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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?
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.
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 ?
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'm quite attached to mine...
At the bottom of the
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.
We would all be using it. If only ms fucked up nt 4.
No,
I remember spending a week or so trying to get 0S/2 Warp working on allegedly supported hardware, could never get the graphics driver out of 640x480 16 colours, networking was flaky (to say the least), so the guy I was setting it up for asked about Linux, a day or so later produced a Caldera Network Desktop disc, and the rest, as they say, is history (They later switched to Redhat). Asking around at the time, I couldn't get any sensible answers as to why it didn't work, ISTR a lot of other people had hardware issues with OS/2.
Next job, several years later, two OS/2 machines were the bane of my existence (the Windows team refused to look at them, so they fell within my purview), First one, you so much as looked at it the wrong way, it went into snafu (and took the equipment it was running with it, at a horrendous cost per hour..no choice, the control software was OS/2 only and the company no longer existed). Just firing up the machine to run this equipment was like preparing for a fscking space launch. The other, I'll have to admit wasn't so much the OS itself which caused me grief, more the user..and anyone who has had the misfortune of supporting the sole OS/2 zealot in an organisation will tell you that Windows zealots have nothing on them...maybe VMS zealots come close, just maybe, (especially ones who have the only VAX cluster in the organisation in their office...and they're the sole user)
So again, no, OS/2 was fucked up in its own right, it would never have been a serious alternative choice if Microsoft had fucked up NT4
We would all be using it. If only ms fucked up nt 4.
MS did, and we don't use OS/2.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
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.
...IBM had bothered to ship Warp with a decent set of drivers. No hardware support, no users. Too late IBM..
...If IBM didn't conceitedly underestimate MS/DOS/Windows, yes.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Why is this ancient operating system still being supported?
Pride.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
In the era of cooperative multi tasking, Windows 3.1, 95, etc, os/2 was a beautiful and stable desktop environment.
Except for the poor hardware support and lack of decent software.
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
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.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
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
I'd be very concerned if you weren't.
Human Rights, Article 12: Freedom from Interference with Privacy, Family, Home and Correspondence
...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.
But at least it can boot from USB!
How about making the development tools available to someone other than rich people. Microsoft had Borland to provide cheap tools for Windows and Windows really didn't take off until sub $250 tools reaches
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
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.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I do.
One of the local banks still uses OS/2 for it's ATM's. And I believe Chicago's Train system uses it for the Kiosks.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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
Well, given the choice between OS/2 and NT, OS/2 won the ATM battle. I used to see OS/2 ATMs all the time. It wasn't until MS made an embedded version of XP that I began to see MS on ATMs.
Learn to love Alaska
OS/2 was only as bad as you complain about because so few used it. When IBM made the hardware, and built the OS to run on it (owning both the hardware and software, it was trivial to build drivers and make it work), it worked great. IBM hardware ATMs exclusively ran OS/2, for at least some time. And I saw OS/2 used as microcomuters (in mainframe-like applications). As well as servers for those who wanted NT-like environments but didn't want MS or Novell.
Though I don't know many that ran OS/2 in a corporate environment without paying someone like EDS lots of money for support.
Learn to love Alaska
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.
If it is possible for you please contact me at martin-os2world.com. I'm trying to consolidate all OS/2 knowledge on some Wikis. If you have some documentation that is not public I can ask formal permission to IBM to release it. Regards.
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.
The kernel was fundamentaly 16 bit, hence the 16 bit asm device drivers.
Microsoft wanted windows api on os/2, but I'm sad no. Not surprisingly since ms was 100% in control of os/2 nt, they switched the primary api to a 32 bit windows api.
Now that the OS/2 betas of football have shown up, Ms had mvdm working on an os/2 1.0 prerelease in 1987!!
I used to think it was ms who screwed up os/2, but it's pretty clear that Ms could have delivered a killer 32bit os in the late 80s!
IBM never got the kernel out of 16bit space
Yep, free of IBM's interference OS/2 NT lives on.
