eComStation 2.2 Beta, the Legacy of OS/2 Lives On 94
An anonymous reader writes "Yes, those OS/2 Warp bastards just don't want to quit. Today the eComStation 2.2 beta live CD was released for public download. There is also this positive review from TechRepublic, and OS/2 Zelots partying/ranting at their community sites."
Somehow OS/2 is the antitheses of HURD (Score:5, Funny)
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Nah; I wish HURD would just hurry the hell up (I know, wishful thinking) and I wonder why the hell eComStation costs so damn much. It's no big deal though, nothing to be worried about... there are alternatives that exist right now, are useful and modern, and don't cost an arm and a leg. But it would be nice to be able to play around with something new for a change.
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I've seen ATMs still running OS2 / eComStation within the past couple of years.
Probably, because they have been running for the past couple of years. They were started once and just kept running, and never needed to be rebooted.
Warp, eh? I remember it when it was still called Cruiser . . . get off my lawn filled with stacks of OS/2 install diskettes . . . with unfeasibly long titles, that start with: "IBM SAA AD/Cycle OS/2 . . . "
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I call bullshit. I have definitely seen ATMs rebooting.
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I call bullshit. I have definitely seen ATMs rebooting.
Yeah, and slow ones. Those are now running WinCE instead. I noticed how much slower the ATMs became when they "upgraded" them to WinCE. You used to be able to hit the button and have the option come up right away but now there is a significant pause before it brings up your account balance.
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I have numerous times seen OS/2 ATMs REBOOTING. If they "were started once and just kept running, and never needed to be rebooted" then why did I see an OS/2 startup screen?
Re:Somehow OS/2 is the antitheses of HURD (Score:5, Insightful)
Those of us who do support on systems from many different clients really don't wonder why they still exist.
HURD is one thing; we don't really wonder why it's stillborn. OS/2, or more specifically eComStation, is something else entirely. OS/2 has a history of commercial support, which means it's also got a history of applications with support. Support means that people used those applications, on the OS, in a business capacity. Think of OSes like: SCO, DOS, and yes, OS/2.
Just because the OS, and application, support goes away doesn't mean those applications aren't still needed. There are a LOT of applications out there which were written one-off, for a single client in a specific role. The companies that wrote them may not even be in business anymore, but the application still works and the the cost of
So people are running their applications on legacy operating systems, sometimes on some pretty janky hardware (I once saw an old box with IDE controllers on a proprietary IDE RAID controller - with half the RAID consisting of CF cards on adapters). Maybe they've managed to virtualize the platform, or partially virtualize it (such as when there's a hardware platform to the application, requiring COM port bridging to the guest so that a USB to COM adapter can be used to interface with a proprietary reader/etc. - you get the point).
No, it's not an ideal business scenario, and there are certainly situations where a lot can go wrong, ruining your day. But There are a lot of these companies, which means there's a special use case for support. Or just in-house people needing to upgrade things to keep as much of their stack compatible as they can.
So yeah, there is still a need for such legacy platforms. Just because it's not shiney and new doesn't mean it's lacking a valid business case.
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Comcast still have NT 3.51 servers running in headends that are making them lots of money every day for Tv commercial insertion. IF you have halfway competent networking people, you can keep running an OS on legacy hardware forever safely.
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Just because the OS, and application, support goes away doesn't mean those applications aren't still needed.
That's true. And what is needed is for those applications to be portable to begin with, so that when your OS or architecture dies you don't have to go vainly crawling after it hoping that it will come back to life, keeping it on life support and praying that it does not completely expire. And anyone who is now having to keep OS/2 going either fucked up or is following someone who fucked up, and didn't follow this simple principle. When you find out that the software only runs on one OS, you're supposed to t
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Easier said than done. A lot of companies sell you a software, not the source. Zealotry doen't change this.
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I see dead OSes. They're everywhere. They don't know they're dead.
