New OS/2 Warp Operating System 'ArcaOS' 5.0 Released (arcanoae.com)

The long-awaited modern OS/2 distribution from Arca Noae was released Monday. martiniturbide writes: ArcaOS 5.0 is an OEM distribution of IBM's discontinued OS/2 Warp operating system. ArcaOS offers a new set of drivers for ACPI, network, USB, video and mouse to run OS/2 in newer hardware. It also includes a new OS installer and open source software like Samba, Libc libraries, SDL, Qt, Firefox and OpenOffice... It's available in two editions, Personal ($129 with an introductory price of $99 for the first 90 days [and six months of support and maintenance updates]) and Commercial ($239 with one year of support and maintenance).

The OS/2 community has been called upon to report supported hardware, open source any OS/2 software, make public as much OS/2 documentation as possible and post the important platform links. OS2World insists that open source has helped OS/2 in the past years and it is time to look under the hood to try to clone internal components like Control Program, Presentation Manager, SOM and Workplace Shell.
By Tuesday Arca Noae was reporting "excessive traffic on the server which is impacting our ordering and delivery process," though the actual downloads of the OS were unaffected, the server load issues were soon mitigated, and they thanked OS/2 enthusiasts for a "truly overwhelming response."

Comments

Bring out your dead

[Anonymous Coward]

And we will revive them

What is this? Jurassic Park, for computers? OS/2 community... now there's a bunch of geezers... Can it run COBOL?

Re:Bring out your dead

[Wolfrider]

--Maybe... But it should certainly run REXX.

Re:Bring out your dead

[hey!]

Of course it can run COBOL.

COBOL remains in use -- it's been estimated that even today on average a typical American interacts at least indirectly with a piece of COBOL software more than a dozen times daily. Over 200 billion lines of code are currently being maintained, and that figure is growing, albeit slowly. It's not hard to find COBOL jobs, if you live in a city which is a major center for some the industries that were early adopters of computers.

Re: Bring out your dead

[Anonymous Coward]

Rex and its Amiga version Arex was awesome

Re: Bring out your dead

[Anonymous Coward]

Man, I still miss my A500. I have Amiga Forever on my Windows box which is pretty close. I just wish I could remember all the AREX commands.

Re: Bring out your dead

[Anonymous Coward]

| Rex and its Amiga version Arexx were awesome

..as was the Apple flavor, called AppleScript /s/. At one point (before the investors brought Jobs back), the Frenchies must have had a fleet of Amiga computers in the basement at 1 Infinite Loop along with a surgical team carefully innovating everything for Apple's System 7 (even knock-offs of Amiga GfxBase, the MIDI integration and Speech). Here in the future, Apple recently let their AppleScript master go on his way and on their billion-user platforms (iOS, tvOS and watchOS) they don't allow third-parties to integrate any standardized-APIs into their mobile apps, or any APIs at all for that matter, except for whatever deep-URL-hooks or quasi-background-tasks they can "make work". They just bought some third-party company called Workflow, so maybe some announcements at WWDC? While the whole syntax of AppleScript was always way more verbose (like the original Jobs-era HyperCard language) than ARexx, the concept was the same --and on macOS Sierra these days, they implement that concept using additional nomenclature besides AppleScript, like JavaScript and MacPython. Whatever Apple does with scripting, I hope it allows integration across all devices in the same realm (Apple ID/Family)...otherwise, this is the #1 reason to build a new operating system and go save some (now) broke-arse manufacturing company that was locked out of the Apple ecoSystem.

Re: Bring out your dead

[Anonymous Coward]

reclaim your life with an emulator

Re: Bring out your dead

[TheFakeTimCook]

| Rex and its Amiga version Arexx were awesome

..as was the Apple flavor, called AppleScript /s/. At one point (before the investors brought Jobs back), the Frenchies must have had a fleet of Amiga computers in the basement at 1 Infinite Loop along with a surgical team carefully innovating everything for Apple's System 7 (even knock-offs of Amiga GfxBase, the MIDI integration and Speech). Here in the future, Apple recently let their AppleScript master go on his way and on their billion-user platforms (iOS, tvOS and watchOS) they don't allow third-parties to integrate any standardized-APIs into their mobile apps, or any APIs at all for that matter, except for whatever deep-URL-hooks or quasi-background-tasks they can "make work". They just bought some third-party company called Workflow, so maybe some announcements at WWDC? While the whole syntax of AppleScript was always way more verbose (like the original Jobs-era HyperCard language) than ARexx, the concept was the same --and on macOS Sierra these days, they implement that concept using additional nomenclature besides AppleScript, like JavaScript and MacPython. Whatever Apple does with scripting, I hope it allows integration across all devices in the same realm (Apple ID/Family)...otherwise, this is the #1 reason to build a new operating system and go save some (now) broke-arse manufacturing company that was locked out of the Apple ecoSystem.

AppleScript isn't HyperTalk-Like. It is a direct descendant of HyperTalk.

And the MIDI integration in MacOS Classic (and later, OS X/macOS) was actually purchased from a company with a Mac OS (classic) software subsystem called OMS (Open Music System).

Re: Bring out your dead

[Anonymous Coward]

I miss my XTs and ATs. I don't remember many 4DOS commands any more.

Re:Bring out your dead

[ArcaNoae]

Comments like this truly shine in their ignorance. Do you like using bottled chemical products, such as shampoo, detergent, bleach, and household cleaners? Do you like the way they are boxed in cartons of a dozen bottles when shipped to your local supermarket? Guess what the systems run which are making the plastic bottles, mixing the chemicals, creating the boxes, and boxing those filled bottles? OS/2, more than likely. Do you like having life and auto insurance? Guess what systems are most often running the computers determining what your premiums are and generating your bills? OS/2, more than likely. Do you like being able to cross a state on a toll road and whiz through the toll barriers? Guess what system is running those toll machines (yes, even the EZ-Pass systems)? OS/2, quite likely. The fact that you don't use OS/2 to play video games has no bearing on its viability as a stable workhorse across several vital segments of the US and world economy. COBOL? Yes. (Note comment about insurance sector, above - what language do you think is used for those applications? Not FORTRAN, though we have a very capable FORTRAN for OS/2, as well as recent gcc, if you want to get down to it.)

Proud of their work

[Osgeld]

While I can and do see the point behind the commercial version, the price of the personal version puts me off of even considering trying it, guess you really have to be a diehard OS/2 personal user.

I am not saying that it should be FREEEEEEE and all that, just 99$ is not appealing for something that is a refresh of something that hasn't existed on the personal market for a couple decades and tout's features like "usb support" and OSS that runs on any semi current OS

Re:Proud of their work

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're going to write tout's, shouldn't you also write O'sgeld, put's, gues's, and decade's?

Re:Proud of their work

[Anonymous Coward]

give's

Re:Proud of their work

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it's "gives." It's not a contraction for "give is", which wouldn't make any sense whatsoever.

CAP === 'solidify'

Re:Proud of their work

[Anonymous Coward]

You cant find $99 - seriously? What else does $99 buy you in the US? Not a lot - couple tanks of gas, feeds a couple people for a week. Or how many things do you waste $99 on that has no residual value?

I'm not even that well paid in the grand scheme of tech jobs, but I could trade 4 hours of simple (to me) work for this shiny new exciting version of OS/2 that other people have put many hours of work into.

I like my software free too, never paid a cent for Windows, OS X, (Linux is free for a reason, its junk) at most I've shelled out a few bucks here and there for iOS apps I find useful. Yet I'm 90% of the way there to dropping $99 on a current version of OS/2 to try out just for the fun and experience of it.

Re: Proud of their work

[mSparks43]

Linux is free because big non MS companies invest in it so they dont have to pay programmers and their investor to reinvent the wheel twice a month.
Linux is only "junk" if your computing experience amounts to wordprocessing and/or using an expensive version of MS paint.

Re:Proud of their work

[Osgeld]

um 9.9 tanks of gas for my small car

and I never said it should be free, im not pissing away 9.9 tanks of gas to use os/2 and firefox... I might consider 20, hell at 20$ I bet they would sell a fuckton more copies

Re:Proud of their work

[__aaclcg7560]

$99 is nearly enough for three IMAX movies (~5 hours) for two adults in the US. My four hours of "simple" work will garner an extra hour of entertainment. Still need to work an extra three hours to pay for food at the theater.

Re:Proud of their work

[Desler]

The aspergers is strong in this one.

Re:Proud of their work

[Anonymous Coward]

maybe around here take fuck's though.

Re: Proud of their work

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope you know that Microsoft is a major investor of Linux development as well

Re:Proud of their work

[OrangeTide]

They release updates so infrequently that $99 doesn't seem like a big deal. Cheaper than a movie box set, and will probably consume more hours of my time.

And if you're a contractor you can probably write off the $229 version as a business expense, and possibly apply depreciation on it. (I'm not a tax accountant)

Re:Proud of their work

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it''s "give's." It''s not a contraction for "give i's", which wouldn't make any 'sense what'soever.

