cool! Hopefully they change the interface to a more modern one. Because no matter how good the underlying kernel and system is, it will totally ruin the overall experience for sure.

Re:Change the interface!

[fnj]

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, with superlative user and programming documentation. I can't think of anything modern that betters or even equals it. OS X? Not even close. Windows XP, 7, 8, 10? Bah. GNOME? Sorry Charlie.

Re:Change the interface!

[Aethedor]

That's fine, but it still looks like Windows 3.11. Only OS/2 diehards will accept such an interface. I tell you: stick with this Windows 3.11-like interface and it will fail, again.

Re:Change the interface!

[U2xhc2hkb3QgU3Vja3M]

I'd still take the Windows 3.11-like interface than the default Fisher-Price look of Windows XP.

Fight for your bitcoins!

Re:Change the interface!

[drinkypoo]

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.

Re:Change the interface!

[Anonymous Coward]

Sort of like Windows 8 then...

Re:Change the interface!

[The Grim Reefer]

Only OS/2 diehards...

I believe they prefer to be called "Team OS/2" ;-)

Re:Change the interface!

[CanadianMacFan]

It may have been technically great but it looked terrible and clunky even compared to Windows 3.1. I'm not a fan of Windows (any version) because I'm constantly fighting with the interface. I didn't have that problem with OS/2 but it really needed some polish.

Re:Change the interface!

[CanadianMacFan]

Yes because the most intuitive thing when I want to STOP my computer is to press the START button. It only became intuitive because we got used to it. At first there was a lot of confusion and jokes make.

Re:Change the interface!

[omnichad]

Not really. There was actually a recognizable power symbol on the start screen. Or was that only 8.1? I seem to remember having to hit Win+I once or twice to power off a machine, but I never used 8.0 to any significant degree.

Re:Change the interface!

[bws111]

Huh? The icon in the system tray with a big red 'X', that when moused over said 'Initiate OS/2 Shutdown' was not obvious? Or even just Ctrl-Alt-Del (ok, that actually did a reboot, but you could just kill the power when the BIOS screen came up).

Re:Change the interface!

[angel'o'sphere]

no idea about your opinion regarding OS X etc.
However the parent is an idiot, so your rectification is valid ;D

Re:Change the interface!

[angel'o'sphere]

You are obviously not aware about the millions of Win 95 users, who could not shut down their PCs after installing Win 95, because it had no shut down option at all?

They used to cold switch of the PC. That includes me (Mac user that time) ...

Because: who the fuck would come to the idea to click on "START" to shut down?

I guess if you look back in /. stories that was a big thing on /. ... I was a /. reader at that time already (or a year later, don't remember)

So? Your point was? You need a "START Menu" to shut down a computer? Uh ... oh ...

Re:Change the interface!

[Reziac]

I briefly ran Warp 3... briefly because

1) It wasn't useful without running Windows on top of it so I'd have some reasonable array of apps, and the exact same app doing the exact same task not only used 4x the memory it did in plain Windows, and ran at about 1/4th the speed, it was also much more likely to freeze up. And any task that was prone to exhaust resources in Windows (which was generally recoverable if one closed the offending app) could be relied upon to crash Warp.

2) When (not if) Warp crashed, it was prone to nuke something it required to boot. I've forgotten the details, but I found a reference to the exact cause in the manual (so it was a known issue!), and tho getting it bootable again was an easy fix it was also tiresome to have to do it every other day.

So after a few days of this it was marked FAIL, and I went back to DOS/Windows. OS/2 must have merit as an embedded OS, or it wouldn't have any traction there in the first place. But it was no mystery to me why it never caught on as a desktop.

Re:Change the interface!

[toddestan]

In Windows 8 you had open the start screen, move the mouse to bottom right (I think) to get the charms bar to come up, at which point you can pick Settings, and in the settings screen there was a power icon which you could then use to shut the computer down. Windows 8.1 added the power icon on the start screen, as well as the shutdown option in the right-click menu on the start button.

At least in Windows 8, there was basically no chance of an accidental shutdown. Can't really say the same for Windows Vista and 7.

Re:Change the interface!

[omnichad]

You didn't have to have the start screen open to get to the charms bar. The same gesture worked on the desktop (or Win+C). Win+I was a direct keyboard shortcut to bring up the settings submenu off the charms bar.

