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Upcoming OS/2 Release Will Be Called ArcaOS 5.0 (techrepublic.com)
At the annual convention of OS/2 users, Arca Noae announced their new OS/2-OEM distribution will be released in the fourth quarter of 2016, and the project, codenamed "Blue Lion", will officially be called ArcaOS 5.0. "The significance of the version number relates to IBM OS/2 4.52 -- the last maintenance release of the platform released by IBM in 2001," reports TechRepublic. martiniturbide writes: The article discusses the features of ArcaOS like USB bootable installer, USB (1.1 and 2) , ACPI, AHCI, and network card drivers, new OS installer, etc. It will be sold in two editions: ArcaOS Commercial Edition [with 12 months of priority support and updates] and ArcaOS Personal Edition...
Anyone have fond members of OS/2? Are there any Slashdot readers who are still using it?
Anyone have fond members of OS/2? Are there any Slashdot readers who are still using it?
We would all be using it. If only ms fucked up nt 4.
We'll just have to wait for them to release version 9.0. Then we can run Arca NINE.
It has a funky memory management system and I'm not sure why anyone wold want to use it now over *NIX. The synchronous input que on the GUI basically doomed it (not counting IBM), but otherwise was pretty nice for the time and fun.
No I have zero fond s/members/memories/ of OS/2.
Honestly, I was fond of OS/2 by the time it was the principal opponent to Win, but nowadays who would like to use an OS that was frozen for the last 25 years ?
Fond members?
...IBM had bothered to ship Warp with a decent set of drivers. No hardware support, no users. Too late IBM..
I worked with and on OS/2 from 1.0 and beta Presentation Manager through the divorce with Microsoft to Warp V4. Developer support on Compuserve, graphics engine customization, conferences, worldwide customer support... Met many great people, still online friends with some.
This news is a troll right? Please tell me it is.
Worked on a port of an asset management package written in DOS to Windows 3.1 and OS/2 in the early 90's, coding C++ for both.
I remember a sales guy wanted to impress with its multitasking capabilities by running installers of 4 applications at once, with another half-dozen running concurrently. It ground to a swapping halt. Still, using it overall, quite impressive capabilities on that front for the time, probably rivaled only by the Amiga in terms the consumer-level arena. Preferred coding for it over Windows MFC, as well.
Regrettably, by 2005 when working at IBM, I encountered no evidence it had ever existed. Windows and Linux boxes only, and the topic never brought up. Seems that history could have gone quite differently, with the right resources at the right time.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
I worked at a large OS/2 site and the users hated it with a vengeance. One of the tricks which the shell would play on them would be to put 100 icons in a folder with no way to sort through them because they all had the same x,y coordinate. There was no organise by name or anything. They had to drag and drop every icon.
Outside work I saw its bootstrap being used all over the place where people needed a convenient way to boot different operating systems. There wasn't really better solution around at the time.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
I remember a friend blowing up an OS/2 demo by dragging a chess piece to the trash can (or equivalent, that was a LONG time ago) and crashing the whole user interface. Entertaining for sure.
Its just called Windows now.
Why is this ancient operating system still being supported? I must be missing something pretty obvious. Was this ever so popular as a platform that businesses built applications on it and still use it for day-to-day operations?
Back in the mid-90s I worked with a chap who was an OS/2 fanboy. We just started rolling out PCs in our IT department to replace the XWindows terminals we were using to support our UNIX estate, which if I recall correctly was comprise of one DG UNIX box. I gave it a go and thought the multitasking was novel, running multiple instances of Solitare in auto play. I remember that you could also run Windows apps but first had to install Windows 3.11 inside OS/2. It was the first OS I used to surf the web and IBM were continually releasing updates to the OS/2 web browser at the time. For reasons I cannot remember I eventually gave up on it and switched to NT 3.51 and shortly thereafter NT 4.0. Most likely because I needed some software that wasn't available natively for OS/2 and the Windows 3.11 compatibility thingy wasn't suitable. For you young-ins out there, this was back in the day when you had to buy your operating system in a box off the shelf from a store. No downloads. I remember standing in line at Futureshop chatting to a guy behind me who was about to purchase OS/2 Warp. Wonder how things turned out for him.
I know I shouldn't expect any proofreading to be done in a slashdot post, but this kind of blatantly obvious error continues to amaze and disappoint me.
I know this is /. but it is almost 2016. At this point I think we need to assume that OS/2 is just another weird IT acronym that needs to be defined in the summaries for those who don't realise that it's more than just another app in the Appstore.