CAP === ''solidify'

FTFY

Re:Proud of their work

[Anonymous Coward]

No, just another person tired of most people's inability to write common fucking English properly.

Re:Proud of their work

[dilvish_the_damned]

Are you suggesting that OS/2 is cheaper to operate than Windows because you dont have to upgrade it very often? Like you only just now need to go upgrade from DB9 mouse to USB because it is just now supported?

If so I would mod you up. You may not be a tax accountant but you are clearly a CTO.

They release updates so infrequently that $99 doesn't seem like a big deal. Cheaper than a movie box set, and will probably consume more hours of my time.

And if you're a contractor you can probably write off the $229 version as a business expense, and possibly apply depreciation on it. (I'm not a tax accountant)

Holy Crap expensive

[TWX]

The summary does not exactly make it clear how this pricing works. It almost sounds like pay to have your OS run (ie, "for the first 90 days") but then it's immediately contradicted by stating that updates will be available for six months.

Is there any corporate use of OS/2 anymore, anywhere? Without corporate adoption I don't know how they can make enough money to keep this project viable as a for-profit venture.

Re: Holy Crap expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

New York's subway system uses OS/2. http://techland.time.com/2012/04/02/25-years-of-ibms-os2-the-birth-death-and-afterlife-of-a-legendary-operating-system/

Re:Holy Crap expensive

[RoverDaddy]

Don't let the editing in the summary trip you up. Personal version is $99 now but the price will go up to $129 in 90 days. From the actual article:

The personal license will retail for $129, with an introductory price of $99 for the first 90 days following release. This includes six months of support and maintenance updates and fixes.

Netscape included

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh the joy!

Re:Netscape included

[unixisc]

The last version of Netscape that existed was Netscape 9, which was some earlier version of FireFox (before that went the Chrome route). The closest thing to that might be to port Pale Moon & Fossamail to this platform. Maybe rebrand it so that it won't sound so weird.

Re:Netscape included

[toddestan]

Actually the closest thing to the Netscape would be clone Seamonkey over, as the interface is basically the old Netscape interface from the 90's and is more or less unchanged. It would look right at home on OS/2.

Re:Proud of their work..but does it matter?

[bogaboga]

Can someone tell me why I should [perhaps] want to use this OS?

I ask because for now, I do not see the point, sadly.

Re:Proud of their work..but does it matter?

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to program for OS/2 back in the day and I don't see the point either. There was nothing about the OS that isn't done better now by Mac OS, Linux or even Windows. And you can play all you want in the Linux world for free. That leaves perhaps a company still running some ancient, mission critical OS/2 application as the most likely target market. How many of those can there really be?

PARTY LIKE IT'S 1999 !!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Literally, because OS/2 was already dead! Back then! In 1999! Prince is already dead! Why is this coming out of the grave!

Re:PARTY LIKE IT'S 1999 !!!

[uvajed_ekil]

Literally, because OS/2 was already dead! Back then! In 1999! Prince is already dead! Why is this coming out of the grave!

It may as well have been dead when WIndows 95 came out. OS/2 3.0 (Warp) was superior, or some of us thought so anyway, but wasn't able to gain enough traction in the market. I pirated it when it came it (poor kid) and used it for a while, but M$ was the only real choice for a lot of us, until Linux evolved a bit. Bothering with a new release now (and charging$100 for it!) seems like an exercise in futility.

Re:PARTY LIKE IT'S 1999 !!!

[unixisc]

OS/2 was superior to Windows 3.1 & Workgroups 3.11, but not over Windows 95. The thing that OS/2 2.1 had over Windows 3.1 was pre-emptive multitasking, something that at the time neither Apple nor Microsoft had. The only other OSs that had that were all the Unixes and VMS, and neither Linux nor the 386BSD was out then.

So some people did have OS/2 2.1 running, but its resource requirements were way higher than Windows 3.1 and even its successor, OS/2 Warp. Probably b'cos Warp ended up w/ better memory management, schedulers & the like. Regardless, at the time, OS/2 2.1 had a major advantage over Windows 3.1, but that came at a major cost. Also, nobody seriously put any effort building quality applications for OS/2. On this front, I do blame ISVs who had Microsoft beating them up hard on the Windows side, but who didn't come up w/ a quality product for OS/2 that might have salvaged both themselves and OS/2.

The companies I'm thinking of here: Borland (for software development packages), Lotus (for SmartSuite), WordPerfect (for their Office), Intuit (for Quicken) and others. Had they made OS/2 offerings as good as or better than what they did for Windows, Microsoft wouldn't have eaten their lunch. Any of the 50 or so PC vendors that existed in the day could have preloaded computers w/ OS/2, Smartsuite and the like, and then sold that bundle in competition w/ the Gateways and the Compaqs of the world then. You wouldn't have had a Microsoft monopoly. Unfortunately, a combination of mistakes by both IBM, who were even then too big for their own good, and the ISVs, saw to it that that never materialized.

As I indicated above, there may be a window for that today, but that has to have a USP of its own unlike that of any of the current players in the market.

Re:PARTY LIKE IT'S 1999 !!!

[Anonymous Coward]

OS/2 was too expensive, and so was the memory.
I wonder if they should have made an "OS/2 lite", CLI-only. For many home users what counted was DOS, not Windows. By 1994 everyone wanted to upgrade to 4MB RAM or a computer with 4MB RAM to run Doom, and that was barely affordable.

The GUI was a bonus, not strictly wanted if you were after games (except for Myst which was a Windows game)
Would a CLI OS/2 2.0 or OS/2 2.1 on 286 or better have worked well with a full screen Doom and 4MB RAM? (using disk swapping and not trying to do much else)
Would it have worked with Duke3D and 8MB?

Excessive traffic

[fph il quozientatore]

Excessive server traffic? All five of their users trying to update at the same time?

Re:Excessive traffic

[Greyfox]

It's probably overloading their 9600 kbps modem.

Re:Excessive traffic

[Anonymous Coward]

9600 kbps modems? Sorry junior, those never existed.

We had 9600 bps modems though.

Re:Excessive traffic

[ArcaNoae]

Actually, we're on a 75Mbps synchronous fiber link, and our ordering server (running WordPress) was overwhelmed. The IP stack was not the problem, rather poor response from PHP was causing serious issues. Ultimately, we moved the Arca Noae site off onto a dedicated server (also running ArcaOS 5.0) and this has mitigated the problem (the main web server here runs close to 50 virtual hosts, and does a fairly good job of keeping up, but we were not anticipating anything like the response we've seen). (As the follow-up to your post clarified, those were 9600 baud, or bps, not Kbps. We didn't start using the "K" until 14.4Kbps modems became available.) ;-)

This.

[Anonymous Coward]

On the one hand I'm happy for alternative OSes to be available. So, good on them and so forth.

One reason is that I've lost faith in everything even close to mainstream (redmond AND linux in all tis many forms AND the BSDs, just about all of them, AND everything else I've looked at, though some moreso than others). We need that diversity (not the SJW "diversity" identity politics BS, thanks, this is about OS code base diversity) for look what happens with a monoculture.

On the other hand, OS/2 feels quite nineties and even then, I liked it for being an alternative but it still stank too much of windows to be taken very seriously. And, well, this is what, the second or third try at revival (and name)? What happened to the previous few attempts?

Considering that the best kids these days manage is yet another distro respin, calling it an "OS" which I think is quite misleading, a honest-to-grue actually different OS is a breath of fresh air, I'm left baffled. What is it with the dearth of viable OSes?

You might say I want to believe but I've been burned too often to be easily swayed. So do tell please, what might convince me that this thing is actually viable?

Re:This.

[Cmdln Daco]

WTF?

Who spewed this wordy blather here?

Re:This.

[SirSlud]

Boy did your parents fail you.

Re:This.

[Anonymous Coward]

"On the other hand, OS/2 feels quite nineties and even then, I liked it for being an alternative but it still stank too much of windows to be taken very seriously."

A no, Windows 95 stank to much of OS/2 as it was the direct derivative of OS/2 once Bill broke off from IBM.

Re:This.

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong. Windows 1.x, 2.x, 3.x and 9x were graphical shells that ran on DOS, essentially suped up versions of DOSShell or ViewMax. You could run and exit them directly from and to the DOS command prompt, just like any program, such as DesqView or Doom.

Windows NT is what Microsoft's OS/2 evolved into.

This might as well go the way of BEOS5

[Anonymous Coward]

99$ , really !?!?! Better luck next time.

For the Young... Some Background.

[geek111]

For anyone too young to remember, OS/2 Warp was an OS released by IBM to compete with Microsoft DOS in the late eighties. It was meant to be backward compatible and superior to DOS in just about every way(it really was too) . Because IBM had a better reputation for business/uptime/everything than Microsoft at the time OS/2 found wide usage in commercial & embedded devices (most notably ATMs). However, in the PC world, it didn't catch on. (Imagine having to install OS2 instead of DOS, then put windows on top of that. So unless your PC came with it you were probably SOL) So after a few years it was ONLY found in ATMs, where it continued to live all the way through the 1990s, eventually being replaced by XP.