Re:Change the interface!

[sad_]

I agree with this.

Was a heavy OS2 Warp user at the time because i had a multinode BBS and it basically the best OS you could have for this kind of environment. There was also DesqView, but that didn't work as well as OS2.

That said, the GUI was horrible, just horrible. I never could quite understand why people keep on going on about the wonderful OS2 GUI. It really wasn't. In fact at the time, a lot of other sysops who also ran OS2 just disabled the whole graphical environment (to save memory, but also because it was not very good).

Re:46:37 Says It All

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

OK, I'll bite. It looked like the audience from a gun show, crammed into a hotel that Murph and the Magic Tones might consider turning down. What did you see?

"Positivism"?

[LichtSpektren]

Surely the submitter meant "positively", because the actual word printed in TFS indicates that the OS/2 community is taking this news in by interpreting the sensory phenomenon of its announcement using deductive logic.

I liked OS/2

[Peter H.S.]

The release is probably mostly for embedded use where OS/2 had quite some use since it was so much better and stable than contemporary MS Windows.

I quite liked OS/2 in its time and found it very superior to contemporary Windows versions.

Re:I liked OS/2

[drinkypoo]

OS/2 ran Windows programs without a hiccup.

Sure, if you installed Windows 3.1 inside of it so that it had the required files. You needed both operating systems, and Windows compatibility was provided by basically running Windows inside of OS/2... which meant your machine had to have the balls to do both at once. Fine for the people who had got one of the shiny new clock-doubled 486s out there, not so fine for 386 users with 4MB RAM.

Re:46:37 Says It All

[OakDragon]

I've always said, where is the OS for the Transgendered African-American-Polynesian Differently-abled community?

Still In Use

[Tempest_2084]

I work for one of the big three car companies, and OS/2 Warp was just recently retired. It may still be in use at a few plants for specific tasks though. PC-DOS is still going strong though.

Re:Still In Use

[squiggleslash]

Yeah, me too, the only place we use OS/2 is for the emissions test detection system code we embed in each car's computer so we can adjust engine performance during emissions testing.

small company, not IBM

[NostalgiaForInfinity]

RTFA, this isn't IBM releasing a new version of OS/2, it's a small company that has gotten a license for OS/2 and is making a release. OS/2 is still as dead as it has been for years.

if the production value of the YouTube announcement linked to above is any indication, this is a tiny company run by people who are a little out of touch with current tech.

Digging up some history...

[QuietLagoon]

IBM chief: Microsoft killed OS/2

The deposition and testimony provided by Garry Norris - IBM's chief negotiator with Microsoft before and after the introduction of Windows 95 - has provided a cornucopia of fascinating evidence in the Microsoft trial. Much of it was previously unknown or unconfirmed. His evidence showed how Microsoft effectively controlled IBM's PC hardware and software businesses by making the price of Windows considerably higher than for other comparable PC makers. Mr Norris described in detail to Philip Malone, counsel for the Department of Justice, five cases where Microsoft had succeeded in modifying, or had attempted to influence, IBM's choice of ...

Re:Digging up some history...

[UnknownSoldier]

Interesting read. That is also (more) proof that hardware without software is essentially useless.

--
Microsoft Windows 10: A 64-bit compilation of 32 bit extensions and a graphical shell for a 16 bit patch to an 8 bit operating system originally coded for a 4 bit microprocessor written by a 2 bit company that can't stand 1 bit of competition with 0 bit of understanding good UI.
(Yes, I know Windows 7 is WinNT 6.1. Windows 8 is WinNT 6.2, Windows 8.1 is WinNT 6.3, and Windows 10 is WinNT 10.0, all which have been 32-bit from the beginning.)

Re:Digging up some history...

[ameline]

I worked at IBM at the time (I designed and wrote a good chunk of the C/C++ compiler back-end used for OS/2), and this is quite true -- but it was aided and abetted by IBMs inability to sell OS/2 outside their traditional corporate markets. OS/2 is sadly dead and not relevant today, and has been in this state since at least 1995.

That compiler was an interesting story -- we (the OS/2 back-end team) were told to write an RPG compiler back end for OS/2 (this was back in 1989). That didn't seem like much fun, but the IR (W-Code) was the same as the one used by the C & C++ compilers for the mainframes. So we decided to make the back-end support C & C++ too -- because that *was* fun. When there was the falling out between MS and IBM, we had a working C and C++ compiler for OS/2. I can still remember getting hello.c running, then dhrystone, and not much later bootstrapping the compiler itself.

