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After 25 Years, 'Lost' OS/2 2.0 Build 6.605 Finally Re-Discovered (os2museum.com)
"In a fascinating example of poor timing, disk images of OS/2 2.0 pre-release level 6.605 from July/September 1991 were missing for over 25 years, only to show up literally one day after after the 25th anniversary of the OS/2 2.0 release," writes the site OS/2 Museum. An anonymous reader writes:
It's the last OS/2 2.0 pre-release which didn't use the Workplace Shell (WPS), but "instead utilized the same old Desktop Manager as OS/2 1.2/1.3, which makes it the closest surviving relative of the Microsoft OS/2 2.0 SDK." Featuring a 16-bit/32-bit hybrid kernel and a "DOS Window" icon (as well as a few games like Reversi and Klondike Solitaire), "the look and feel was not quite the same as OS/2 1.3 and in fact was a cross between OS/2 1.3 and Windows 3.1."
The elusive 6.605 pre-release fell between 6.149 and 6.167 -- and "It is not known what possessed IBM to assign it a completely out-of-sequence number."
The elusive 6.605 pre-release fell between 6.149 and 6.167 -- and "It is not known what possessed IBM to assign it a completely out-of-sequence number."
build, I'd appreciate it. I'd love to have an os/2 virtual machine.
I was doing some house cleaning a few months back, and I found some old installation media for OS/2 Warp 4. I must have bought it 20 years ago. The media was still readable, so I installed it in a VM.
I was flabbergasted by it. Despite being around 20 years old, it still offered an experience just as good, if not better in some ways, than modern systemd/GNOME-3/Linux distros do.
The installation process was pretty trivial. Going through it again reminded me of when I had installed it the first time, years earlier.
It booted really fast. It's about as close to instant-on as I've seen an OS. And it booted properly right away, without any of the peculiar sorts of problems that I've had with systemd.
Although I hadn't used it in years, the desktop environment was efficient and enjoyable to use. It wasn't like GNOME 3, where I can't figure out how the hell to do even simple tasks a lot of the time. The OS/2 UI was very intuitive and easy to work with.
It took a little bit of effort to get the networking working. But once that was done, I was able to find an old version of the Mozilla Suite browser that would run on it, so I was able to at least do some basic web browsing.
Honestly, if modern software ran on OS/2, and if it had a better underlying UNIX-type experience like macOS has, I would totally consider using it as my everyday operating system.
It's quite sad that an obsolete OS from 20 years ago can still challenge a modern systemd/GNOME-3/Linux installation. I don't think it's that OS/2 was ahead of its time, like BeOS was. Instead, it's just the Linux workstation environment that hasn't progressed well at all.
I was an avid user of Os/2 and certainly used its included Windows 3.0 or was it 3.1? IIRC, IBM had the code for Windows and recompiled it using their own compiler and it worked faster and maybe better than Microsoft's product. It also had a neat terminal program - can't remember its name - that was produced by a company near my post office on Centennial Blvd in Colorado Springs. Can't remember its name either. Things have changed. Would things be better if OS/2 development had prevailed instead of development of the current Windows platforms? Maybe. We will never know.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
I bought OS/2 Warp with the intention of loading it on the 20 PC's at the company I worked for. The problem is that when issues occurred and I called IBM support, they were out of the office. They only worked one shift, five days a week. Do, any real work on weekends or at night couldn't have supplier support ASAP. I dumped it after a couple of weeks, on the sole machine I had it on, mine, due to growing crashes that IBM support, when I did get a hold of them were like "get start over" Nope. OS/2 deserved to die due to corporate suckage. I installed Windows 95 beta and that's when we went with. The Windows 98 beta, when it became available, ran so well that it was installed on most PC's before being finalized. This is only the story of one company with very specific software needs that IBM screwed up and Microsoft did a great job on. Note that I dislike Microsoft these days, due to the final QA layer they pushed on Windows 10 Home and Pro users.
The entire OS/2 2.0 fiasco is one of my favorite topics. Remember MS's attempts to attack OS/2 later on, some of which was unethical I think?
Dead platforms are usually dead for a reason. Best they get left to rest in peace.
Progressivism: Parasites helping parasites to help themselves - to other people's stuff.