OS/2 was pretty cool and I'd support this project if their pricing structure was geared to only charge for commercial use. They could have thousands of free beta testers. Charging hobby users will likely be their death knell... Just my 2 cents.

Re:For the Young... Some Background.

[Anonymous Coward]

OS/2 was the "high end" PC operating system developed jointly by IBM and Microsoft, which was crafted to take advantage of the protected modes of Intel's 286 and 386 chips, and thus be able to address up to 16 MB memory (for 286) or 4GB memory (for 386) without the Rube Goldberg hacks needed to address more than 1MB memory under MS-DOS. It came with a Macintosh-inspired GUI called Presentation Manager.

Unfortunately, it was slow to take off. Then MS released Windows 3 in 1990, which was a huge hit; moreover Window 3 provided "DOS extenders" so that apps could take advantage of the Intel protected modes. Microsoft also announced "Windows NT", an enterprise-grade version of Windows, and dropped support for OS/2; IBM took sole control and re-christened it "OS/2 Warp", with the geeky Star Trek reference.

Windows 3 was incredibly buggy, and many users experienced system lockups or blue screens (accompanied by loss of their work) several times a day, but Mac OS at the time was hardly better, so people got used to it. Windows NT also started making headway as a server OS for i386; NT on i386 was arguably the first "commodity" PC server platform. OS/2 Warp was mostly ignored except by some vertical markets such as banks.

Re:For the Young... Some Background.

[Anonymous Coward]

OS/2 was meant to REPLACE, not compete with, MS/PC-DOS. OS/2 was never real mode, which DOS was, and all it ever was. OS/2 ran protected mode, albeit with the 80826 to start. Details are on the internet. MS was on-board to start, but only to ensure a proper skuttling once it saw it owned the world with Windows 3.1. With help from Tears for Fears. OS/2 had a few years' run, but IBM threw in the towel right after Warp 4 (some would say Warp 3, the first Warp) came out, and went no where.

Re:For the Young... Some Background.

[ericlondaits]

Back in the day OS/2 was THE way to have a modern OS with real and sort of stable multitasking on a regular PC. It could run DOS and Windows apps but it also had native apps and for some applications that was all you needed. I had a BBS/FidoNet system back then and OS/2 was the best way to run all the services and parallel processing tasks... the alternative that some used was DESQview, a multitasking OS/Hack running on top of DOS. People on the argentine FidoNET scene stopped using OS/2 mostly because of:

- Linux, which was quickly gaining popularity
- Windows 95, which had preemptive multitasking

Re:For the Young... Some Background.

[CrashNBrn]

Like Steam, it'd be an Impulse buy at 5 or 10 bucks, with a similar expectation of "get around to it eventually."

Re:For the Young... Some Background.

[Anonymous Coward]

The Amiga had true preemptive multitasking LONG before Windows 95. In fact Commodore released the intuition library (the multitasking) source code to the public domain. Windows 95 still didn't do it as well as the Amiga...

Re:For the Young... Some Background.

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me clarify a bit because I actually worked with these systems. OS/2 was competition to Microsoft DOS and early versions of Windows. It was stupidly expensive, slightly incompatible, better designed than DOS or Windows, and largely unpopular. It was mainly used by System 390 mainframe backroom dorks that refused to run Microsoft software and had plenty of money in their department from sympathetic bosses to pay the crazy fees.

OS/2 Warp was a re-branding and redesign meant to reach the masses. Cheap enough for the average person to own a copy. It had modern features and compatibility (which still wasn't 100%). Warp was a good idea but it was simply way too late (like stupidly late to the game). IBM did their typical thing and stagnated so long that they lost the opportunity. Warp was a good design but with just enough incompatibilities that normal people didn't want to pay money for it.

Re:For the Young... Some Background.

[Anonymous Coward]

kewl story bra, to bad it doesnt have anything to do with shit in a hen house

Re:For the Young... Some Background.

[Anonymous Coward]

The Amiga had true preemptive multitasking LONG before Windows 95.

Except that an Amiga program could disable the preemption. This also was an issue with Windows 95 and hooking the timer interrupt. Meanwhile, in OS/2 you could have the same effect (IIRC) if you were to override the timer emulation in a DOS VM--which was required to get sound in a lot of DOS games (and possibly the reason NT still has sound emulation issues). In any case, this is one major reason why I dislike DirectX being able to hook all keyboard interrupts. Even with Linux and the ability to ssh into a machine, it's a non-trivial matter and really shouldn't be allowed because no amount of preemptive multitasking will help you if a single program can hook the keyboard and mouse, go fullscreen, and then hang.

Re:For the Young... Some Background.

[Anonymous Coward]

Further... Had I been head of IBM. I would have given it away for free. No joke, anyone that wanted OS/2 for any reason could acquire it and use it as they want.

That likely would have at the very least split Microsoft in two. Over time and as the Internet Age happened then OS/2 could have one-upped Microsoft at every turn because it was already better engineered on so many levels.

If that had happened then today we would be talking about how the new crappy OS/2 is with it's spyware, instead of Windows.

Literally a defining moment in history and IBM once again missed the boat. Idiots! We can argue whether it's greed or being beholding to shareholders but in the end it's just a fail. That's what IBM does. They do good work then absolutely fail to capitalize on it due to bloat, greed, and lack of forethought. Total morons. These old-school battleships of companies are doomed unless they're rebuilt from the ground up.

Re:For the Young... Some Background.

[laughingskeptic]

You left out a lot: IBM initially contracted Microsoft to create OS/2 due to their recent antitrust issues. IBM insisted on the entire OS, including the UI shell being written in assembler despite Microsoft's advice that the majority of the code be written in C with a small assembler kernel. It is easy to claim superiority over DOS. DOS was not an OS, it was a simple shell for running a single single-threaded process. However, OS/2 was incredibly buggy due to the extensive use of assembler. Key internal APIs and structures such as the kernel memory block structure were still changing within dot releases of Warp until the very end. This meant that other key OS component were always playing catch up. Getting working debugging tools was almost impossible. Every functional debugging tool I ever received for OS/2 came to me through back channels from a guy who knew a sales guy at IBM who knew an engineer who had patched a given tool for a given release. IBM horribly mismanaged later contractors such as those that developed the postscript printer drivers. The project managers at IBM seemed to have no understanding of what a printer driver was and they essentially contracted for the same work over and over resulting in a complete mess in that part of the product.

Windows NT came out a year after OS/2 had a working UI and supported existing hardware. OS/2 only really worked on IBM's PS/2's. Windows NT quickly surpassed OS/2's reliability despite the fact that it ran on a much wider variety of hardware. The big difference between OS/2 and Windows at that point was individual Windows aps did not have a threading API provided by the OS. I implemented this feature for my company because our code was initially developed on OS/2 and was designed from the beginning to use 2 threads. It was easier to add threading to Windows NT than re-write our code for the port. I spent 2 years working at a low level with both OSes and in my opinion OS/2 was doomed from the beginning by its buggy, unstable kernel and lack of tools. I don't think Window's kernel memory structures have changed since NT was released. Microsoft learned a lot from their early work on OS/2.

Re:For the Young... Some Background.

[squiggleslash]

OS/2 Warp was an OS released by IBM to compete with Microsoft DOS in the late eighties

Not... really. OS/2 Warp was the name given to the third version of OS/2. OS/2 was originally Microsoft and IBM's jointly developed successor to MS DOS/PC DOS. The history went like this:

1. OS/2 1.0 was co-developed by Microsoft and IBM as the successor to DOS (not a competitor.) It was not very good, the first version didn't even have a GUI although later versions in the 1.x series had a limited GUI not unlike Windows 3.x
2. Both parties hated the arrangement, and Microsoft and IBM had different ideas as to what the next version of OS/2 should be like. The two initially agreed to work on two more versions, with IBM releasing a short term 32 bit version of the OS called OS/2 2.0, and Microsoft working on a longer term version that would end up being the version after OS/2 2.0.
3. IBM released OS/2 2.0, which was generally praised but not widely adopted; but at this point Microsoft and IBM were completed divided on the future. What Microsoft had developed was clearly so far removed from OS/2 that it wasn't going to be OS/2 2.0's successor. It became Windows NT, and in the mean time Microsoft started selling DOS with Windows 3.x as the true successor to plain old DOS.
4. At this point - the early 1990s - IBM and Microsoft were at war. IBM revamped OS/2 2.0 producing OS/2 3.0 Warp, which it heavily marketed as a better Windows than Windows. PC manufacturers, with a handful of exceptions, completely ignored it, bundling Windows 3.x with their PCs, partially because IBM was considered a major competitor, and, after the MicroChannel debacle, not a company to be trusted.
5. OS/2 4.0 came out about the same time as Windows 95. Microsoft blacklisted IBM and refused to provide them with Windows 95 even for testing on their PCs until literally the night before release. IBM, knowing it had no chance of selling PCs without Windows 95, promptly dropped all development and marketing of OS/2.

