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A 21st-Century Version Of OS/2 Warp May Be Released Soon (arcanoae.com)
dryriver writes: A company named Arca Noae is working on a new release of the X86 OS/2 operating system code named "Blue Lion" and likely called ArcaOS 5 in its final release. Blue Lion wants to be a modern 21st Century OS/2 Warp, with support for the latest hardware and networking standards, a modern accelerated graphics driver, support for new cryptographic security standards, full backward compatibility with legacy OS/2, DOS and Windows 3.1 applications, suitability for use in mission-critical applications, and also, it appears, the ability to run "ported Linux applications". Blue Lion, which appears to be in closed beta with March 31st 2017 cited as the target release date, will come with up to date Firefox browser and Thunderbird mail client, Apache OpenOffice, other productivity tools, a new package manager, and software update and support subscription to ensure system stability. It is unclear from the information provided whether Blue Lion will be able to run modern Windows applications.
There have been operating systems which have come and gone which have reasons to exist today, like BeOS. But OS/2 is not among them. Windows 3.1 support? That's not a relevant feature. Please tell me that their actual planned release date is April 1.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Will it have the Workplace Shell? Some virtualisation engine for running other OS's under it? (other than the DOS/Windows 3.x bits, which are "thunked" rather than emulated) These are what I want to know! I would *LOVE* to have workplace shell on Linux, and would run OS/2 again if I was able to run WPS and use other OS's in virtualisation!
Check out: http://www.warpstock.eu/ May 20, 21 in Rotterdam. The next Warpstock in North America is going to be announced soon: http://www.warpstock.org/
If it can compete against the steaming pile that is Windows 10 and the eye candy which is Macs, this is a good thing. Being able to buy a license for a machine and use it without being forced to "upgrade" or have updates automatically installed whether you want them or not would be a great leap forward.
Being able to run software which is a few years old but does what you want would also be a big plus.
...in 1988, back while IBM and Microsoft thought they could work together. HA! I was a contractor and I made much money in my entire career working on the installation package with an in-house language that lack the ability for simple Boolean functions! That's right - no AND or OR or NOT! We beg to do it in C but were overruled. It was a such a stupid project. I learn that if stupidity is profitable, it will be repeated.
While Windows start-of-art was 3.11, OS/2 came out with Presentation Manager and true multitasking and I was in love! This was before Linux, before the Wide World Web and we crave to upgraded to an PS/2 Model 70 with a blazing 16 mHz 32-bit processor and curse to slow transistion from 5.25 to 3.5" floppy disks!
My favorite part was the clean interface, especially the Font Palette. I could set a font and and will be EVERYWHERE. I had just two folders on my desktop, Programs and Data. It's the cleanest, more elegant interface of my life.
All the lead people are mainframers. We used the same email system as Oliver North did. The low point of my three years there is when the Lead Designer, the Big Cheese of the project, went on a massive rant about the GUI and wanting me to justified it over the command line. He hated mice! He hated color - anything beyond monochrome was inappropriate for business! It was a obscenity-filled, homophobic rant.
Then the Great War between Microsoft and IBM started. I think over REXX and Visual Basic. IBM loved REXX and want to include for free but Bill Gates was reported to have something like, "Over my death body, they can buy my Basic". But truly, it was a Big Dick contest and they parted ways and Microsoft beget Windows 95 and IBM OS/2 Warp and eventually IBM threw in the throw and ECOMstation took over OS/2 in Europe. I just checked, ECOMstation2 does not Windows (yay) but still does DOS (in a box).
I never heard of a single report of malware for a native OS/2 or ECOMstation application. Ever. Have you?
If you need your OS/2 apps badly, you can already freely download IBM OS2 Warp 4.0 and run it in a VM or some old metal. As for DOS, FreeDOS reliably runs even on modern hardware though you can also use ReactOS which implements it faithfully. Finally, Win 3.x apps are old hat for WINE. You can SkiFree all day if you want! ;)
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
I have never seen such a vivid graphical representation of /dev/null before. Thank you!
Trolling is a art,
OS/2 got interrupt handling exactly right. I could format a floppy, play Wolfenstein in a window, and have a mod tracker playing in the background on a 486/25. BeOS got close but was never quite as good.
My Linux machine today can't copy to a USB hard drive without making the rest of the system unusable.
It seems like Linux could still learn some tricks from these old OS's.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I was an OS/2 evangelist and apologist, a major fan. I mourned for OS/2 during it's slow, agonizing death and was likely in a state of denial for a while after it did die. However, at this point, anyone who thinks that OS/2 is viable for anything is really just engaging in necrophilia.
That's due to the bridge chips being a bottleneck and it impacts on everything - MS Windows, Solaris etc also act that way on the same hardware. It becomes painfully obvious on things like the Raspberry Pi (where a broadcom chip is the weakest link and used for usb, network, etc) but it applies elsewhere. That old system you describe was dealing with it in the cpu so it's much easier to divide up the load.