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I see dead OSes. They're everywhere. They don't know they're dead.
.. looking around the cubicles I think its the same with people
Open Source Someday (Score:1)
osFree = FOSS OS/2 (Score:3)
It's there - heard of osFree [sourceforge.net]? Essentially, it consists of the L4 microkernel, which has multiple personalities riding over it - a Presentation Manager personality, a win16 personality, a win32 personality and a neutral personality. The last one is the native personality that provides the microkernel services to all the overriding subsystems. This is somewhat similar to IBM's Workplace OS that they were trying to do in the 90s to give PPC a native OS of its own, except that instead of the slow Mach 3 micr
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I dream of the day we can have an x86 version of OS/400 (or whatever they call it these days).
For those who don't get it ... (Score:5, Insightful)
OS/2 was used by major corporations back in the day. Even though most of those installations have been replaced with Windows, a few of them remain because: the cost of replacing custom or specialized software can be quite high, and the cost of replacing equipment that is currently in service can be quite high. Serenity Systems (the people who maintain eCS) was created to service these installations.
A nice benefit is that OS/2 remains (moderately) updated for other users.
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A nice benefit is that OS/2 remains (moderately) updated for other users.
There are more nice benefits. Like the unrivaled WPS, the unrivaled DOS capabilities, the ever growing linux friendliness (meanwhile we have CUPS, qt4, and rpm working).
Best of all is the unrivaled peace of mind after 20 years of internet access without malware threat.
And please don't believe the FUD about not running on modern hardware. The eCS 2.1 machine I'm writing this comment on consists of an N68C-GS FX mb with Athlon 64 X2, PCIe graphics, SATA and PATA HDDs, and 1600*1200 display. It also works with
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Back in the day I co-developed a set of tools that off loaded costly mainframe development to relatively inexpensive OS/2 workstations. Code was synchronized between the two platforms with a full execution environment for each developer rather than the single shared environment they had on the mainframe. For those of you interested in such things, it was a CICS/COBOL/DB2 application being developed.
At the time, Windows 3.1 would have been the only alternative and it couldn't even come close to what OS/2 w
Re:A reminder... (Score:5, Interesting)
This is a good reminder of why Microsoft should never be trusted. Ever.
OS/2 was gaining significant ground and (in theory) could have been *Linux* today.
OS/2 was very advanced at the time.
Excepting, MS paid off IBM to kill it so it wouldn't interfere with their race to the desktop.
No jail time, no DoJ investigation; nothing...
Let's see how well secure boot works.
Actually, OS/2 and Linux co-existed side-by-side in the 1990s and one of the most frustrating things was that it was easier to get free Linux support from open-source resources than it was to get paid OS/2 support from one of the largest companies in the world. And we had 2 multi-CPU IBM mainframes at the time, which should have counted for something. As it was, every time we finally found someone in IBM who could help us, they ended up leaving IBM shortly thereafter, and us without support.
OS/2 support sucked. The IBM program products all used different and incompatible preferences and logfile formats, typically only readable by a proprietary IBM program; compare to Linux where the preferences and logs were/are in text files (and thus processable by text utilities) and in well-defined, consistent locations.
Yes, OS/2 had some worthwhile features, but in the end, they weren't enough, especially with Microsoft patting them on the back with knife in hand. Windows contains some of the same horribleness that OS/2 did, but less of it, and that made a lot of difference.
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IBM support still sucks. You spend more time proving to them that you're entitled to support than you spend getting support. Customer number? Site code? How about I give you the number of dollars we've sent you, and then we can talk about how you can't find those other numbers in your system.
I went through this yet again earlier this week. At one point I had to bite my tongue to keep from saying, "Four months ago, my company wrote you an eight-figure check for worldwide licensing and support. If that'
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IBM support still sucks. You spend more time proving to them that you're entitled to support than you spend getting support. Customer number? Site code? How about I give you the number of dollars we've sent you, and then we can talk about how you can't find those other numbers in your system.
