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.

Comments

Seems a bit pointless.

[Gravis Zero]

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! ;)

Re:Sorry, it's time has passed

[bill_mcgonigle]

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.