That was a long time ago.

Re:Digging up some history...

[rcase5]

Interesting read. Thanks for sharing it.

This paragraph made me chuckle:

It was revealed that Bill Gates was "surprised" that IBM was not prepared to "jointly and exclusively promote Microsoft products [and] reduce shipments of OS/2".

This in a nutshell is Microsoft's culture; so self-assured of the superiority of their products when nothing could be further from the truth. OS/2 was a great operating system, and ran circles around anything Microsoft put out until Windows NT (which, as it happens, shares lineage with OS/2). IBM was ultimately too big and too slow to prevent what happened to OS/2, but one thing they know how to do well is design stuff.

This paragraph also gave me a good chuckle:

When Microsoft was described by Lou Gerstner in Business Week as 'a great marketing company, but not a great technology company' Mr Gates was furious according to evidence presented. He is said to have complained about 'smear campaigns' against Windows 95.

Truth hurts, doesn't it Billy Boy? Microsoft's ability to market it's products is the only way to explain how they can get away with putting out really mediocre products when there are so many better alternatives (in terms of stability and quality) out there.

Re:Digging up some history...

[0xdeaddead]

and yet it wasn't good enough to bootstrap the kernel, or the device drivers.

OS/2 2.0 was largely a MS affair, and such a stopgap port into being 32bit with 16bit device drivers. If only IBM had let MS put windows on top of OS/2 and ditch the ass backwards PM. But no, IBM had to have SAAS (which nobody used). So MS took their ball home, and realized that they didn't need IBM anymore.

But IBM SURE needed Microsoft. OS/2 never became a real 32bit OS, still relies on 16bit drivers, and suffers many limitations as such. It'll never be 64bit, and always have MAJOR components like networking even with it's NET/2 TCP/IP left as an expensive addon.

IBM kept on sabotaging OS/2 starting with the $3000 OS/2 1.0 SDK, and the $2500 OS/2 2.0 SDK's.

Good riddance to IBM being out of the market with their insanely overpriced tools, and borrowed OS's which they clearly never understood as they had years to do something about the kernel, and the best they could do was that aborted L4 port that was as braindead as the 16bit extended 2.0 kernel.

Power companies everywhere

[HideyoshiJP]

Rejoice, power companies! Your crappy old OS/2 systems can be supported again!

Re:Power companies everywhere

[RabidReindeer]

Rejoice, power companies! Your crappy old OS/2 systems can be supported again!

What do you mean, again? The place I worked dropped OS/2 because didn't get any support even back when it was still a mainstream product.

Re:Its done put a fork in it

[pecosdave]

I'm with you.

I was a Novell guy - it was hard to let go when an inferior product ran it out of business, but it happened. I've since become a Linux guy.

Unless it's open source...

[noldrin]

I used OS/2 for a few years, from 1995 to around 2001, it was a lot of fun. A lot of the technologies were interesting, but now antiquated. If it was open source, it could be something fun to run in a VM and tinker with.

Re:Unless it's open source...

[Major Blud]

I was able to run OS/2 Warp 3 and 4 from retail copies I had just fine in VMWare Fusion.

Installing this from 36 floppies sure brought back memories.

Re:Unless it's open source...

[dryeo]

VirtualBox was actually written to run OS/2 and ended up being the killer OS/2 app that everyone had to have, just backwards as it ran OS/2 rather then ran under OS/2. And of course, as OS/2 used parts of the x86 system that other OSes didn't, any virtual machine that can run OS/2 can run any x86 OS

Re:Unless it's open source...

[Major Blud]

I believe that you're thinking of Virtual PC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Virtual_PC), which I think VirtualBox may be descended from (?)

Re:Unless it's open source...

[NominalLoss]

Yep, and disks 17, 23, and 31 would all be bad.

Re:Unless it's open source...

