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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."

3 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: 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