OS/2 is that thing like a small DIN plug for connecting a mouse, right? I have a PC somewhere with those.
I don't use it - loading the coal is really messy.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
By the time I got ahold of a copy, it was quite some ways behind NT4 on useful desktop software, and lightyears behind on drivers.
The copy I had was a floppy diskette based installer set, with some ungodly number of diskettes in it. I remember wondering about the similarities between HPFS and NTFS.
Mostly, it felt like windows 3.1 with a 32bit UI instead of a 16 bit one, very ancient windows app support, and very little native apps.
I suppose it could have gone somewhere had IBM actually gone hard-nosed about it after being snubbed my MS when they released NT4. NT4 had some nasty warts-- no PnP support, No USB support, and a number of others. A proper reboot of the OS/2 ecosystem with proper win32 app support, WDM driver support (So it could use windows drivers, even if just using a wrapper to do so) along with proper OpenGL, USB, and PnP support would have gone a long way back in the day.
These days the features of OS/2 are so obsolete it isn't even funny. ReactOS is extreme bleeding edge alpha, and would be more useful than an OS/2 deployment.
The real windows alternatives out there today are OSX and Linux.
I have a boxed copy of OS\2 Warp and having wanting to give it it's own dedicated machine. Can anyone suggest a hardware configuration I suppose in the 486 DX real or maybe Pentium 60 with working drivers in mind?
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
It's a whole other world from when that had its last release. How well have those OS/2 ATMs been holding out against network attacks? Is this old code full of buffer overflows and ancient ping packet crashes?
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
I remember that you could also run Windows apps but first had to install Windows 3.11 inside OS/2.
The funny thing was that you could often get better performance running Windows software within OS/2 as opposed to a native install under DOS.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
It's the OS/2 problem. Folks talk about the P vs NP stuff well this is the OS/2 thing there.
...held in the phone booth behind the convention center...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I can't see this as any compelling reason to upgrade though.
Maybe if it wasn't closed source.
But at least it can boot from USB!
i will attempt to revive a winnt4 box that was hacked by a drunk hobo back in 1998 and the server has been down and offline ever since
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
IBM died on consumer machines because of their testing/QA methodology. Waterfall method. Exhaustive but not reactive.
Windows programmers had to "eat their own dog food" and the chow started to taste better very quickly.
IBM was (and probably still is) like Raytheon when I worked there. It became a standard joke for those of us testing an air traffic control system (MAATS) -- we'd ask each other if bugs found months ago had been fixed. They never were.
I come here for the love
From about the time Warp came out through the first year of Windows 95 a person could argue they had the most kick ass desktop with OS/2 and Object Desktop. My main system through our first year of home broadband but I cant imagine using it today compared to linux. Dont miss the zombie threads desktop sounds and streaming music clashing would create though.
I still have the dark blue Microsoft OS/2 LAN Manager book bag that was given out at a tech conference back in the day.
I haven't used OS/2 in many years, since around 2000 I'd say. Installation was always a challenge but once it was running it was solid and a fun system to use. I had custom built a computer specifically for OS/2 with a Pentium Pro 200 MHz, Matrox Millenium II video and Sound Blaster AWE64 which I ran for quite a long time. I'm looking forward to playing with this release although I admit it won't be a primary or even secondary OS for me at all.
Driver support meant I couldn't use it. Probably just as well because the install was "touchy", and I had no tech skills at all. I went with NT for better support. And NT was pretty cool too, but...
I never forgot that feeling of looking into some sort of future. I had no idea at the time that the future was 'Nixes, and now I get to take stuff like multiple desktops for granted. But OS2 feels like that girlfriend I almost got way back when. It's a nostalgia thing. And darn it, when Arca Noa comes out with a new version, I'm planning on setting up and running an extra computer as a dedicated OS2 box for an occasional nostalgia binge.
Don't step on the baby.
We still have a few tools and machines at work running it. The vendor for one still uses it for new builds. At home I still have a real and a virtual machine running it 4.52 with al available fixpacks. Just a couple old programs that I don't have ported over to Linux. OS/2 still has some design features missing from Windows and Linux including the Presentation Manager.
Back in the mid 1990's, I worked at a big company that had a bunch of old OS/2 boxes being used as print and file share gateways. I remember thinking at the time that this was an old, obsolete OS. My only real interaction with these machines was having to go into the server closets on each floor of the building to manually reboot them once a week.
Anyone have fond members of OS/2?
Soooo.... Editor David is David but not an Editor...
... that couldn't run in MSDOS because my computer at the time had too little memory. Booting into OS/2 and starting it worked great - and the fact a large chunk of memory was virtual and on a HDD caused no problems.