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.
I bet you didn't really run linux around that time. It was very rare that mainstream hardware actually worked. Winmodems & hp inkjets *shiver*.
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.
A friend of mine and I both used OS/2 as a DOS multitasker for running FidoNet BBSes back in the '90s. I remember one time he was unable to install because he had an Oak brand VGA card which was somehow not 100% compatible with the IBM original. I never really cared much for it other than it was probably the best multitasking environment for DOS programs. I still have that old PC stowed away somewhere, and it still boots OS/2.
As far as OS/2 being fucked up, I would say that the blame lays mostly with IBM, including their original requirement to run the 286, just as the 386 was becoming the hot thing. (Microsoft's ambitions didn't help things get better, either.) The 286 was honestly a very dumb design on the part of Intel, if only because of the 64K segment size. The other dumb thing about the 286 was ignoring the base of real-mode code out there that did tricks to get over that 64K segment size. You literally had to reboot the machine and have BIOS check a flag bit in the CMOS to get back to real mode, which shows just how far the heads of the 286 design team were up their asses.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Anyone have fond members of OS/2?
Soooo.... Editor David is David but not an Editor...
I bet you didn't really run linux around that time. It was very rare that mainstream hardware actually worked. Winmodems & hp inkjets *shiver*.
It was very rare that *new* mainstream hardware actually worked. If you waited a few months, the needed drivers came out, and all was well.
Linux was for people who didn't necessarily need the latest, shiniest new thing, it was for people who knew their shit. If it almost never worked (ever) on mainstream hardware, then it would have gone the way of OS/2...because that's actually what the problem was with OS/2. Mainstream hardware didn't work...and because there was no open-source community empowered to fix the problems or fill in the gaps, the problems pretty much stayed unfixed and the gaps turned into goatse-like gaping...well, I'll stop there.
I get a kick out of the fact that OS/2 will now support USB...but only 1.1 and 2.0. I mean seriously...what's the fucking point?
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
OS/2 was only as bad as you complain about because so few used it. ...
Though I don't know many that ran OS/2 in a corporate environment without paying someone like EDS lots of money for support.
So few used it because OS/2 was only as bad as you complain about. And that's why it cost a lot of money for support.
There...fixed that for you.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
... 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.
The kernel was 32 bit. The only 16 bit piece left as of OS/2 4 was the HPFS driver.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
If BeOS can live a zombie life as Haiku, why can't we have a zombie version of OS/2 as well?
Barbara Hudson wasn't. You're cisist, you are.
At the bottom of the
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.
IIRC windmodems didn't come out until way late in the 33.6k era, (almost 56k era) and were the result of their builder going with a cheaper software based controller, which meant a fatter, more complex driver. That also meant they were slower in some situations, hence I avoided them anyways (they were also only about $20 or so cheaper.)
I also remember hearing about the struggle to get them to work in Linux, and IIRC it took so long for the Linux kernel to finally support them that they already became irrelevant to most of us since that was about the time that broadband became mainstream.
Lol, you wish. It's 16 bit.
Mine's detachable.
Try $99! QuickC for Windows, and turbo c were both $99
Its community including the IBM guys was great, helpful and polite.
IBM did great support like commissioning Mozilla Inc to ship a decent, working Netscape and paying to SciTech to develop a universal graphics driver ending the graphics driver issues. Compare it to Apple 's treatment to PowerPC users.
OS/2 2.0 still retained significant 16 bit code, by 2.1 and Warp 3, much of that had been excised, with HPFS being the notable exception.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
Most of the device driver infrastructure was still 16 bit along with legacy APIs from OS/2 1.x and cmd.exe.
The real test was that OS/2 got as much of a speedup on a Pentium Pro as any 32 bit OS unlike Win9X which did have critical 16 bit code.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
OS/2 has supported USB since 1998 or so. The problem was that IBM wrote the drivers according to the official spec whereas everyone else was using the MS implementation, which as usual did not follow the spec.
