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.

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

[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.

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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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: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/...