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.

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: 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: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.