Currently the biggest problem is with Large Floppy Support, eg USB drives over 2GBs have to be partitioned and have the correct LVM info added.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
I'm posting this from an OS/2 box (SeaMonkey 2.35ESR that I compiled), works fine on my old C2D and dial-up connection.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
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
There were legacy drivers in 16 bit, but OS/2 itself was primarily 32 bit by Warp 4, except for... you guessed it: HPFS, which was wholly MS's purview. Now I wonder why on earth MS was interested in keeping that driver 16 bit and didn't allow IBM to run the 32 bit HPFS386? It couldn't have anything to do with their absolutely sucky NT?
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
You don't mention what version you were running. 2.0 admittedly sucked. 2.1 was reasonably decent on supported hardware. 2.2 was by far better. On the particular hardware I had, Win95 was absolutely unusable (EISA and "Smartdrive" did not get along, with the latter wiping the CMOS EISA configuration on install) and NT 3.5 was unbearably slow and had no supported software of note at the time.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
It was very rare that *new* mainstream hardware actually worked. If you waited a few months, the needed drivers came out, and all was well.
On Linux, in those days, you could become a neckbeard before a driver came out to support whatever flavor hardware you happen to want to buy that week. If you stuck to certain high dollar items that met specs, then you were fine.
Linux was for people who didn't necessarily need the latest, shiniest new thing, it was for people who knew their shit. If it almost never worked (ever) on mainstream hardware, then it would have gone the way of OS/2...because that's actually what the problem was with OS/2. Mainstream hardware didn't work...
Incorrect, Windows specific hardware didn't work. That it was considered "mainstream" is also incorrect. In general, windows hardware was cheap and marketed to joe blow consumer, whereas things like HP LaserJets which implemented accepted standards worked just fine with OS/2. In fact, they worked better than Windows anything boxes because they all depended upon the GDI interface to print, and that was specific to the machine and device configuration they had, thus altering printed pages on a computer basis. There was no guarantee even 2 identical PCs with different software would print a page the same way even out of Word. That's how "awesome" windows was.
I get a kick out of the fact that OS/2 will now support USB...but only 1.1 and 2.0. I mean seriously...what's the fucking point?
OS/2 supported USB 2.0 prior to Linux supporting it. What's your point?
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
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.
Most all device drivers are still 16 bit or at least need a 16 bit shim like Uniaud, the Alsa port (so support most current sound cards etc) which has a 16 bit shim to load the 32 bit part. The Gradd video drivers are 32 bit.
As for HPFS, the story I heard was that IBM and MS agreed that a modern file system was needed and that that would each write one and use whichever was the best. The rules included being written in C and compilable for a 286. MS showed up with HPFS386, didn't mention it was written in 386 assembly and won the file system contest.
Then when IBM learned that HPFS386 didn't meet specs, they had to rewrite it and that is the driver shipped with most all versions of OS/2. MS was charging about a $1000 for a HPFS386 license, the bastards.
Eventually IBM rewrote the AIX JFS file system for OS/2, then ported it back to AIX (JFS2) and forked it into a GPL version for Linux. Then Mensys paid for a bootable version of JFS to be written so now there is no reason to use HPFS, especially with it only supporting 64 GB partitions and 2 GB files (and 2MB cache).
Still shitty that the Linux versions license is incompatible with the OS/2 version and no manpower to port the fork back.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
I mean, you could still get real modem cards even post-winmodem. But the existence of them meant that you had to be really careful.
When development of the 286 started, it was still arguable that most software would be rewritten to accommodate it, because that had happened every other time previous. Obviously, that didn't happen- there was already a huge boom in software for companies that previously didn't even use computers, and for families as well. In hindsight it was a monumentally stupid decision, but at the time you could still make the point and not be openly mocked.
I think the real problem was in asking "Is anyone working on protected mode DOS?"- and when the answer is "nope, no real plans", that should have been the signal.