[dryeo]

The AC has it right. First there was a Russian company (forget the name) contracted to write a virtual machine to run OS/2. Eventually that became Parallels for OSX. Then Innotek partnered with Connectivx to add OS/2 support to Virtual PC and port Virtual PC to OS/2. No sooner then they did this, that MS bought Connectivx and killed the OS/2 port. Then Innotek wrote VirtualBox, based partially on QEMU and released it as GPL (probably had to as it used GPL source) with propriety additions for things like USB support. Sun bought Innotek and Oracle bought Sun.
The hard part of virtualizing OS/2 was that the DOS drivers ran in ring 2, which allowed DOS device drivers to work under OS/2. OS/2 even allows any version of DOS to run in a VDM.
 

Re:Unless it's open source...

[0xdeaddead]

I still run OS/2 2.0 on Qemu version 0.15.1. It runs stable enough to run synchronet, on a VPS in a datacenter. Honestly at this point OS/2's only redeeming thing is that it runs MS-DOS based doors better than anything else out there.

Re:Its done put a fork in it

[Grishnakh]

Yeah, I'm not sure what the point of OS/2 would be at this time. It's straight from the days of Windows 3.1 and maybe Win95.

If you want an alternative to Windows 10, we already have many Linux distros. OS/2 was nice in its day, but it's not going to provide support for modern hardware, or a reasonably modern user interface.

Re:Windows 10 is just OS/2 with a new skin.

[DanJ_UK]

lol irl

Re:46:37 Says It All

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

>> where is the OS for the Transgendered African-American-Polynesian Differently-abled community?

I thought that was Ubuntu. Remember the "Nongendered Noncontinental Nubian" release (v11.31)?

Leasons learned

[mejustme]

Started my career with OS/2, and IBM's C++ compiler. Worked on some really nice systems in the 90s that used OS/2: automated trains, banking systems, robotics. But I was burned by IBM: first when they killed OS/2, then when they killed off OCL and their C++ suite for both Windows and OS/2. Jumped to linux in 2001 and haven't looked back since. But lesson learned: I'd have a hard time trusting an IBM OS or compiler suite.

What does bringing back OS/2 do today? Nothing. It would need something really innovative to make it worthwhile again. E.g., let it run Linux binaries and Win64 .exe files? Having some kind of package translation layer that allows people to install .rpm or .deb files to take advantage of existing Linux repos and software?

It is unfortunate that IBM gave up on both OS/2 and OCL/Visual C++ when they did. But "OS/2" is now 15-20 years behind the curve. Go ahead and make it available as a toy to remember the old days if you must, but I suspect it would take non-trivial development investments to re-awaken it.

Re:Leasons learned

[dryeo]

OS/2 uses GCC mostly now, current version is 4.9.2 along with a pretty good libc, sort of between mingw and cygwin in capabilities. Package manager uses RPMs though Linux (and some Windows using Odin, sort of like WINE) binaries need to be recompiled.
It'll never be 64 bit (unless IBM open sources OS/2 for PPC) and can't handle memory above 3.5 GBs except as a RAM disk.

Re:Editing?

[U2xhc2hkb3QgU3Vja3M]

This is interesting, but maybe we could have some grammatical editing before throwing up a story on the main page?

I think that's exactly how they upload their stories.

Fight for your bitcoins!

Re:As a Linux refugee, I'd seriously consider OS/2

[U2xhc2hkb3QgU3Vja3M]

Even OS X has become bloated in the last few updates. I think the last true great one was Snow Leopard, maybe Mountain Lion.

Fight for your bitcoins!

Re:As a Linux refugee, I'd seriously consider OS/2

[U2xhc2hkb3QgU3Vja3M]

What about BeOS/Haiku?

Fight for your bitcoins!

Just imagine ...

[Fished]

Just imagine, if you could get OS/2 running on an Amiga and call it BeOS, all the "positivism" that would ensue.

It'll go nowhere fast

[Lead Butthead]

Not as long as MS is still holding the FS and DDK hostage.

Re:As a Linux refugee, I'd seriously consider OS/2

[Grishnakh]

. I don't have that much time to spend just getting my system working.

Try switching to Linux Mint. I recommend the KDE version, but if you don't like that, there's 3 other variants: Xcfe, MATE, and Cinnamon.

There's a lot more distros out there than just Debian and Gentoo.

Re:46:37 Says It All

[RabidReindeer]

I've always said, where is the OS for the Transgendered African-American-Polynesian Differently-abled community?

I think that's a Linux distro.