Was it any good? Opinions differ. I thought it had some nice features, but it was hampered by poor technology choices from the beginning. It was a better system than 16 bit Windows, but that's not much of a complement.

Re:For the Young... Some Background.

[Kjella]

Because IBM had a better reputation for business/uptime/everything than Microsoft at the time OS/2 found wide usage in commercial & embedded devices (most notably ATMs). However, in the PC world, it didn't catch on.

Basically all the places that could afford the hardware OS/2 needed to run well. On low end hardware particularly without enough memory it was very slow, IIRC it needed 8MB to run okay vs 4MB for Windows 3.11 also many games were DOS based so you only started Windows 3.x when you needed to, a poor man's "dual boot" if you will. It was technically superior but lost anyway, a bit like VHS vs Betamax or how SCSI never took over for (E)IDE.

Re:For the Young... Some Background.

[johnw]

Not quite.

OS/2 was released jointly by IBM and Microsoft in the late eighties as the replacement for MS/PC-DOS (also a joint IBM/Microsoft product) and early fairly useless versions of Windows.

Then Windows 3 started to take off (Windows 1 and 2 had pretty much tanked) and Microsoft jumped ship, deciding instead to continue with the Windows branding and abandon the OS/2 marque. They were already working on OS/2 2.0 which they took and re-branded as Windows NT. IBM continued with the OS/2 branding and started again to produce first OS/2 2.0, and then OS/2 3.0 (also known as warp).

OS/2 always struggled with the fact that the PCs weren't really ready to run it. Early versions would run on an 80286 but there were a lot of compromises. It really came into its own with the 386, but it still required a significantly higher spec than Windows 3 did.

Re:For the Young... Some Background.

[jandrese]

The problem of course is that if you has an affordable machine then you couldn't run those DOS or Windows apps because there wasn't enough computer power left over for them. I bought an honest to god IBM P75 with 16MB of RAM back in 1995 and it came with OS/2 Warp 3.0 preinstalled alongside DOS/Windows 3.0. I tried using OS/2 a bit but I personally found the interface to be somewhat inscrutable and it was really vulnerable to random interface lockups when running the included applications. Virtually no DOS games worked in OS/2. I can't remember ever getting a Windows app to run in there either. In the end there just wasn't any reason to run it.

Re:For the Young... Some Background.

[Anonymous Coward]

I have no idea where you got your info from, and I am happy tou got a few karma from the comment. However, it is as wrong as the netcraft confirms posts of the day. Your comment is so fill of crap it is not funny.

Btw, yes I was one of the few OS/2 RS6000 SMP PPC techs but we certainly did exist at Delta.

Re:For the Young... Some Background.

[dissy]

While I can't speak of the OS/2 "internals" as I've never developed for the platform, as someone who still administrates OS/2 systems to this day, my end-user experiences are far from what you describe.

At the manufacturing plant I work for, we have numerous pick-and-place machines and through-hole insertion machines that are driven by OS/2 embedded systems.
The front end software was also made for OS/2 on a desktop, which in our case lives in VirtualBox instances on the engineers workstations.

While these systems are not on our standard client computer vlan, and in effect can only see each other in what is basically the OS/2 vlan, the systems themselves run flawlessly and with pretty insane uptimes.

The machine controllers have never actually been "rebooted", and in the last decade only powered off and on twice (Once due to a 12+ hour power-loss, and once for relocating the machines themselves)
That last power cycle was back in 2011, and they have been running for 6 years non-stop without problems.

The front-end systems have also never once needed rebooted to fix any stability issues or problems, although these systems don't run continuously.
That however is mostly due to the fact the virtualbox virtualization hosts are Windows desktops that do have to reboot for updates and stability issues. Thus the VMs are only ran as needed.

None of the bare metal involved are IBM PS/2 based systems, or IBM systems in anyway beyond being x86 backwards compatible Pentium era embedded machines.

As an OS/2 developer, you are likely in a very small minority that is already within a very small minority.
I'm not saying you are incorrect or anything, but within the small group of existing "end users" I gather you won't find many people at all that share your view of OS/2.

Re:For the Young... Some Background.

[Anonymous Coward]

Not sure how this post was ranked at 5. I agree with everything that you said in the first section of your post, all of the stuff about IBM mismanagement and how misguided it was to try to build it entirely in Assembler, etc. The second part of your post though is inaccurate in several ways and frankly almost sounds like it was written by someone from M$FT's NT team.

I ran several versions of OS/2 on many different clone PCs for many years with no problem, and so did a lot of people.
OS/2 was always very stable, so I am not sure what all of this kernel instability is that you are referring to.

Every good multi-line BBS at the time ran OS/2 on lots of different kinds of harfware, definitnely -NOT- on PS/2's for the most part. Only goverment, banks and morons (apology for redundancy there) used PS/2's. The reason that we ran multi-line BBSs on it because it was extremely stable, it foundd a home in many different niches for this very reason. We also ran Win 3x and DOS apps with OS/2 because it could multitask faster than Windows (by far), and it was far more stable.

All of that said, I wouldn't run it today except for nostalgia because... Linux!

- phobia

Re:For the Young... Some Background.

[Anonymous Coward]

Place I work in the mid 00s had an OS/2 system running the phone voice mail for about 1600 extns, over several years we rebooted it maybe twice.

Where things would go wrong for NT4 systems, is people would try to get one box to do many different things and run server different apps, and they would be unstable. The NT4 systems we ran at the time typically would run either core network services and nothing else, or be dedicated to one application, and they also got good uptimes. I think we even had one NT 3.51 box around that did something, again same deal, it was stable because it only ran one server application.

Virtualization kinda fixed that, as it allowed you do just that on large scales, one VM per task vs lump as much as you onto one physical box.

Re:For the Young... Some Background.

[Mordaximus]

Windows NT came out a year after OS/2 had a working UI and supported existing hardware. OS/2 only really worked on IBM's PS/2's. Windows NT quickly surpassed OS/2's reliability despite the fact that it ran on a much wider variety of hardware.

OS/2 had a UI years before NT was released, in 1988.

Re:For the Young... Some Background.

[Anonymous Coward]

OS/2 was so good that many large enterprises relied on it extensively before the advent of NT and as an alternative to UNIX. NT eventually dominated because it provided many similar features of OS/2 but was able to leverage the Windows brand to win the popularity contest.

(I used OS/2, DOS/Windows, Windows NT, SCO, Solaris/Sun OS, AIX and Linux in enterprise in the 90's.)

Re:For the Young... Some Background.

[Anonymous Coward]

Your point 3 is almost right. MS did dev it. The *ALSO* did NT because they saw what IBM was trying to do Which was make them a suppler to IBM only again. It was the reason DPMI existed and win3.x was included in os2. MS wanted to position OS/2 as a 'business' target. IBM wanted general computing but then priced it at 10x a copy of DOS and win3.x. IBM wanted to box general computing back into their realm. They wanted to put the toothpaste back into the tube (see micro channel). MS did not.

As for you point 4. The reason everyone ignored it as there was a serious lack of good software that was not wildly expensive for OS/2.

IBM made that mess. MS gave them a good shove and was able to snake their whole market.

Re:For the Young... Some Background.

[SEE]

Um, no. The Joint Development Agreement didn't have anything to do with antitrust. (You're confusing that with why IBM didn't lock Microsoft into exclusivity in the DOS contract five years earlier, which in part was motivated because of the antitrust settlements on IBM mainframes that required IBM to make its mainframe OSes available.)

Microsoft's original plan for its successor to the limited DOS was a migration path to Xenix, but, when the 1984 AT&T antitrust resolution came down, AT&T got permission to sell Unix as a product. Microsoft decided it would be folly to try to compete with AT&T selling AT&T's OS, and switched over migration plans to a product called "ADOS" or "DOS 4" or various other names in the press. ADOS would then slip under Windows, also in development, which would be the GUI.

At the same time, IBM had been trying to develop its own improved extensions and GUI to DOS to exploit 286 hardware -- Top View.

After a fairly short period of the press speculating about the coming war between Microsoft and IBM over the future of the PC, and the initial failure of Top View to get as many sales as expected, IBM and Microsoft signed a joint development agreement for what the press would, during development, still call ADOS/DOS 4, and which was internally codenamed CP/DOS. The PC would have a single, obvious software future.

And when this OS was released as OS/2 in 1987, it worked just fine on non-PS/2s, which was only to be expected, because A) IBM was already committed to customers that it would work on ATs, which is why they wouldn't let Microsoft make it a 386-only OS; and B) Microsoft actually finished development of it (and released initial outside developer machines with it) on Compaq 386s.

