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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 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.
Wasn't it something like XComm? I had that too. It was awesome being able to download from a BBS at 14.4k in the background while playing Wolfenstein.
Yeah, basically IBM paid for Microsoft to develop NT. If you look like MS's history, it's filled with them doing unethical things. IBM should have known better after the whole DOS fiasco.
-- if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic - Lewis Carrol
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
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
March 1989: "Nearly four years have elapsed since the initiation of our Joint Development Agreement .. Now, we need to focus on .. establishing OS/2 as the next standard in personal computing."
.. I was super enthusiastic that we shipped OS/2"
Aug 1988: "I think we need to think very carefully about how much we want Windows to compete with OS/2 in the OEM channel and for the ISVs attention".
"In December, OS/2 shipped initially from IBM
June 1991: "I have written a PM app that hangs the system (sometimes quite graphically). You can take a look at it anytime, just let me know Eric"
July 1991: 'SteveB went on the road to see the top weeklies, industry analysts and business press this week to give our systems strategy. The meetings included demos of Windows 3.1 (pen and multimedia included), Windows NT, OS/2 2.0 including a performance comparison to Windows and a “bad app” that corrupted other applications and crashed the system'
"The demos of OS/2 were excellent, crashing the system had the intended effect"