I went through this yet again earlier this week. At one point I had to bite my tongue to keep from saying, "Four months ago, my company wrote you an eight-figure check for worldwide licensing and support. If that's not in your database, maybe you should switch to Oracle."
I might be wrong, but back then, it was mostly that OS/2 support sucked. IBM did, after all, originally have a reputation for providing support so all-encompassing that PHBs everywhere rejoiced in not having to think for themselves - as long as they bought what IBM told them to buy, IBM did most of their work for them.
That was, of course, before IBM jettisoned major constituents of their local talent in favor of offshore staff. Frankly, unless you're one of those rare companies that still has use for mainfr
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Frankly, unless you're one of those rare companies that still has use for mainframes, I'm not sure what they're good for any more. I can get Dogbert Consulting from anyone.
If you don't count supercomputers as being mainframes, they're still good for that too.
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I've told this story on /. before when OS/2 stories come about. OS/2 had the unfortunate luck of coming out at a time when IBM was running/trying to run all of its divisions as separate companies. Case in point: I had some true blue IBM PCs (PS/ValuePoints IIRC) with true blue IBM 5250 (minicomputer terminal) emulator cards, trying to connect them to true blue IBM System/38s and AS/400s (The predecessors to the iSeries). I could not get the emulator cards to work with the OS/2 installed on the PCs, and the
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I've told this story on /. before when OS/2 stories come about. OS/2 had the unfortunate luck of coming out at a time when IBM was running/trying to run all of its divisions as separate companies. Case in point: I had some true blue IBM PCs (PS/ValuePoints IIRC) with true blue IBM 5250 (minicomputer terminal) emulator cards, trying to connect them to true blue IBM System/38s and AS/400s (The predecessors to the iSeries). I could not get the emulator cards to work with the OS/2 installed on the PCs, and the IBM support people told me point blank that they did not support OS/2 with their cards and to get it to work I would need to install Windows 3.1. So my nascent OS/2 rollout at the company I worked for was stopped dead in its tracks because even IBM wouldn't support OS/2. It's a shame because OS/2 was superior in almost every way to the Windows of the same era.
Actually, there was a cynical joke about IBM being 12 different companies on 5 different continents, none of whom were on speaking terms with each other that dates all the way back to at least the early 1980's.
OS/2 just helped prove the point.
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Curiously once I dropped OS/2 I tried three different distros of Linux, I actually p
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I know several people who worked on OS/2, one of which was a graphical designer (the one who created the swirly blue logo). He said that IBM had a hard requirement that all graphics had to be limited to 16 colors, for legacy video support. That explains a bit of the ugliness. The other part was that they experimented with alternate UI designs which ended up being horrible - specifically, the "tabs on a spiral notebook" layout, where the tabs would be on the left, right, and bottom in the particularly egr
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Just buying OS2 was a pain in the ass. When I first jumped on the os2 train it took me 4 reps to even figure out what sku to get. Even then they were surprised I wanted to buy it at all.
Then the install process was a horid mess I had to disable the cache to get 2.1 to install (~8 hour install time and sitting there waiting for 'next disk please'). *Most* computers out there did not run OS2 at all. If you could get it to install (stick to the preferred provider list please). MS may be knocked on for wha
Re:A reminder... (Score:4, Insightful)
It didn't take too long after I signed on before they instituted the processes requiring you to prove you owned a legitimate copy of the product and limiting the amount of support you could get for free. Someone mentioned a number for what just answering the phone cost IBM. I don't recall the exact number, but it was surprisingly large -- somewhere in the $30-$40 range IIRC. So they did away with the call screeners who had previously been taking down customer information before transferring the call to support. The support person answering your call still had the same daily call quota, but also the added responsibility of requiring the customer to prove they were entitled to support, jockying the new 900 number support line and dealing with the technical question. As a reasonably competent level 1 guy, maybe I could fix your shit, but now I had just enough time to understand your problem (or sometimes not,) and take down your information for a level 2 person. I transferred to electronic forum support as this was taking place, and that really was the best place to go to get an answer while we were doing it.