And it was, in fact, that 286 compatibility that hampered it the most, because the 286 had no v8086 mode to hide DOS programs in. Thus the tendency to call the DOS box the "penalty box" By the time OS/2 1.1 shipped with the GUI in October 1988, Windows/386 had already shipped and, because it used virtual 8086 mode to multitask DOS, had better support for DOS apps than OS/2. Added to the ability to drop out of Windows just to pure native DOS if necessary, the installed base of DOS apps then won the day for 16-bit Windows.

NT didn't even release until July 1993, long after 16-bit Windows dominated desktops. And NT wasn't enough to stop OS/2 Warp from making a play, it was 32-bit-extended-16-bit-Windows 95 that shut OS/2's last charge down.

Re:For the Young... Some Background.

[nukenerd]

OS/2 Warp was an OS released by IBM to compete with Microsoft DOS in the late eighties.

Who modded this codswallop as "Informative"?

DOS was old hat by the time WARP was released (1994, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...). By then OS/2 was competing against Windows, in particular Windows NT.

I've some news for you and the modders, albeit nearly 30 years too late :- OS/2 in the late 80's was jointly developed by IBM and Microsoft themselves, to replace DOS, not rival it. There were several versions of OS/2 before Warp, by which time Microsoft had split from IBM and gone off to develop WIndows. It is thought that there was a fair bit of OS/2 code in Windows NT.

You are not the only poster who seems to think that OS/2 was always called Warp. Only versions 3 and 4 had that name.

Re:For the Young... Some Background.

[The Wild Norseman]

... Just my 2 cents.

Awesome, thanks! Just another $98.98, I'll be able to try out a copy myself!

Re:For the Young... Some Background.

[nukenerd]

Not quite..... Microsoft jumped ship, deciding instead to continue with the Windows branding and abandon the OS/2 marque. They were already working on OS/2 2.0 which they took and re-branded as Windows NT.

Not quite. WinNT was not a re-branding of OS/2, although it is believed that it had a bit (perhaps quite a bit) of OS/2 code in it. NT was mostly written by a team headed by Dave Cutler who (and most of the team) had been poached from DEC for the purpose. It is also believed that Cutler's team brought a bit (perhaps quite a bit) of VMS code from DEC. DEC threatened to sue Microsoft over the poaching of Dave Cutler and team, but they settled out of court; it was really the end for DEC anyway.

Re:For the Young... Some Background.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, but there is no "... likely be their death knell...".

OS/2 had it's death knell, funeral, memorial service, celebration of life, lamentations of the widows, harsh call of reality, Mom found new love and remarried, everyone lived happily ever after, then the survivors lived out their allotted times on Earth and shuffled off this mortal coil.

OS/2 is an ex-operating system. It is finished. It's feet have been nailed to a perch to keep it upright. OS/2 is pushing up the daisies. It is Bernie from Weekend With Bernie.

Let it go.

Re:For the Young... Some Background.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Youth is wasted on the young" (George Bernard Shaw) and so may be this OS/2 rebirth.
"Dissy" writes on the merits of OS/2 today. I will reply here, as all the historians in this thread get some detail (major or minor) incorrect IIRC but as I am currently overseas and all my OS/2 materials are thousands of miles away, I won't cite any history at all from memory... too risky at my age!

So, the history of IBM vs MS isn't essential anyway.

I bought the last "DOS" (non-gui) version of OS/2 because that entitled me to a free shipment of OS/2 v2 when it would be released. I built a machine for it and waited. I was a happy OS/2 user for 10 years.

Now, as a long time Linux user, I will happily pay $100 for a chance at OS/2 again on todays hardware. With the return of HPFS, and assuming the OS/2 command line usefulness is there, and if the Work Place Shell comes back I will probably leave Linux facing the internet but I will again have an OS/2 server.

Re:For the Young... Some Background.

[Dog-Cow]

You must have really sucked at life. OS/2 was well-known as a better Windows than Windows because it was natively preemptive, which made it easier to kill misbehaving Windows apps. Its compatibility was so good, it practically killed OS/2. No 3rd parties wanted to create OS/2-specific versions of their software when they had a perfectly good Windows version that worked just fine under OS/2.

Re:For the Young... Some Background.

[Anonymous Coward]

What killed it was IBM's stupid policies towards developers.

Want to make a program? Buy the SDK.

Oh, you want sound in your program? Buy a separate SDK.

Etc.

Re:For the Young... Some Background.

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows 3 was incredibly buggy, and many users experienced system lockups or blue screens (accompanied by loss of their work) several times a day

Windows 3.x never had blue screens. That was introduced with NT.

Re:For the Young... Some Background.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, the Amiga was preemptive and lightning-fast, but the system didn't offer any memory protection at all. It was quite easy for a poorly-written program to bring the system down completely. Also, the scheduler was implemented in the Exec library. Intuition was the UI library, and I'd be curious to see a link for an open-source release of it or any other original Amiga system code.

Re:For the Young... Some Background.

[NormalVisual]

OS/2 was so good that many large enterprises relied on it extensively before the advent of NT and as an alternative to UNIX.

A large part of why OS/2 was adopted by larger companies was Communication Manager/2. If you had IBM mainframes in your data center, OS/2 was your best bet at getting everything to play nice together.

Re:For the Young... Some Background.

[Reziac]

I bought Warp 4 in the retail box, and had a similar experience. It was bog-slow, locked up at random, used about 10x as much RAM as Windows to run the same apps, proved incapable of printing large documents because it consistently ran out of memory, and after the second time it committed seppuku (via a problem sufficiently well-known that the fix was documented deep in the manual) I gave it up.

Re:For the Young... Some Background.

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows 3.x had a blue screen you could trigger on purporse by hitting ctrl-alt-del. It could return to the desktop and do nothing, or be used to close a stuck program, or ctrl-alt-del again to reboot immediately.

Re:For the Young... Some Background.

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong: OS/2 1.x was a joined endeavor of Microsoft and IBM. OS/2 2.x was created by IBM to be an alternative to Windows 3.1. OS/2 Warp 3 and 4 were subsequent releases by IBM that could have been alternatives to Windows NT and Windows 95. And then IBM killed OS/2 altogether.

Regarding OS/2 on ATMs: Yes, that was the main use for a while, then banks started to replace it by Windows NT, 2000 and later XP.

Re:For the Young... Some Background.

[phoenix_rizzen]

NT started life as the next version of OS/2. The original UI (personality) for this OS was the new UI from OS/2. As Windows 3.x became more popular, they added a second personality to it that borrowed heavily from Windows 3.x. There was also a POSIX personality, IIRC. The original filesystem for this OS was HPFS, but Microsoft developed their own filesystem (NTFS) as well. The original releases of NT 3.x included support for HPFS. They also developed the HAL that allowed them to run NT on various CPU architectures (x86, MIPS, Alpha, PowerPC) without having to change any of the code running above the HAL.

The multiple personalities on the front-end (you could run OS/2, Windows, or POSIX apps), and the multiple CPU architectures on the back-end really allowed NT to grab a foothold in the server market. But the steep hardware requirements (for the time/compared to DOS/Windows) make it languish in the desktop market.

Later releases of NT removed support for various personalities (mainly the OS/2 one) and CPU architectures (MIPS, Alpha, PowerPC all went the way of the dodo).

There's a great book that details the development of Windows NT from it's OS/2 roots to NT 4.0. I can never remember the name of it, but it really digs into the nitty-gritty of the development arrangements between IBM and MS, OS/2 and DOS/Windows, and the release of NT.

Re:Proud of their work..but does it matter?

[Anonymous Coward]

Many ATM's (I know for a fact since I've seen 'em reboot) run OS/2.
So there's a real installed base out there, not just a bunch of geezers.

CAP === 'customs'

Re:Proud of their work..but does it matter?

[fluffernutter]

I'm thinking if you want to run an application on a OS that is simplified down so that it is stable and have attack vectors minimized, but you are using a development platform that won't be compatible with linux, you may consider this. I have seen many kiosks with blue screens.

Yay, an another obsolete OS

[Anonymous Coward]

Now you can party like it's 1992!

Re:Proud of their work..but does it matter?

[__aaclcg7560]

Can someone tell me why I should [perhaps] want to use this OS?

Back in the day, you could run multiple nodes of your favorite BBS software in OS/2 on a single machine. The alternative was DOS with DESQview and QEMM. Those who had the money or were funded by their users swore by OS/2 for running multiple nodes. Some these BBSes might still be around.

Is it worth what it costs?

[OneHundredAndTen]

I would be surprised.

Re:Is it worth what it costs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not really. OS/2 was in today's terms really the predecessor / previous version of Windows NT. Although some development has been done since, OS/2 right now is for most purposes not even on par with NT4. And for home users like me, lack of application compatibility is a big issue as well.

Re:Is it worth what it costs?

