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After 25 Years, 'Lost' OS/2 2.0 Build 6.605 Finally Re-Discovered (os2museum.com)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the old-OS's dept.

"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."

4 of 93 comments (clear)

  1. OS/2 Warp 4: Better than modern Linux. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    1. Re: OS/2 Warp 4: Better than modern Linux. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      What part of OS/2's user interface isn't intuitive? Here's a sample screenshot for reference. It's very clear what's a window, what are buttons, what are menus, and what clicking on the various buttons or menu items will do. It's a clean, sensible UI. Anyone who could use Windows XP or Windows 7 would have no problem with OS/2.

    2. Re:OS/2 Warp 4: Better than modern Linux. by Solandri · · Score: 2, Informative

      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.

      OS/2 is based on IBM's Common User Access guidelines, which laid out standardized keyboard and mouse user interface inputs for various operations. It was developed based on years of research and human trials to figure out what did/didn't work. Unlike GNOME 3 which is seemingly based on whatever the programmer thought was cool and neat. Windows is based on CUA as well, although Microsoft has begun taking some liberties with it (or abandoning it almost entirely for their Metro stuff).

  2. Re: If anyone could put up a torrent of last good by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    No torrent needed.

    https://winworldpc.com/product/os-2-warp-4/os-2-warp-452