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?

Comments

Re:My intro to operating systems

[Greyfox]

Not really. They just built a timeout into the single input queue. If something wasn't processing messages for a while, it'd give you the option to kill it. Funnily enough, their multiprocessor version of OS/2 had an input queue per processor, so you could tie one up 100% of the time and the system would remain responsive. The attitude in IBM at the time was that PCs were toys and that if you wanted to do real multitasking, you should spring the 5 grand or so for an AIX box.

Their OS/2 SDK shipped with a lot of documentation in some format or other not entirely unlike HTML. Ironically the document reader that shipped with OS/2 didn't utilize threads and would lock your system up while it operated, but the windows version of the program could be run in a standalone windows session and not tie your system up. So the windows application was much better for actually reading the OS/2 SDK documentation. IIRC you could also format a disk from the command line and not tie the system up, but if you used the GUI object to do it, it would. There were a lot of little quirks like that in the operating system. A few months before they shut it all down, I got into Linux and stopped worrying about it so much. There were some die hard OS/2 users inside IBM after all that, but by the time my last contract with them wound down in 2005, I didn't know of very many who were left.

OS/2 was actually really not that bad and they could have improved it, but they killed it instead. Lotus notes, on the other hand, was shitty for pretty much anything you could use it for, and they were still beating the fucking Lotus Notes drum when I left. AFAIK they never did manage to port their ticketing system (RETAIN) over to notes, even though they had a huge strategy boner to do so for well over a decade.

Re:Could have been a contender

[Greyfox]

Yeah, I had some carefully planned tech demos for it. Formatting a floppy disk (Specifically, from the command line) and printing a document out was a fun one. As long as you knew how to avoid tying up the system input queue, you could accomplish some mind-boggling (for the time) things with the system. At the '95 COMDEX in Atlanta, we set up a quad processor Compaq box at the Compaq stand to play 4 videos at once. It had a staggering 16 MB of RAM, so we made a small RAM disk to hold the videos so we wouldn't have to go to disk for them. It sat there quite happily for a good chunk of the show, playing its 4 videos in separate windows side by side. The WIndows NT box next to it was running its polygons screensaver.

I only just played with it

[wierd_w]

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.

Re:I've got a question:

[NormalVisual]

You don't see too many active OS/2 installs anymore, but years ago it was difficult to find an ATM that ran on anything else. The biggest business case was for those companies that ran IBM mainframes - Communication Manager/2 made it relatively easy to get OS/2 boxes to co-exist with them, which I'm sure contributed to the aforementioned popularity as an OS for ATMs. Additionally, if you had MS-DOS applications that required a specific version, the primitive VM support allowed you to run several different versions in separate windows.

Re:OS/2

[Lumpy]

The problem with OS2 has always been crap drivers. Linux did not hav ethis problem because the community releasing drivers and every user had the ability to compile one. OS/2 did not give you that ability so you were stuck.

Any side OS needs drivers, and the device makers will not write them for you.

Re:OS/2

[quetwo]

In the mid-90's into the mid-2000's, OS/2 was very popular in the banking industry. I'd say about half of my customers ran OS/2 on the teller's machines and most other desktops that had to do with customer data (most likely because most of these banks used IBM AS/400 Mainframes, and the clients to these apps were written for OS/2). I started seeing a lot of banks switch to Windows-based PCs in the mid 2000's, then connecting to the mainframes via terminal software.