[ArcaNoae]

Clearly, there is some gap in your understanding of NT vs OS/2 Warp. NT4 never - read that again, please - never - had USB support - at all. Instead, M$ stated that if one had a need for USB connectivity, W2K was the way forward. By comparison, Warp 4 shipped with a fully functional USB stack, voice type dictation, and speech recognition. The two were hardly on par. In fact, Warp 3 was probably more adept than NT4 (ever unplug a PS/2 keyboard or mouse from NT4 and have the system lockup dead? That *never* happened on OS/2, ever.) Worth the cost for ArcaOS? That depends. You can pay less and have your information harvested and sent to who knows whom with or without your knowledge. You can be put on an endless upgrade treadmill, forced to buy new version after new version, simply to run the same software you've always run. Or, you can switch to Linux, which is fine (hey, I'm a Novell-certified Linux engineer), and have to learn a new desktop with every single blasted release, let alone a different desktop from one Linux system to another (and don't get me started on Unity, please). Alternatively, you can invest $100 now ($130 in 83 days or so), pay a modest fee for continued updates, bug fixes, enhancements, and support, and continue to use the same applications which have worked just fine for decades, as well as current or nearly-current versions of Firefox, SeaMonkey, Thunderbird, and OpenOffice. It all depends upon how expensive you think that $100 is as compared to the other choices. Sometimes, out-of-pocket cost is less expensive than paying in other ways. ArcaOS 5.0 provides a stable operating environment, installable on modern hardware. So, for those who say, "well, I can buy OS/2 warp 4 on eBay for $15!," just try installing that on any machine built after 2006 - and without a floppy drive to boot it. ArcaOS 5.0 installs from bootable DVD, and later, we plan to offer it on bootable USB stick, as well as pre-built ovas and pre-loaded hyard dri9ves and SSDs.

OS/2 had its chance, but it is too late now

[stikves]

OS/2 was designed to be the replacement of DOS and Windows, by IBM ... and ... Microsoft. It had an interesting history, and up until they were ready to release OS/2 NT (http://www.os2museum.com/wp/nt-and-os2/) even Microsoft believed in it. However history was not kind at that moment, and MS and IBM split, causing OS/2 NT being repurposed as Windows NT, and the rest of the story is well known.

NT microkernel had support for separate subsystems (OS/2, Windows, and Unix). Even until Windows NT 4, it was able to run (command line) OS/2 applications natively, in addition to Windows. (This is more or less how the Linux applications run today on the recent "Creator's Update" stuff. They have a separate kernel API for the Linux subsystem).

However NT took on, OS/2 did not. Mostly due to technical reasons: it was fast, but not stable on most devices, except for a small approved subset, had a single message queue for the system, whereas NT had true multi-tasking, and would not run 32 bit Windows applications, only 16 bit ones. I was sad that this happened, but given many good alternatives today, like Haiku OS optimized for multimedia, Linux for everything else, and yes Windows for desktop, it might not be a big loss.

Completely unrealistic

[Anonymous Coward]

Next up, a $200 version of DOS?

prediction: out of business in 6 months.

Re:Proud of their work..but does it matter?

[Wolfrider]

--If you have $99 to spare, you can expect it to be pretty much immune to most virus infections - nobody's targeting it.

--OS/2 Warp 3 came out right before Win95 did. It had a very stable object-oriented GUI that basically wouldn't crash unless you had a driver issue; had an advanced filesystem for the time (HPFS supported long filenames and was fragmentation-resistant), great DOS support, native REXX scripting that was "better" than command.com, good multitasking (you could format a floppy in the background and do $other-things on a single-CPU 32-bit system without the whole interface bogging down) and better 16-bit multi-program Win 3.1 support than *native* Windows 3.1.

--I dropped out of Warp when it wouldn't boot anymore after I inserted a space before an REM in config.sys back in the day. (Win95-98 could handle that with no problem.) There weren't really good bootable OS/2 recovery tools back then... Linux was the place to be after that, circa 1996-1997.

--I would say that Linux is still the place to be these days, but trying out OS/2 on modern hardware for grins will add to your non-Windows experience at least, and who knows - you might like it.

REF:
http://www.os2museum.com/wp/os...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Does anyone /need/ it?

[Gravis Zero]

Despite endless upgrades, there has always been come lingering need for DOS support (which has existed since the days of DOS) for legacy stuff people still use but does anyone know of a need for OS/2 support? I feel like all the systems that needed OS/2 support have been replaced by now. So, seriously, does anyone know of any sector or business that actually relies on OS/2 software? I'm not saying it's not interesting, I just think anyone that has needed it in the past has moved on by now.

Re:Does anyone /need/ it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Depends what you mean by need. We can probably get by without it, but that's true of a *lot* of things, and if people decide they want it... maybe let the market decide? In any case it's good to see another player (re)enter the game.

(If it can peel off some windows users - recent example I saw was a supermarket self-checkout device that was being rebooted - then I would be tempted to call it a success anyway).

Re:Proud of their work..but does it matter?

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

I tried Warp back in the day, and I liked it a lot. The only thing that held me back was that it required a fairly powerful machine to make it practical.

At the time a PC with the speed and memory of that caliber was around $4000 to $5000. Anything less and it was painfully slow, lots of disk thrashing, etc. But it worked and you could run lots of DOS windows under it seamlessly.

I remember editing a doc, doing a download from a BBS with Telix, running a game, and formatting a floppy all at the same time....which was kind of amazing back then.

Not long after that Windows 3.0 came out and its main claim to fame was that it would run pretty well on much less powerful PCs.

Warp was technically better (it had true multitasking) but Windows took over the market and that was the end of that.

Re:Proud of their work..but does it matter?

[squiggleslash]

They might, but if they're OS/2 only, why would they need anything other than the version of OS/2 they already have? And if not, why bother when something like Ubuntu + VirtualBox + FreeDOS can presumably do the same thing? (And that's assuming you want to run an ancient BBS implementation to begin with...)

"Called upon to ... open source any OS/2 software"

[tlambert]

"The OS/2 community has been called upon to report supported hardware, open source any OS/2 software, make public as much OS/2 documentation as possible and post the important platform links."

That's an interesting idea.

Here's my counter offer:

I'll happily give you access to each of my OS/2 software titles.

Each title will be available in two editions, Personal ($129 with an introductory price of $99 for the first 90 days [and six months of support and maintenance updates]) and Commercial ($239 with one year of support and maintenance).

I think that's fair, don't you?

Re:Proud of their work..but does it matter?

[__aaclcg7560]

They might, but if they're OS/2 only, why would they need anything other than the version of OS/2 they already have?

The most popular BBS packages were DOS only. A few were available for OS/2. Most sysops used OS/2 to run multiple DOS sessions.

Re:Proud of their work..but does it matter?

[Desler]

And that is relevant as a reason for running it on a personal computer, how?

Missing in action.

[Anonymous Coward]

OS2World insists that open source has helped OS/2 in the past years and it is time to look under the hood to try to clone internal components like Control Program, Presentation Manager, SOM and Workplace Shell.

So, does that mean this version doesn't have any of that then?

Kinda Neat, But So What?

[Philotomy]

I think OS/2 was a nice OS, for the time. However, it's time is past, and I can't imagine why I would want to switch to it, today (I run Arch on my main system and I have a Mac laptop for iOS development).

Thank you for saying what many of us were thinking

[Anonymous Coward]

When I read that line I was thinking 'Gee, shouldn't you start with OS/2 then?'

It seems cheeky how often companies pilfer/expect open source to support their software business when they aren't willing/can't release their own source code.

OS/2 is long past the point where it provides anything over alternatives. Hell x86_64's system model is dramatically different than one OS/2 was designed around, and who knows what sort of assumptions made in the 386 to PPro days doesn't carry over with the current iteration of the software.

Furthermore, who thinks this small company with be able to provide a sufficient level of spport compared to Microsoft/Linux/BSDs/etc to be worth the money paid for an extended support contract?

Having said all this, I wish them luck, but have no use for it myself, having 2.1 and Warp 3 to spin up in a VM if I am ever feeling nostalgic.

Checking it out...

[Heebie]

I used to be a serious OS/2 user, and I'm definitely going to check it out. If you've never used the Workplace Shell, you really owe it to yourself to check this out. If it ends up compatible with a lot of things, I might very well end up running Arca OS and the WPS in a full-screen VM on my Linux machine, just to have the WPS. A great deal of Linux software will likely be as portable to Arca OS as it was to OS/2 in the past... which is extremely portable. (I probably ran 2/3's free open-source software on OS/2 back in the day, mostly ported from Linux.) Seriously.. if you're looking for a new UI... WPS is worth checking out! (The $99 price tag isn't horrid for checking it out. I think that's what I paid for OS/2 2.0 and 2.1 back in the day.)

Re:Proud of their work..but does it matter?