Re:Its done put a fork in it

[dryeo]

OS/2 (actually eCS+Arca Noae latest) will install and run on some modern hardware. Being 1990's tech it does have limits, needs to see a BIOS and only supports up to 2TB drives (plan is to split larger drives into virtual drives), no video acceleration, no USB3 currently, shitty wireless support, sound supported by an Alsa port, printing limited to CUPs, any memory over 3.5GBs only usable as a RAM disk, limit of 64 cores (only licensed for one physical CPU)

OS2 had Windows 3.1

[Streetlight]

IIRC, IBM used their compiler to compile Microsoft's Win 3.1 code and the resulting product ran much faster and more reliably in OS2 than DOS. Also, I'm not sure exactly what the controversy was, but did Microsoft develop NT in parallel with IBM's and MS's co development of OS2? Did NT have any OS2 code? Comments, anyone.

Re:OS2 had Windows 3.1

[Solandri]

As with DOS, IBM contracted with Microsoft to develop OS/2, so it actually started off as Microsoft's code. Both partners were on board for a while and told the entire industry DOS (a CLI running programs in real mode) was going to be replaced by OS/2 (a GUI though it could run DOS in a window using the 80286's protected mode, so a crashed DOS app wouldn't hang the entire computer), so a lot of companies began porting their software over to OS/2.

Then there was some sort of falling out. Most people point the finger at Microsoft because Microsoft stopped talking about OS/2 and started talking about Windows (a GUI which ran on DOS). That's why early versions of Windows had a terrible reputation for crashing - because it ran on top of DOS, any app which crashed could hang the entire OS. You would typically have to reboot the computer 2-3 times a day, losing all your unsaved work each tine. This remained true all the way up to Windows ME. By Windows 3.0, Microsoft was completely pushing Windows and not OS/2. IBM wasn't happy but the contract called for Microsoft to do OS/2 development, so IBM couldn't take over or hire another company to do it. They negotiated to take over the project from Microsoft.

Because the then-current version of Windows was built with the same GUI elements IBM had established after a lot of usability R&D (IBM's Common User Access), IBM also got rights to Windows 3.x's code. That's what allowed them to include a copy of Windows in OS/2 3.0. They just modified Windows to run on the version of DOS running in OS/2's DOS box, instead of MS-DOS. It's also one of the reasons Microsoft really pushed to release Windows 95 in 1995 (it was code-named Chicago, and the joke was that Gates made the official name Windows 95 instead of Windows 4.0 to force his developers to release it in 1995). The terms of the split only gave IBM access to Windows 3.x code, so it was important for Microsoft to push the next version of Windows out there. Starting with Win95, Microsoft played a cat and mouse game making changes to prevent it from running in an OS/2 DOS box (or on DR-DOS).

NT was a separate project within Microsoft (built like OS/2 to not run programs in x86 real mode like DOS did), which had been on the back burner. Once they formalized their split with IBM, they began working on it in earnest, merging its API with Windows 9x. There were earlier enterprise-only releases, but the first real commercial release was Windows 2000 (in parallel with Windows ME). It's the foundation for the current versions of Windows.

Incidentally, the switcheroo between OS/2 and Windows ended up really helping Microsoft. Both IBM and Microsoft stressed that OS/2 was the future, so a lot of software companies which dominated DOS (e.g. WordPerfect, Lotus) invested a lot in porting their software to OS/2. When Microsoft switched gears and told them to develop for Windows version instead, these companies felt they'd been lied to and balked. They either made a half-hearted attempt to port to Windows, or put it off for a year or more. That time gap is what allowed Microsoft to swoop in and take over the office suite market on Windows with Microsoft Office. And thus began the early calls for an anti-trust investigation of Microsoft (which really swung into high gear when Microsoft tried to take over the web browser market by including it in Windows for free, essentially destroying the profit model for any competitor making a browser).

Re:Its done put a fork in it

[MightyMartian]

Does OS/2 even have a 64 bit kernel? It was great in its day because it was the only major x86 operating system to operate in real mode, but that was over 20 years ago, and hardware has come a very long way in that time.

I booted Warp 4 in a VM guest about five years ago for fun, but I can't think of many practical applications now, or any particular reason to even create a modern variant.

The ill-fated history of IBM's OS/2 Warp ..

[nickweller]

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

...and the business model is?

[4wdloop]

Who is financing this effort and why?

Re: Its done put a fork in it

[martin0641]

I want this to happen just so I can start seeing job openings with OS2/Warp as a pre-requisite...