Maybe they had parallel development paths for a while, before deciding which way to go. That would make it being "half an OS" literally true.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
I used to boot into OS/2 just to do a large ping packet that would crash my coworkers computer. She was always on IRC chatting with her boyfriend.
Emulation and reincarnation
Nobody cares.
I, along with a few people I worked with, can take some credit/blame for that.
IBM Toronto Manufacturing in the early-mid '90s was building memory SIMMs for PS/2s running OS/2. IBM, at the time, had a standard set of seven memory tests but they didn't catch problems in a multi-tasker like OS/2 running on a 286/386 with memory management with multiple processes running so the memory was heavily used - so we booted OS/2 and started up a number of processes, each one accessing memory continuously and see if there were any defective memory chips on the SIMM that only failed during very heavy usage.
The issue was trying to figure out if the failure was caused by an instruction or data operation and where exactly it was in the address space which was problematical because the actual page where the failing bit/data was obfuscated due to memory management paging. When a SIMM failed the OS/2 test, it would be brought to a debug station where attempts would be make to recreate the problem and, using a custom OS/2 build, return to that sequence where the problem lay and, using a processor emulator, determine what the address was failing.
As a side note, memory at the time cost $150/Mbit, so it was worth the time and effort to find and replace the defective chip on a 1-2 Mbyte SIMM.
I'm not sure exactly how our code got into the main branch, I suspect it was because there were other things that were fixed in that recovery code and situations where there was a failure resulting in the loop of death wasn't part of the test sequence.
I do remember that there was a fairly simple way of cold booting the system from so that you could avoid this failure loop (we called it the "loop of death") - If memory serves correctly it was pressing 'F8' when the OS/2 logo comes up and then selecting a cold boot from a menu (this is going back more than 25 years ago so don't shoot me if I'm wrong). OS/2 support at that point in time was pretty good, they would have explained how to get out of the loop of death as it was a pretty common problem, especially with badly behaved Win 3.11 apps.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
No torrent needed.
https://winworldpc.com/product/os-2-warp-4/os-2-warp-452
In life you get what you pay for. Linux sucks. Role with a real OS that can run good software like Windows or OS X.
Indeed. Often times a dead platform is killed off simply because it's parent company went out of business due to overly aggressive, potentially illegal, business tactics by competitors.
Other times a platform ends up dead simply because an inferior, less desirable, replacement was conjured up by it's parent company who is having trouble selling the new system simply because the old is still around.
Oh wait. Perhaps there's no need to leave it dead after all! :P
Hi. I'm still looking for developer warriors to help the OS/2 community to clone the CPI, PM, SOM and WPS API of OS/2 Warp. http://www.edm2.com/index.php/...
Let us appreciate the BIOS as the real kernel module HAL, and can we build a hardware-independent OS?
Sill no discussion how Spectre gui is the best multi-tasking DOS console experience.
"It is not known what possessed IBM to assign it a completely out-of-sequence number, but without a doubt there is a patent behind it."
But I still have the OS2 CD given out just before Windows was first released
AC was still using the Amiga in 1991? Ewww. Guess that's why he's anonymous. Real people were using bsd, unix, stuff worth while.
It was a very secure system far ahead of Microsoft. The problem was the IBM marketing department and the rush to beat Microsoft to market.
In its day it was the underlying O/S for many ATM networks do to its security and journaling disc system. You could literly remove power and when the system came back up it would continue with the task it was working before power down.
no matter how good it is, it is human nature always wants to make things better
The server version running JFS was relatively secure, the regular user version was less secure in that it wasn't really multi-user nor had a journaling file system in by default. Yet its architecture was still far more secure than Windows and NT despite what MS wanted you to believe. Merely breaking out of the process thread didn't grant you root access to the system. Finally, the ATM network software was written by people who understood redundant and highly reliable systems, which is why they worked they way they did. You could have done most of that on NT, but you'd have had to code more of it yourself since NT's journaling file system left more than one thing to be desired regarding journaling, because I'm sure no one's NT file system ever crapped out when power failed during writes.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Darn, and I spent an hour building my own. It was interesting, though, seeing the install screens etc fly by on modern hardware, once the floppies and CDs were copied over.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
https://github.com/bitwiseworks/mozilla-os2/releases
Thanks dude.