Despite the cost constraints, the people down in Boca really were committed to delivering quality support and the highest customer satisfaction with the support that we could muster. IBM has always had the smoothest process of any place I've ever worked, and they had 5 or 6 different contracting companies in rows of cubes there all working together cohesively. I've never seen that large a team working together that smoothly, before or since. At one point there was a plan that all the level 1 guys would get their IBM "OS/2 Certified Engineer" certification, though I think I may have been the only support person ever to have actually done so -- the were doing the cert test for free at the 95 spring COMDEX and I knocked it out. A few months later, IBM announced they were closing the Boca Raton site and it was over.
IBM's problem with OS/2 was they viewed it as a profit-making enterprise. Microsoft knew their OS was a conduit for all their other products. When you control the OS and the APIs, you have a tremendous amount of leverage for the platform. Microsoft squeezes a little more money out of their OS now that they're at nearly market saturation, but I think they still realize the value of controlling the OS on the desktop. IBM never seemed to. Anything at IBM was either profitable on its own or an enabler to the sale of their big iron. OS/2 was always fantastic at talking to the big iron, but didn't move units. People would buy the mainframe and then get OS/2 as an afterthought instead of some mainframe terminals.
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Well, this is what IBM does to stuff. Someone brilliant invents a cool thing, then IBM adds a new piece to the product or the process every year until it sucks. When I went to work for Tivoli all of our support personnel were former sysadmins. By the time I left we had a whole infrastructure of support personnel below us who couldn't spell, couldn't think, didn't know shit about computers. As usual, most of the biggest idiots were relatives of the chick hired to run level 1 support.
While I was there my prox
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IBM's problem with OS/2 was they viewed it as a profit-making enterprise.
Yeah, you want to make a profit when you sell stuff.
You don't have to make a profit on everything you sell. IBM knows about loss-leading. The OS/2 people were never allowed to run their business like that.
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Back in the 90-ies I used to run a popular BBS, I tried to go modern and multitask with win31 instead of desqview. Users forced me to change and I went for OS/2 which worked wonders (maybe - 92).. What I remember to this day is that some stuff just was much more logical in OS/2 than still in this day in windows (DnD, drag on appicon etc.)
Really liked it and it is nice to see that its legacy is living on.
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This is a good reminder of why Microsoft should never be trusted. Ever. OS/2 was gaining significant ground and (in theory) could have been *Linux* today. OS/2 was very advanced at the time. Excepting, MS paid off IBM to kill it so it wouldn't interfere with their race to the desktop. No jail time, no DoJ investigation; nothing...
Let's see how well secure boot works.
Actually, OS/2 and Linux co-existed side-by-side in the 1990s and one of the most frustrating things was that it was easier to get free Linux support from open-source resources than it was to get paid OS/2 support from one of the largest companies in the world. And we had 2 multi-CPU IBM mainframes at the time, which should have counted for something. As it was, every time we finally found someone in IBM who could help us, they ended up leaving IBM shortly thereafter, and us without support.
OS/2 support sucked. The IBM program products all used different and incompatible preferences and logfile formats, typically only readable by a proprietary IBM program; compare to Linux where the preferences and logs were/are in text files (and thus processable by text utilities) and in well-defined, consistent locations.
Yes, OS/2 had some worthwhile features, but in the end, they weren't enough, especially with Microsoft patting them on the back with knife in hand. Windows contains some of the same horribleness that OS/2 did, but less of it, and that made a lot of difference.