[Greyfox]

Yeah, the company I was working for from '89 to '93 had three DOS programs they maintained. We had clients all over the place, so they bought me an amazing 486 laptop with a color display and 4 megabytes of RAM that was the most powerful machine at the company. Our production systems started out as 286 machines that we eventually upgraded to 386 or 386sx processors. They were running DOS and mostly only needed to run one of the three programs we maintained. But I was able to run all three programs (and then some) at the same time on the 486 laptop running OS/2. This was quite helpful to my development effort.

The company had originally experimented with SCO Xenix (not UNIX mind you,) which was actually the original reason they hired me -- they had no experience with a UNIX-like OS. The SCO Xenix OS had costed them $1200 and SCO wanted another $1200 (IIRC) for the C compiler and I want to say adding TCP/IP would cost you another several hundred bucks. We also looked at another multitasking DOS (DR/M DOS or something,) that was in the same price ballpark. So the OS/2 price tag seemed quite reasonable to us. Plus, working with it gave me enough experience with the OS to pick up a contract position with IBM on their tech support line, after both owners at that company died of lung cancer. Probably not coincidentally, it was the last place I worked that allowed smoking in the office. There's probably still a quarter-full coffee cup with a cigarette butt in that office, somewhere...

A friend of mine tried to make OS/2 work for his BBS, but never could get it running on the computer he was using for it. OS/2 was a bit fiddly about the hardware it ran on, at the time.

Re:"Called upon to ... open source any OS/2 softwa

[Junta]

An article from a while back said:
"Because ArcaOS includes software from third-party vendors, pricing information is not yet available as negotiations with vendors are ongoing."

So they may not have much choice on pricing or open sourcing, even if they wanted to.

But would be nice for them to be clearer.

Re:Proud of their work..but does it matter?

[jandrese]

While it was technically true you couldn't crash the OS very easily, it was pretty easy for a badly behaving application to lock up the entire interface due to a quirk in the way it handled events. I can't remember the details exactly, but I do remember some apps that would effectively freeze the machine when they crashed, even though technically the OS was still chugging along.

Has potential, but it is 32bit.

[Anonymous Coward]

I used and liked OS/2 at the time, but IBM had the worst marketing people, and betrayed its devoted user base. You would go to a software store and ask what is this Warp 3 thing? The sales people had no idea, but they had dozens of boxes on the shelves. Surely IBM could have had sales reps to explain.....
The idea of resurrecting OS/2 would have been great 10-15 years ago when everything was still 32 bit. Why would anyone other than OS/2 diehards want to dish out money for this when it is 32bit, has virtually no drivers for the devices people normally use today (keyboards, printers, external drives, HD graphics, etc)? These developers should have offered the personal edition or free for a while, and then build on it to create a pro 64bit version. But then, the drivers again......
Sorry, I will stick with Linux and keep the OS/2 Warp Logo as a souvenir.

Re:Proud of their work..but does it matter?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can someone tell me why I should [perhaps] want to use this OS?
I ask because for now, I do not see the point, sadly.

If you have to ask the question, then the answer is that you do not want or need to use this OS, and you would be correct that for you there would be no point.

This is targeted at people who maintain existing OS/2 systems professionally, or who classify themselves as OS/2 hobbyists that would like to utilize newer hardware for their existing setups.

Arguably with the prices given, maybe not even that last one either.
However the previous torch carrier that released Communication Station was clearly targeting nothing but companies maintaining existing installs and provided no other options.

Re: Proud of their work..but does it matter?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not targeted by malware.
Security through obscurity

IPv6?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've heard it doesn't support IPv6. Is it of any practical use then?

Warp, was fantastic at the time.

[Anonymous Coward]

IF
* you had 8MB of RAM. Most PCs had only 4MB.
* you wanted to do MS-Dos software development, it was the best environment possible for DOS programming. Sorta like using containers or VMs are for devs today.
* 32-bit OS. DOS and Windows at the time were 16-bit and needed "thunking" for any large member use. OS/2 had a 32-bit memory model, no overlays. No thunking. No dealing with limited memory access under 1MB of RAM.

Remember the day I got all the 32-bit GNU tools on a Hobbes OS/2 CDEROM. Those weren't available for Windows or DOS at the time.

Preemptive multitasking wasn't available to home PCs prior to OS/2. OS/2 2.0 and 2.1 were clunky. OS/2 3.0 (warp) was nice, elegant. I probably have my Warp CD around here somewhere. By GUI standards today, Warp's GUI sucks.

But for 1992-ish, it was a rock solid OS that was also fast on about $1200 of PC hardware.

Only IBM used OS/2 1.x. Techies started using v2.x and nerds started using v3.x. Just remember those days were when Windows would crash 3+ times a day and couldn't handle more than 1MB of RAM at a time. It wasn't until Win95 that Windows became stable enough to stay up a few days. Around 1996, WinNT v4 came out and was almost as solid as OS/2 was 2+ yrs earlier.

Alas, but 1994, I'd already moved onto Unix.

Re: Proud of their work..but does it matter?

[Anonymous Coward]

Cnet was a pretty popular BBS, though maybe before you were old enough to be online, and it ran on a Commodore 64.

Re: Proud of their work..but does it matter?

[Type44Q]

great DOS support

But would it run X-COM: UFO Defense?

Re:Proud of their work..but does it matter?

[Anonymous Coward]

I bet Windows 3.1 viruses would run fine on it.

How does this relate to Ecomstation?

[Anonymous Coward]

How does this relate to Ecomstation?

For the Misinformed... Some Background.

[Anonymous Coward]

For anyone too young to remember, OS/2 Warp was an OS released by IBM to compete with Microsoft DOS in the late eighties.

Actually, it was written by Microsoft to keep IBM from writing their own OS. It was intentionally inferior to Windows which was pre-installed on every IBM compatible of the day. OS2 lost by design, and Microsoft Windows dominated the market for decades.

The pricing scheme is a joke. According to Wikipedia, "OS/2, on the other hand, was available only as an expensive stand-alone software package"

Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat the same mistakes.

Re:For the Misinformed... Some Background.

[Anonymous Coward]

Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat the same mistakes.

Meanwhile, those that didn't even know the history to begin with are doomed to create sadly misinformed Slashdot posts.

Re:Proud of their work..but does it matter?

[Anonymous Coward]

Most every bank in the USA.

Interesting but too expensive

[DidgetMaster]

I used to be a dedicated OS/2 user. It has some great features and I developed some applications and drivers for it. But I would not pay $99 just for the privilege of trying it out. I like open source, but I will still definitely pay for my own copy of good software (system or application). I think if we want good software, we have to support those who develop it financially. But you have to price it right if you want to build a base of loyal customers. $20 to $25 is what I call a fair price for stuff like this today. $10 is a no-brainer. If you sell a few million copies (instead of a few thousand), you will have all the cash you need. Just my 2 cents (that is what advice like this is worth these days).

Will it run Ninnle?

[Anonymous Coward]

But does it need to? Why run OS/2 when you can run Ninnle Linux?

Re:Proud of their work..but does it matter?

[nukenerd]

JustAnotherOldGuy wrote :

I tried Warp back in the day, and I liked it a lot.......Not long after that Windows 3.0 came out .... Warp was technically better but Windows took over the market and that was the end of that.

Your long term memory is failing OldGuy. Windows 3.0 came out in 1990 and Warp (OS/2 v3.0) came out four years later. But OS/2 should not be compared with WIndows 3.x or 9x, they had entirely different types of user. OS/2's equivalent and rival was Windows NT which first appeared in 1993, by which time OS/2 v2.0 (the first decent version) had been out for a year already. OS/2 and NT were systems for servers and power users.

Kinda expensive

[MoarSauce123]

Not wanting everything for free, but 129$ for a basically deader than a door knob OS that needs community help to find out what isn't working? How about 29$ or 49$ with decent email support for a year? And 239$ for commercial use? Isn't that even more than a Windows license?

Re:Kinda expensive

[OrangeTide]

It's cheaper than switching to Windows if your business already has a lot of expensive OS/2 software. Even if you switch to the latest version of Windows, you'll notice that Microsoft eventually kills off releases and their hardware requirements continue to increase.
At least with a supported version of OS/2 these super conservative business don't have to change much and can replace worn systems with modern off-the-shelf hardware because of the new ACPI and USB support in this version.
Of course running OS/2 means you're quite limited in terms of software library, but if everything is specialized to your industry and has to be developed through contract anyways maybe the thousands of times more apps in the Windows world is irrelevant.

Re:Kinda expensive

[ArcaNoae]

Hmm... Are Firefox 45ESR (soon 52ESR), SeaMonkey, Thunderbird, and OpenOffice 4.1.3 considered "limited in terms of software library?" PMView, which is an excellent image viewing and editing application is at the same code level on OS/2 as other platforms (and started life as an OS/2 application, BTW). Indeed, the pricing model for the commercial version is a good one if you have a business with a critical application which runs on OS/2 as compared to trying to migrate that to something else when the hardware is in need of replacement. The personal version provides privacy and stability. We think the price point is a good one, and judging by the number of orders we've received since the product launch, the general public seems to agree.