OS/2 was created as the next generation DOS, the first versions didn't even have a GUI. And it was a very good DOS.
There were two versions of OS/2 Warp. One came with Windows 3.1 built in, and that version was legendary for the fact that it could run Windows apps faster than a native Windows system (the rumor I heard was that it was because IBM had recompiled Windows 3.1 with the Watcom compiler). The other version, which I owned, was cheaper, but required you have a copy of Windows 3.1, and then OS/2 could use its native DOS support to run Windows apps. You could also run the Windows apps either in the IBM GUI where they would be managed alongside OS/2 windows, or you could run it full screen.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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
OS/2 is still alive ref
The day Bill Gates screamed IBM's house down
In the late 90s I was able to produce spectacular performance with OS/2, DB2, Java and Caucho's Resin (a Java httpd) while serving dynamic web pages. Due to the (server) stability of OS/2 and its multi threaded nature, IBMs commitment to Java, DB2 wih Java integration and early XML/XSL implementations, I was able to produce a bleeding edge content management system. I'm talking approx. 1997 to 2001. When IBM killed off OS/2 I switched to Linux which by then had Java implementations that could match OS/2s, also by IBM. You can guess I have fond memories of OS/2.
as a developer of OS/2 apps used internally. When it became obvious that OS/2 was on its death bed, the official company line was "The platform doesn't matter" and that OS/2 was not only alive and well, but would soon beat the competition. We all just groaned.
During that era, I attended many internal presentations given by corporate types who echoed the official line "The platform doesn't matter". 100% of the time, without exception, the computers those people used to run their presentations, were running Windows. Guaranteed.
Yeah, it was a bitch to install, but I enjoyed OS/2 at the time, and had Win3.11, OS/2, DOS 6.2 and Linux (I want to say it was Yggdrasil) all booting from OS/2's boot manager on the same 40 GB hard drive. I had no room for actual applications, but i had a great time tinkering with the OS'es! My first foray onto the World Wide Web was via OS/2's WebExplorer 1.0. I loved their NR/2 Newsreader with it's MDI UI - I keep thinking I'm going to build something similar in PyQT, but never quite get around to it. Anyway, IBM seemed to drop OS/2 support hard - no updates to WebExplorer, no new device drivers, and barely any bug fixes. Even people who were otherwise enjoying the OS had to move on pretty much out of necessity. I think i may even still have my copy of Petzold's OS/2 PM Programming kicking around. Good times.
"Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?"
In 1994 I was struggling with a modem, that worked fine under Windows, but would not work under FreeBSD.
This wasn't a "winmodem" in the sense it required a driver to function. But it had to be initialized and would not work without that.
To my delight, certain phk added the code necessary to allow a userspace program (which he also wrote) to load the modem's firmware into the chip — you had to load different code (supplied on manufacturer's floppies) depending on whether you wanted to use it for data (SLIP, PPP, kermit, etc.) or faxing. I, for one, was most grateful.
Unfortunately, the same guy deleted the functionality some years later — claiming, it was too hard to maintain and "nobody wants it, or whoever does, should ask the manufacturer to supply drivers — the usual...
This rendered my old computer — which I kept around for faxing — unupgradable. I was, actually, able to maintain the local diff for the feature for some time longer, but not long enough — the little ISA-card outlasted FreeBSD support for it.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Mostly due to the faster file system. It was also nice that you could run each Windows program in its own session, Win3.1 wasn't too bad if only one program was running.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
What, did systemd kick your dog, steal your wife and fuck your mother?
From the Article:
"Are there any Slashdot readers who are still using it?"
Any one who uses an ATM to get cash, check their balance, make a deposit, etc has used OS/2; it is still the most popular of the ATM OSes.
Os2 and lan manager was the forerunner to Windows NT.
I had a very close association to them and still shudder the thought of the 50 3.5" floppy install and ndis driver installs.... Scary.
Was nice to have a single tick box that could disable and delete all of your server shares without a "sure you want to do this".. That wasn't going to end pretty ever ;)
If only English had an authoritative collection of rules for them — the way Ukrainian and Russian have, for example.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I remember running Photoshop 3 in OS/2 at a publishing shop. No issues. It subjectively felt more robust than Windows. About 10 years back I worked at a telecommunications company. I was surprised to see that all of their comms hardware was running OS/2 or Solaris. The IT admin told me that they were very good for utility computing. Once you had the system in place on premis, you very rarely if ever had to worry about it. I suppose that once your have the formula for a solid system, you don't want changes and updates. You just want it to do the one thing it does really well.. OS/2 was good at this.