Did you run OS/2 and NT 3.1 side by side? Obviously not. OS/2 was not as bad as you claim. NT was almost unusable as a desktop environment, at least until NT4SP3 and later. I worked plenty of places where people would have two computers on their desk. An NT machine to access the server shares, and second computer to do work on. Floppy to move stuff back and forth. But NT was unusable for many people. You could pay MS $1,000,000 and they still wouldn't get your CAD program to work with the cutting edge card you wanted. But with OS/2, you could.
But your memory is bad, so you parrot what you've heard others complain about.
Learn to love Alaska
all the hardware was allegedly compatible with OS/2
Your English is poor. Your statement ambiguously means "someone, somewhere says it may work". Then you go on before and after, implying it was on an official IBM HCL. The implication wasn't explicit, and the wording that would clarify was deliberately weakened.
So the question is, were the devices 100% verified to be 100% supported by IBM?
THe complaint that OS/2's HCL was inaccurate is different than "it's hard to use". I've seen thousands of machines running OS/2. Those that were zealots would search long and hard for the right components/combinations, and it would work as advertised. I never paid attention to whether they were using the official HCL, or making up their own. I was never interested in the OS wars.
Learn to love Alaska
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.
I'm surprised that no one has duplicated the functions of the Work Folder as it worked in OS/2. The OS was way ahead of things at its time.
clancey
Actually most of the drivers were 16-bit. The network and disk drivers were all 16-bit. I know because I worked on them. There was no easy way to write 32-bit drivers in OS/2 (at least through OS/2 4.0 and whatever the next release was called.
It was a real PITA since I worked on a very large driver (around 100,000 lines of C++) and had to make sure classes could fit in a 64K segment. The driver was around 1MB in size. C++ on the other hand was even more tricky. While it worked out well I was limited to only being able to use Watcom C++ 10.0B, not revision C or later. The originator of the codebase did a lot of work so the C++ code could be used.
My experience with C++ in a driver was actually a very positive experience. It made doing a number of things much easier and I wish it were more mainstream.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
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"
We ran Linux and FreeBSD on production servers - well I started administering them it was in late 1999. Back in those days you chose the components of your servers carefully to get supported hardware and you weren't surprised when something not listed as being explicitly supported didn't work, and yes you would wait for a couple of months or longer for new drivers to come out. Watching FreeBSD build itself over the internet from a single boot floppy was an experience verging on the mystical; and ports at the time had no comparison to any software distribution system. You could download, compile and build software with three commands, it was pure magic. I know of people that were running headless Linux servers from about 1996 onwards, for things like file and mail distribution and as firewalls. And to compare it to the offerings of the time from Microsoft or Novell - they were pretty damn good.
We don't believe in radical loony monotheistic religions from the middle east -- we're Christians.
XP on ATMs? Wow.
We don't believe in radical loony monotheistic religions from the middle east -- we're Christians.
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
If you were wealthy enough to afford 16 megs (somewhere around $750 circa 1993, from what I vaguely remember), OS/2 was definitely a step up from Windows 3.11. It did a better job of multitasking Windows 3.11 apps than Windows 3.11 itself did. IF you had the RAM.
That said, Windows 95 was a real-world step up from OS/2 Warp in every meaningful way. I remember that my soundcard (Gravis Ultrasound) NEVER, EVER worked reliably under OS/2. From what I recall, it could only do 1024x768 in 16-color mode without hardware acceleration on my first-generation S3 '911 video card, and crashed constantly with the Tseng ET4000/w32 card I bought to replace it (on rumors that it worked better under OS/2). And I'm pretty sure I had to do a scorched-earth total reinstallation OF OS/2 Warp to change to that new video card after I bought it.
Windows 95 wasn't perfect... but it was literally the first time I'd ever had an OS that fully and effortlessly supported every single piece of hardware I owned.
In retrospect, OS/2 Warp's most valuable legacy was its partition and boot manager, which I continued to use long after I'd ceased using OS/2 itself. It was absolutely without equal until Partition Manager finally came out.