OS/2 need windows 32bit working MS broke

[Joe_Dragon]

OS/2 need windows 32bit working MS broke win32's with updates to hurt os/2.

Also maybe a better way to install fixpacks / updates as well.

A real safe mode.

Better config.sys

etc

OS/2 is dead, get over it.

[Anonymous Coward]

The OS/2 4.52 kernel is hopelessly dated. No drivers for new hardware, no x86-64, no nothing of these shiny new features that appeared during the last decade. The source code for the kernel is closed. IBM won't open it, nor will it release more updates. The rumor is, the rights for OS/2 are partially owned by Microsoft, and they won't agree to make it open source. Unless something changes, projects like this one make no sense.

Re:OS/2 is dead, get over it.

[Nemosoft Unv.]

The kernel is outdated, but Arca Noae has released a lot of improved drivers, patches for ACPI, USB drivers (see the various updates) so it's not so dead as you think it is.

Re:OS/2 is dead, get over it.

[confused one]

The rumor is, the rights for OS/2 are partially owned by Microsoft, and they won't agree to make it open source. Unless something changes, projects like this one make no sense.

That's not really a rumor. It was originally a joint project, until there was a disagreement and a splitting of ways. IBM continued on with a release as OS/2 and Microsoft released the "New Technology" NT kernel. There's likely joint ownership on a lot of the original kernel code.

Re:OS/2 is dead, get over it.

[martiniturbide]

Hi. Yes and No. If you take the time to read the "JOINT DEVELOPMENT AGREEMENT" between IBM and Microsoft, it seems that they both has rights to use the source code, and they can not share the source code for 10 years after the release date. http://tech-insider.org/person... "For a period of ten (10) years from the date of receipt of Source Code from the other party, neither party shall disclose to any third party such Source Code of the other party unless such disclosure is made in accordance with terms and conditions ...."

Re:OS/2 is dead, get over it.

[gzuckier]

The rumor is, the rights for OS/2 are partially owned by Microsoft, and they won't agree to make it open source. Unless something changes, projects like this one make no sense.

That's not really a rumor. It was originally a joint project, until there was a disagreement and a splitting of ways. IBM continued on with a release as OS/2 and Microsoft released the "New Technology" NT kernel. There's likely joint ownership on a lot of the original kernel code.

Thus the name; "Oh, a stew".

ATM's also went to USB and more network based as

[Joe_Dragon]

ATM's also went to USB and more network based as well.

Older ones used to be dial up where they dialed when used or only dialed at the end of the day.

Arca Noae Formal Announcement about Blue Lion

[martiniturbide]

Arca Noae just posted his formal announcement about the project: https://www.arcanoae.com/blue-...

editing, -1

[argStyopa]

OK this is a little off topic, but what the funk is "...with positivism..."?

Maybe you meant "happily" or "is pleased"?

Is editor just a synonym here for 'monkey trained to cut, paste, and hit 'post to page'"?

Re:editing, -1

[angel'o'sphere]

Positivism is the opposite of negativism.
So could have deduced the meaning of the word by your won.
Hint: with activated spell checking you only have to type it into a random text field (works on macs) ... if it is not red underline, it likely is a valid word.
If you don't know the word, double click on hit the "search lexicon/dictionary" shortcut ... used to be ^D on my Mac ... sigh, does not work on this one ...

Now I'm disappointed and have to figure how to reactivate ^D on this Mac to show my lexicon :-/

Anyway ... positivism is a valid word, and surprisingly, regardless of your strange question: it means what you think it means (facepalm)

Re:As a Linux refugee, I'd seriously consider OS/2

[spauldo]

You'll be wanting PC-BSD, then. It's FreeBSD with tweaks for desktop use, a different installer, and some extra utilities. It's more of an add on to FreeBSD than a separate project like Ubuntu is to Debian.

If you're used to Debian, bear in mind that updating FreeBSD isn't as streamlined as running apt and walking away. It's not difficult, but it's not as automated as Debian.

My advice: stay away from ports unless you need specific options for a piece of software. The way ports interacts with the package system is a bit unintuitive; it works fine, but it'll confuse you if you're not accustomed to it. If you do use ports, only make the changes you actually need - sometimes the options it gives you will make the port not compile.