Back in the day I used OS/2 to run multiple nodes for a Searchlight BBS. So yes, many happy memories. We were edgy. We ran a RIP-only BBS because we thought the whole ANSI text interface was old school, the future of BBSes was going to be all point and click! Then Mosaic came along... :(
But yeah, OS/2 Warp was solid. The only time I saw it after that was in Commonwealth Bank offices, and even they switched over to Windows pretty quickly.
The catastrophic error IBM made while building OS/2 was not aiming at the 386 chip. Instead they targeted the 80286.
Had they started off aiming at a chip with decent memory handling, it would have been far more effective.
But still, big companies had a terrible record of not grasping the PC nettle.
The "best chance ignored award" definitely goes to DEC, who at the appropriate time (first released 1972) had a brilliant multi tasking, time sharing, system for 16 bit computers called RSX-11. They could not bring themselves to sell it for a sensible price, and completely missed the boat.
Sad, as it was a vastly better system than DOS, CP/M, etc.
And now they are gone.
"Cats like plain crisps"
The Workplace Shell and Presentation Manager were hands down the best user interface that I've ever used. To this day, if I open a command prompt in windows and rename an executable file, when I click on it's desktop icon I'll get an error message asking if I want windows to search for it. In OS/2, if I did the same thing, it continued to work.
Also, it made more use of the extended attributes of its files than anything since.
Just like with Linux, you had to watch what hardware you purchased, because drivers might not be available for some hardware.
Overall, I thought that it was the best out there at the time.
And I had no real driver trouble that couldn't be worked around. Winmodems and winprinters weren't actually all that common in the grand scheme of things. Maybe for a year or two in the mid-'90s. But there was a wealth of used hardware available in those days that was the real deal.
Anyway, I always used external modems, including for a while a very weird Telebit modem with a steel case, a flip-open front door, and a non-AT command set that meant that I had to log into it via a terminal emulator and execute commands myself because only AT command sets were reported.
On the printing front, very early on I was able to get ahold of a secondhand Apple LaserWriter, and then set up Netatalk and a bunch of adapters to print to it over Either/RS-422 or something like that. It made everything on Linux a thousand percent easier because you could just dump postscript directly do it, and Linux print drivers weren't really sorted for many years.
In fact, there was even a really reasonable (for the period) WYSIWYG office suite called InterViews that ran under X and dumped out PostScript files for printing. The text editor was called 'ez' and I still have a bunch of non-CS homework from that era saved as '.ez' files somewhere. For the CS homework, I would just dial my university's SLIP pool and then telnet over to the Sun systems in the department where we had logins and used gcc for everything.
The actual hard part, as I recall, was getting Linux in the first place, which took me several months. There were no dial-up BBS systems I could find that had actual complete Linux distributions of any kind. The distributions that did exist at the time (I remember Slackware, Yggdrasil, Trans-Ameritech or something like that, and a couple of others, though maybe my memory is off) were set up as a series of dozens of 1.2mb or 1.44mb floppy disk images.
Not only was there no BBS that seemed to host a complete distro, but those were actually pretty sizable downloads at the time—it represented many hours of downloading even if a complete set could be found. At school, the systems on the actual 'net via 10-Base-2 and AUI at the time (our so-called 'smart hosts' that were in the DNS system) could download such things quickly from other smart-host FTP sites with complete sets, but they were Sun workstations with no floppy drives, and our filesystem quotas were not big enough to hold a complete set.
And before I had Linux actually installed, there was no way for me at home to log into those quotas and download the files from Unix machines anyway, otherwise I could have used FTP over dial-up to move a few images at a time through the pipline to home.
IN the end, I managed to find a local ISP that would set me up at home with a UUCP feed, and a vanilla UUCP dial-up binary set that was a massive bear to configure on a non-Unix system. Then I spent many weeks laboriously pulling images down over UUCP nightly from Usenet.
Once I finally had the complete binary set downloaded, I got ahold of many boxes of floppies, wrote the images, and did my first Linux install.
That bootstrapping was the hard part. Once Linux was actually installed, the entire non-BBS online universe of the Internet became massively easy to navigate (at the time, it was not easy to do Internet on PCs—there was little if anything on http:/// but that was the only protocol supported by DOS-based systems or by Macs) because now I had gopher, wais, archie, veronica, ftp, and so on. It was like boostraping your home computing universe into the Internet age.