This was what failed OS/2 - it being owned by IBM. Had it been independent, or managed by a consortium of Microsoft rivals, like Borland, WordPerfect, Lotus (before IBM acquired it), Quicken, Symantec, Netscape and some others, it would probably have had more success
If one recalls, people were waiting forever for Microsoft to come out w/ Chicago a.k.a. Windows 95, and despite the 'OS/2 is here today' mantra, IBM could never get widespread support behind it. Their clout in the industry would have been e
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Excepting, MS paid off IBM to kill it so it wouldn't interfere with their race to the desktop
You need to get back on your meds. I was a strong OS/2 advocate at the time, and MS did no such thing. MS was just a lot better at this kind of business than IBM was.
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Re:Please (Score:4, Funny)
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I "zealot + Grammar Nazi = zelot grahamor" thought always.
On a side note, I've decided that grahaming is the process of writing English which sounds correct when spoken aloud but is subtly ungrammatical.
Wish I could find a copy of OS/2 for Pens (Score:1)
Apparently there was actual work done on this, and it was close to being a shipping product --- anyone have any details?
William
And yet (Score:2)
Win7 doesn't really have any new features or improvements over XP in the scope of actual functionality. While Win8, is a short trip into the tall weeds and in between them all was Vista - again no actual new features or improvements just bloat and failure. So yes, OS/2 had some problems - not the least of which was it was by IBM which always knows best, better than any customers and IBM does things that IBM wants to do not what you want to do - but in terms of "this is old junk I don't know why people use i
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Win7 doesn't really have any new features or improvements over XP in the scope of actual functionality.
It has better support for new stuff that XP couldn't support well or quickly. That's an important improvement.
While Win8, is a short trip into the tall weeds and in between them all was Vista - again no actual new features or improvements just bloat and failure.
Win7 has nearly no improvements over Vista. But Vista made numerous improvements over XP.
So yes, OS/2 had some problems - not the least of which was it was by IBM which always knows best, better than any customers and IBM does things that IBM wants to do not what you want to do - but in terms of "this is old junk I don't know why people use it!" it's no better or worse than anything else.
No, it's a lot worse. The interface is crap. It is different for the sake of being different, but actually no better. For some reason people love it, I have used OS/2 2.1 and 4.0 and I still don't know why.
I have three Win7 Pro 64 installations running on three different laptops right now. They ALL behave subtly different from one another for no explicable reason at all.
Without knowing what you're on about, it's hard to know what you're on about.
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While Win8, is a short trip into the tall weeds and in between them all was Vista - again no actual new features or improvements just bloat and failure.
Win7 has nearly no improvements over Vista. But Vista made numerous improvements over XP.
That "numerous improvements over XP" may be true in your world, but it is hard to see from an end-user perspective. I am looking at a just recovered "Vista Home Premium" Toshiba laptop with 1.73 GHz "Genuine Intel(R) CPU", 1 GB RAM and a 120 GB HD sitting on my desk running a defrag before being returned. This is a fresh install to "factory condition" with updates applied to clean it up for transfer to someone else from the original owner. It is DOG SLOW, even with a "factory condition" reinstall just compl
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That "numerous improvements over XP" may be true in your world, but it is hard to see from an end-user perspective. I am looking at a just recovered "Vista Home Premium" Toshiba laptop with 1.73 GHz "Genuine Intel(R) CPU", 1 GB RAM and a 120 GB HD sitting on my desk running a defrag before being returned. This is a fresh install to "factory condition" with updates applied to clean it up for transfer to someone else from the original owner. It is DOG SLOW, even with a "factory condition" reinstall just completed to a wiped HD!
I agree with everything you said. Even after service packing, Vista uses too much memory. It was too much OS too soon. I too have a slow laptop (1.2 GHz amd64) but with 2GB RAM and a 160 GB or maybe even 250 GB slow as molasses disk and Vista is still the pits. If you're trying to run it in one gigabyte, I really feel for you. If I could run something else on this hardware, I would. Windows 7 actually would do better on your hardware or mine, and you might look into an upgrade license but in my case the dri
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Win7 has nearly no improvements over Vista.