As an aside, you do realize that you can run Debian with pretty much any desktop, right? It doesn't have to be GNOME 3. If you can live with systemd (most people don't have too much trouble with it - I only had trouble when migrating to it), that might be the best option for you.

Can it run Win32 apps?

[blind biker]

If yes, this could potentially be interesting. Microsoft has thoroughly turdified Windows since Windows 8.0. Windows 10 is a huge putrid bag of Don't Want.

Re:Can it run Win32 apps?

[Greyfox]

Probably not. IBM licensed compatibility for any Windows 3.x version, and that's as far as OS/2 ever went. You could run a Windows 3.1 program pretty well, but anything later will most likely not work.

Re:Its done put a fork in it

[rickb928]

Ditto. Working systems are not enough. You need marketing and penetration. Or something like that.

in 1994

[harvey the nerd]

That would be OS/2 2.1 or 2.11, released May 1993 or July 1994, respectively.

The real question is Why?

[daninaustin]

I used to use OS/2 many years ago and it was great compared to the microsoft alternatives but the world has moved on and OS/2 hasn't. If you want an alternative to MS use Linux or OSX.

Re:The real question is Why?

[iggymanz]

No, OS/2 is current and still used. XEU's ecomstation has been maintained and has added features and components

Re:The real question is Why?

[daninaustin]

So where is the 64 bit version?

Re:The real question is Why?

[iggymanz]

why would one need 64 bits for the applications I listed?
64 is twice as good as 32? the apps would run faster and use less memory? have I sad news for you about that last question

Re:Why OS/2

[xombo]

They're probably looking to get some money from financial institutions still running OS/2 software. It's not, I suspect, a play in the conventional Operating System business–just maintenance of legacy systems.

Re:Its done put a fork in it

[epyT-R]

I think that modern guis are part of the reason people stick with older OS.

Wake me when it's BeOS's next turn.

[DdJ]

The next time a similar story comes out for BeOS, I'll probably be interested.

Re:Wake me when it's BeOS's next turn.

[Moof123]

Yep, BeOS is still the only dead OS i have any nostalgia for.

OS/2 Warp

[Crixus]

I ran OS/2 Warp back in 1994 or whatever it was. Much better than the Windows offering back then, and I had a great experience with it. I am interested in seeing it, but won't be moving over to it. I'm very happy wiht linux right now.

Re:OS/2 is alive and maintained, get over it

[iggymanz]

alive, current and used for POS, CAM, PBX and ATMs.

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

Re:Its done put a fork in it

[dryeo]

The kernel is hybrid 16/32 bit so there won't be a 64bit port. And I think it was the only x86 to fully use protected mode though 1.x could drop to real mode to run a DOS session, usually called the penalty box as you couldn't just ALT-TAB out of it. The 286 just wasn't designed well enough.
There are still a lot of business applications running on OS/2 including various hardware controllers that have to run on real hardware and that's the main market.

Re:Its done put a fork in it

[dryeo]

The WorkPlace Shell (WPS) is still more advanced then all modern GUIs, at least at core. No fancy 3D support or fancy rounded corners on windows but the fact that eg Cairo can be integrated as a subclass to give transparency on the desktop shows the power of the object format. http://trac.netlabs.org/wps-wi...
Gnome started out trying to copy the WPS and MS first copied the 1.x interface in Win [NT] 3.x and then tried to copy the WPS in Win 4+. Shit, they even stole the idea of a web browser that is mostly a DLL so that its widgets could be reused by other programs as was the idea with the Warp V3 WebExplorer released in '94

Re:Its done put a fork in it

[Grishnakh]

Slackware fits that bill too, as do some other Linux distros.

Did they ever fix that single message queue prob?

[ayesnymous]

That allowed a single program to freeze the entire OS.

Please include pen support and HWR

[WillAdams]

I've got a Fujitsu Stylistic ST4121 w/ a daylight viewable display which I had to quit using when Microsoft quit supporting Windows XP, and I haven't been able to find a reasonably priced replacement tablet w/ a real daylight viewable display.

OS/2 for Pens would be perfect for it.

Back in 1995

[ebvwfbw]

1995 is when I last used os/2. Never missed it. It was clearly better than anything microsoft had. All that stuff was still a cruel joke side of a real os like Unix/Linux.

yes! at last!

[gzuckier]

my closet full of thinkpad 701s will return!! after that, my Osborne!!