Re:Proud of their work..but does it matter?

[OrangeTide]

Can someone tell me why I should [perhaps] want to use this OS?

I ask because for now, I do not see the point, sadly.

Some people have weird hobbies. For example I'm really into computers, not everyone is and maybe you would be more interested in football or frisbee.

Re:Proud of their work..but does it matter?

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

Your long term memory is failing OldGuy.

I think you may be right, lol. It was OS/2 I installed (I still have the install disks in their plastic binders). I'm not sure why I said Warp, but I think I tried that too at one point.

Re:Proud of their work..but does it matter?

[sheramil]

Nostalgia. The same sort of feeling I get whenever I see a Tandy TRS-80.

Re:Proud of their work..but does it matter?

[TheFakeTimCook]

Can someone tell me why I should [perhaps] want to use this OS?

Back in the day, you could run multiple nodes of your favorite BBS software in OS/2 on a single machine. The alternative was DOS with DESQview and QEMM. Those who had the money or were funded by their users swore by OS/2 for running multiple nodes. Some these BBSes might still be around.

OS/2 was a multitasking monster!

I remember fooling around with OS/2 Warp, and spinning-up program after program and watching, fascinated, as they all just Marched along.

Re: Proud of their work..but does it matter?

[jIyajbe]

Can you imagine the expressions on the faces of TSA employees when they boot up your laptop and see OS/2? Could they possibly figure out how to access your data?

The laugh might be worth the $99 dollars all by itself!

Re:Proud of their work..but does it matter?

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no reason other than nostalgia.

If you don't want to use Windows, Mac or Linux, you can try Haiku. It's free, open source and the successor to BeOS, which to this day is the most advanced desktop OS ever made.

A case for an OS/2

[unixisc]

While I can and do see the point behind the commercial version, the price of the personal version puts me off of even considering trying it, guess you really have to be a diehard OS/2 personal user.

I am not saying that it should be FREEEEEEE and all that, just 99$ is not appealing for something that is a refresh of something that hasn't existed on the personal market for a couple decades and tout's features like "usb support" and OSS that runs on any semi current OS

I do think it ought to be Open Source: its pricing is up to them. At this point in history, it would be like FreeDOS: something fascinating to try out on computers w/ several times more memory than what they had when these OSs were in their prime. Like OS/2 Warp had a recommended RAM of 4-8MB. Imagine what it could do if we took one of today's computers w/ 2GB of RAM, an Atom or Celeron, and all the rest?

In fact such a computer would be a good substitute for Windows XP, for people who can't or don't want to upgrade to a 64-bit PC, are threatened by malware and intimidated by Microsoft & others for not upgrading to Windows 10. And people who are nervous about trying either Linux or a BSD. You have the ultimate 32-bit PC - something w/ 2GB of RAM and whatever storage you want, and then add to the OS the things that it needs to be a success. Start by porting Firefox/Palemoon, Thunderbird/Fossamail and Chromium for starters. No need for this OS (unlike the OS/2 of the 90s) to support win32 applications. Have a port of Steam as well to this platform - it would be useful to work w/ Valve on this. And port as many of the Open Source games out there. Have a music player and a video player that support all public formats, and you'll be off to the races.

In fact, one more advantage it could have: don't hook it up to any advertizing setup, and tout respect of your privacy as a key feature, w/o being as complicated as any POSIX compatible OS. Instead, price it something reasonable - something b/w $20-$50, and include an installation fee so that it can be installed for newbies or baby boomers or anyone nervous about it, so that if it doesn't go off as planned, customer does not need to pay anything and gets back his original setup. I'm not sure what the underlying costs were under IBM's OS/2 - whether they had to pay anything to Microsoft for using win16 or FAT or any Windows specific technology, but in this OS/2, I recommend making it a clean & pure OS - just HPFS, REXX & the like. Add in things - not just USB support, but also all recent WiFi generations (say from b onwards), HDMI, et al. And make it possible for USB sticks to be formatted in HPFS, and have a file system that puts all user data in a place that makes it easy to retrieve/back-up in case a reinstallation is needed. It will have several selling points over the alternatives:

- Windows: For people still stuck on XP or w/ computers that they don't wish to leave behind, this would be a clean, nag-free substitute. Note that it wouldn't run Windows software: such people would probably already have moved on to 7 &/or 10.

- OS X: For people who either don't like the direction OS X has gone, such as becoming more iOS like, it would be an alternative. It's also an alternative for people considering Hackintosh b'cos they can't afford a Mac

- ChromeOS: For people not willing to put all their stuff on the cloud, or be online at all times, or be forced to use a skeletal configuration, this would be a handy alternative

- Linux/GNU or BSD: For people who are nervous about going into ash/bash/.../zsh to resolve something that may not have a widget under LXDE/XCFE/KDE/GNOME/..., this would be a better option, since OS/2 users, from what I understand, never had to really know REXX in order to push things

All that said, I do think this OS should at least be open source, so that even if their creators, $DEITY forbid, goes under, their users ain't left high & dry, like, say, OpenVMS saps who were forced to buy Itaniums.

Re: Proud of their work..but does it matter?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes.

Re: Proud of their work..but does it matter?

[Black LED]

If you want to freak people out, install Temple OS.

Did they ever fix the single input queue?

[ayesnymous]

The thing that would allow a single poorly programmed application to freeze the entire OS?

Re:Did they ever fix the single input queue?

[ArcaNoae]

This was - and continues to be - a complete myth. There never was an SIQ problem in OS/2. Indeed, OS/2 has a single input queue. So what? The problem is software not written to properly behave and systems which were underpowered at the time. Today, issues like this rarely occur. To answer your question, not only did IBM never address this issue, neither have we, because it simply isn't an issue.

Re:Did they ever fix the single input queue?

[michael_wojcik]

There never was an SIQ problem in OS/2.

I'm afraid I have to disagree.

I was an OS/2 developer and user from 1989 through 1998, and worked extensively with all versions from 1.1 EE on. Besides being a key platform for the commercial software package I worked on, OS/2 was my client platform of choice until it became impossible to get decent video drivers for the laptops (Thinkpads, ironically) I was issued by my employer, sometime around 1996. Even after that I continued to work on commercial software for OS/2; and since that package was also available on a host of other platforms, from MS-DOS to CICS, I had plenty to compare it with.

The SIQ was definitely a problem, both in Presentation Manager and in WPS. Yes, ultimately the blame goes to misbehaving applications; but applications do misbehave. And, true, issues with it are not common, but they're common enough to be a problem. Perhaps once a month I'd have to remotely kill[1] some OS/2 process that was hanging the GUI.

That's often enough to be a concern for some users, particularly people developing GUI software, who might accidentally introduce such a bug.

I'm glad you folks have resurrected commercial OS/2. I might even buy a copy myself, for old time's sake. (Really, $130 is a drop in the bucket; I routinely spend more than that at the hardware store.) But I think we're all better off if we can be honest about its limitations. Then people can work to alleviate them.

[1] One of the advantages of working on a middleware / application engine product was I could do pretty much anything I wanted remotely. Around 1990 I used it to build a client/server version of RCS for OS/2 - note this was around the time CVS was invented, so distributed version control systems weren't widely known on small-system platforms. Then I ported the client to the AS/400, to give us RCS on OS/400. Good times.

Single input queue

[Anonymous Coward]

IIRC, OS/2 before V4 had only one synchronous input queue. So if one GUI program froze and did not retrieve its mouse and keyboard messages, all the other programs were stuck too. The character-based OS beneath the Presentation Manager/WPS GUI continued quite unperturbed, but remained inaccessible for the user, so you couldn't even kill the frozen program.

Later, someone wrote a program that polled the Serial port, and if you used a bit of cable and a paper clip, you could short 2 lines and bring up a command shell, to kill the offending program.

They only repaired that with Warp 4, IIRC. Legend has it, that IBM had wanted to put in multiple asynchronous input queues from the beginning, but Microsoft had said that nobody needed that in a desktop OS. A mistake they did not repeat when programming later Windows versions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS/2#Problems

Re: Proud of their work..but does it matter?

[Anonymous Coward]

WWIV (heavily modded) -> Celerity -> Vision/2 -> Oblivion/2

Re:Proud of their work..but does it matter?

[Anonymous Coward]

Compliance with the EMV standard has pretty much pushed out OS/2 ATMs. Windows XP and XP embedded are probably being replaced with Windows 7 embedded. The move to Windows 10 IoT will probably take a few more years to work out patent licensing and device compatibility. Linux ATMs are like Sasquatch. Most financial institutions (FI) don't have a choice of the OS installed. Generally, all they can do is specify features, card compatibility, and ATM protocol. ATM vendors then tell the FI which models will meet the requirements. Also, there has been a big move over the last 3 years for community financial institutions e.g. regional banks and credit unions, to outsource ATMs.