The drivers were really of secondary importance once you got your hands on a complete distro. You'd just note which graphics hardware was supported by the X binaries, for example, and then go out and buy that card for $50 or $100. That was easy compared to actually getting your hands on a complete distro stored on the right machine and OS (DOS to write the images) and then getting it all written out and ready for install from floppies.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
There were two versions of OS/2 Warp. One came with Windows 3.1 built in, ..... The other version .... required you have a copy of Windows 3.1
It did not of course require you to have a copy of Win3.1; that was only required if you wished to run Windows programs. Of course everybody did, using (except corporates) spare or borrowed copies of Win3.1 (no DRM in those days). For the version with included Windows IBM paid a licence fee to MS. Both versions of OS/2 also came with PC DOS which of course IBM owned.
About 1996 I was one of the first personal users of internet banking in the UK (told I was the first in the South West division of TSB). It was with their own Windows 3.x app which I had running under OS/2. When I mentioned this to a techie on their help line (not about an OS/2 related problem) he told me it was impossible.
Funny thing was that the latter version was hyped as "OS/2 for Windows" as if OS/2 was some kind of app running under Windows when the opposite was more true. AFAIR, you could install that version OS/2 on top of an existing Windows installation and it was all sorted for you. The "for "Windows" meme was the leading software sales meme at the time, usually as a prominent sticker on software boxes. Yes, software came in boxes then, with manuals.
I remember getting a free copy of OS2 3.0 blue box when I worked at IBM. After a few tries, I got it working pretty good on a 386dx-40. Boot manager was great for setting up a method for booting multiple operating systems. I later moved to Warp connect and then WSEB which I downloaded from who knows where... There was a few aggravating issues. One was the single input que issue. One program could cause the WPS to not respond even though the system would continue to function. Pressing control+escape a few hundred times might recover the system for you if you were lucky. A program called WATCHCAT was a lifesaver here. Also, if you made any network changes after the initial install, the config utility would not update the configuration files right and you'd get CONFIG.SYS errors. You had to manually edit the networking config files to resolve the issue. I think this was finally fixed in WSEB. Sometimes the WPS would act funny because of ini file corruption. There were 3rd party utilities for this too. OS/2 ran great on the IBM PS/2 models. Just choose the defaults and wait for install to finish. I never had a driver issue myself. Just use a soundblaster or crystal audio sound cards and 3com NICs, and you had drivers. I loved newsreader/2 as it made reading threads so easy. That and browsing web with netscape 2.0 When setup right, it was bulletproof. Lots of settings to tweak and play with. Still miss the WPS.
-- After all is said and done, more is said than done.
I'm glad to see iOS/2 is still alive. Then again, I suppose I am biased as I worked on OS/2 for IBM a very long time ago. I thought it looked very good versus the competition (Win3). Being a huge fan of open source, I have been using Linux for a very long time now. In fact I have always preferred Unix variants over anything else almost since I started working 45 years ago. It was a breath of fresh air versus IBM mainframes where I started.
.. will remain useless.
one of the biggest problems with knowledge in the IT sector (unlike most other knowledge) is that it suddenly becomes completely useless.
I used OS/2 from v2.0 through to v4 ("Warp"). But once IBM made it clear it had given up on the desktop, I have up on IBM. The deal sealed when it became impossible to install OS/2 4 on new hardware. Plus it's a 32-bit OS.... I went to Linux (and then ChromeOS and Android flavours). I see ArcaOS 5.0 lacks USB3 support? OK. I might try it on an old laptop, but for sheet usability Remix OS offers me the same thing, more or less, as well as access to virtually all Android apps.
Only boring people are ever bored.
OS/2 and OS/2 Warp are elegant operating systems.
IBM spent a huge amount of effort on their Windows compatible subsystem. It worked well, but I remember yelling at someone for doing something as innocent as moving the mouse pointer off the Windows subsystem window causing the entire system to crash on OS/2 Warp.
It's still a good operating system. The entire thing should be open-sourced, even if large parts of it were hand-coded in assembly language.
Kriston
Is ArcaOS 5.0 a 32 or 64 bit OS? What are its enhancements over OS/2? Does that mean that if this laptop I'm running on - a Pentium quad core with 4GB RAM - could run a 32 bit ArcaOS?
...and that, ultimately [IMO] is why OS/2 failed. I never had serious problems with OS/2 Warp, but it became obvious to me [lack of apps, lack of drivers] that its days were numbered. I made the decision to switch to Win 2000 and haven't looked back. Kind of like switching from Blackberry last year to Android. Good system but it just fell out of favour and started to trail the pack too far. [I liked Betamax too...oh well...].