Remember, there were basically two kinds of "Winmodems":
* The cheap shit "Host Signal Processing" ones that were basically glorified soundcards with a phone jack & used the CPU for literally EVERYTHING.
* The premium ones that had a proper DSP to do the heavy lifting (like Lucent's), and only used the host driver to implement things like parity and +++AT commands.
The DSP-type Winmodems, on a fast computer, often had slightly BETTER performance than non-Winmodems. Why? Most non-Winmodems had underpowered microcontrollers... their embedded CPU was sometimes a performance-limiting factor. In contrast, DSP-type Winmodems could take full advantage of a powerful CPU to do things almost instantly that took substantially longer to do on most non-Winmodems.
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.
but at the time you could still make the point and not be openly mocked
The thing is, I could tell that 64K segments were a dumb idea back in the early '80s, when 64K was becoming the standard RAM in computers. That's why I went straight from TRS-80 to Macintosh in 1985.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
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.
ms fucked up NT 4. We all know it. Mangers insisted on using it anyway. The M$ pr machine was at its peek. They took a networking package that they couldn't give away, Novel owned that market, repackaged it, called it NT... and sold the crap out of it. Never mind you needed about 4 times the resources to do the same thing that Novel did. Never mind netbui still sucked.
OS/2 was no real prize compared with Unix either. No surprise, Unix was about 25 years old when OS2 came out and outclassed it at every level. Still, way better than windows.
Yep, that one kept me in beer and takeaways for years, until about 2001.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
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
I do know that MS received around $87 per copy of HPFS, and the amount per HPFS386 sounds excessive, but not by an order of magnitude. The price of their HPFS licenses drove the price of both Win95 and NT, so that those would cause IBM to suffer a loss on every copy of OS/2 sold if they were to compete with Windows. Remember that MS wanted OS/2 to fail, and they almost failed until Office95 was purposefully made to break OS/2 support by querying memory at 2GB on startup. Never needed it, would never use it, but OS/2's VM's maxed out at 512MB, and would return an error, causing Office95 to fail to load. Definitely a dirty trick, because otherwise, Office95, IIRC, could run on OS/2 just fine. Add in the 10 months of failing to support older office versions and the upgrade cycle at the time, and MS killed off OS/2 by incompatibility in a large swath of industries.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Are you sure about the $87 for HPFS? I bought Warp V3 (redbox) for $50CND when it came out, OS/2 2.11 for the price of postage and eCS 2.1 (OS/2 4.52) for a $100 US. I think you're confusing HPFS with Win 3.1 which did cost about $87, at least the blue box editions were about a $100 more then the red box editions and the only difference was whether it included Windows or you used your own.
The $1000 HPFS386 license fee was for Warp Server towards the end.
MS broke Win32s (and Win95) with version 1.30 on OS/2 by loading some of the DLLs above the 1GB mark (might have been above 2GB) as no processes on OS/2 could use more then 512MBs, at least until Warp Server 3 or 4 and on the desktop, Warp 4.5 (Warp v4 + FP13). Even now you have to work to use memory above 1GB, eg this SM that I just compiled and am posting from needed -Zhigh-mem (with os2safe.h included to avoid loading any 16bit API high, 16bit functions are limited to addressing 1GB virtual memory) fed to GCC and then xul.dll marked to load code and data high. Using about a 1GB of memory I have 224,526,336 bytes of free shared memory. Building a debug versions I need the full 3GBs of address space to link xul.dll and the system swaps with 2GBs of ram
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
...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...].
Yep, IBM was losing money on every copy of OS/2 sold. I can't find any links today, but that's what I recall way way back when, when there were hot discussions about why OS/2 was so much more expensive than windows.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
I don't know about this specific version but ecomstation has LVM as part of the installer and it's been bootable from CD-ROM/DVD since forever. If they are using the same code IBM developed it should have the JFS2 code IBM wrote when they were creating it for AIX and ported to OS/2.
Well I've wrestled with reality for thirty five years doctor, and I'm happy to say I finally won out over it.