Runs faster, uses less memory, numerous improvements in the driver model, has better GPU acceleration support, preferching is better, caching is much better. I could go on. Basically, you're a moron.
OS/2 was XP A decade earlier (Score:1)
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VirtualBox was originally written to run OS/2 by an OS/2 vendor, Innotek who amongst other things had previously fixed Virtual PC to run OS/2 and run on OS/2. Of course then MS bought VPC.
VirtualBox ended up the fabled OS/2 killer app but backwards, running OS/2 instead of running under OS/2 and took off. Unluckily Sun didn't care much for OS/2 and now...
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So *you* were the other one. Nice to meet you finally. :-)
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So *you* were the other one. Nice to meet you finally. :-)
Another one here actually, running a mix of Warp and Slack. Interesting, we all have UID:s below 10k. :-)
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superior tech actually inferior (Score:2)
I'd hardly consider the Itanium as superior to anything. The whole thing about the EPIC architecture is that it gains a minimal speed gain as a result of die size shrinks as a result of moving all dynamic analysis algorithms off chip, while losing whatever backward ILP compatibility there is w/ previous generations. Also, w/ multi-core CPUs becoming the trend ever since XP merged the Windows 95 and NT branches, the reason to have any VLIW based architecture went away. So there is not even the theoretical
It had its moments (Score:4, Insightful)
In short, everyone in my office had higher productivity which more than paid for the expensive RAM: They were not constantly waiting for machines to re-boot.
If ever there has been a case for a class-action lawsuit, it should have been against Microsoft for all the business hours lost waiting for Windows to re-boot due to a windows bug. If our cars ran the way Windows used to, we'd all have walked to work.
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Yep.... Back in the day, I ran an OS/2 based bulletin board system. It handled multiple nodes with dial-up modems on one computer far better than anything else available at the time. (There was even a native OS/2 version of one of the "fossil drivers" the DOS guys typically used back then as the comm. driver for their BBS packages.)
OS/2 was always one of those products you had a love/hate relationship with. It always seemed to be a few steps ahead of Windows, on the plus side. Especially when they released
Not entirely off-topic: (Score:2)
Not entirely off-topic:
I got curious again just the other day and tried to install OS/2 in a virtual machine just to experience it. However I was completely stymied by the fact that the floppy disk images are in some odd-sized proprietary "DSK" format that neither VirtualBox nor Parallels seem to be able to read, and the CD images are apparently not bootable. I googled for half a day unsuccessfully looking for some way to convert the the floppy images into a compatible format. There was no way that I could
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in Windows, mount a Virtual Floppy with 1.44MB size (use any floppy virtual tool available). Download LOADDSKF.EXE from hobbes.nmsu.edu (The OS/2 CD included it too). In command line, run
LoadDskF imagefile.dsk floppydriveletter: /F
The floppy images are in native binary format (hence the size is bigger than 1.44 MB). LOADDSKF will transfer it to real (or simulated) floppy disks.
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If you want to convert the
VirtualPC and Parallels can also run OS/2. VMWare not.
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More like v1.2 (Score:1)
From the website:
'The current Demo CD is based on the eComStation 1.2 product and does not reflect the current state of the eComStation 2.0 product."
In OS/2 Warp tradition... (Score:2)
ECOM station won't actually boot on any PC you have either :).
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The way I remember OS/2 and "the end" (Score:1)
I worked for a company that went Big Blue (desktops, mainframe and OS/2). Overall I liked OS/2 although the Windows 3.1 (WinOS2) emulator had a few issues.
IMO the thing that killed OS/2 was the success of Windows. If Windows hadn't made enough improvements to be acceptable then OS/2 would have had the edge and kept on growing market share. They had some advanced functions for the time and with a larger support base they would have kept on growing.
When Microsoft had a viable product they stopped supportin
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