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"?

[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.

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: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: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: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.