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

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.

[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:Bring out your dead

[Wolfrider]

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