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

My intro to operating systems

[thinkwaitfast]

OS/2 was the reason I started reading ./ and learned about it and operating systems.

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.

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.

Could have been a contender

[Empiric]

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.

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.

Re: Could have been a contender

[Junior J. Junior III]

In 1995, a kid in my dorm showed me this new OS called Be. Running on a PowerMac 603 with a single cpu and 16mb of ram, he showed me how Be could play 6 video files simultaneously. Mapped to 6 faces of a cube. And you could spin the cube around via the mouse while all 6 videos were playing. Never any input lag, or dropped frames. It was a thing of beauty.

Re:OS/2

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:OS/2

[hcs_$reboot]

We would all be using it. If only ms fucked up nt 4.

MS did, and we don't use OS/2.

Ob

[Hognoxious]

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.

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:Ah the memories

[martiniturbide]

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.

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.

Re: OS/2

[Anonymous Coward]

I bet you didn't really run linux around that time. It was very rare that mainstream hardware actually worked. Winmodems & hp inkjets *shiver*.