Upcoming OS/2 Release Will Be Called ArcaOS 5.0 (techrepublic.com) 211
At the annual convention of OS/2 users, Arca Noae announced their new OS/2-OEM distribution will be released in the fourth quarter of 2016, and the project, codenamed "Blue Lion", will officially be called ArcaOS 5.0. "The significance of the version number relates to IBM OS/2 4.52 -- the last maintenance release of the platform released by IBM in 2001," reports TechRepublic. martiniturbide writes: The article discusses the features of ArcaOS like USB bootable installer, USB (1.1 and 2) , ACPI, AHCI, and network card drivers, new OS installer, etc. It will be sold in two editions: ArcaOS Commercial Edition [with 12 months of priority support and updates] and ArcaOS Personal Edition...
Anyone have fond members of OS/2? Are there any Slashdot readers who are still using it?
Anyone have fond members of OS/2? Are there any Slashdot readers who are still using it?
My intro to operating systems (Score:4, Interesting)
It has a funky memory management system and I'm not sure why anyone wold want to use it now over *NIX. The synchronous input que on the GUI basically doomed it (not counting IBM), but otherwise was pretty nice for the time and fun.
Re:My intro to operating systems (Score:5, Informative)
Their OS/2 SDK shipped with a lot of documentation in some format or other not entirely unlike HTML. Ironically the document reader that shipped with OS/2 didn't utilize threads and would lock your system up while it operated, but the windows version of the program could be run in a standalone windows session and not tie your system up. So the windows application was much better for actually reading the OS/2 SDK documentation. IIRC you could also format a disk from the command line and not tie the system up, but if you used the GUI object to do it, it would. There were a lot of little quirks like that in the operating system. A few months before they shut it all down, I got into Linux and stopped worrying about it so much. There were some die hard OS/2 users inside IBM after all that, but by the time my last contract with them wound down in 2005, I didn't know of very many who were left.
OS/2 was actually really not that bad and they could have improved it, but they killed it instead. Lotus notes, on the other hand, was shitty for pretty much anything you could use it for, and they were still beating the fucking Lotus Notes drum when I left. AFAIK they never did manage to port their ticketing system (RETAIN) over to notes, even though they had a huge strategy boner to do so for well over a decade.
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I enjoyed using IBM OS/2 Warp but honestly Commodore AmigaOS was ahead of IBM OS/2 Warp. It is unfortunate Commodore and the other non-IBM computer manufacturers could not survive the IBM PC and Microsoft Windows onslaught. If Commodore had ported AmigaOS to the IBM PC architecture it might have become the market leader in operating systems.Considering Commodore's history a partnership between Commodore and International Business Machines producing hardware and software would have been preferable to the hel
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It's over there, with my stack of FreeBSD books and CD repository copies of FreeBSD from 1998.
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The nice thing on unix is that you always are at a ./ place :D
Why but why (Score:2, Insightful)
Honestly, I was fond of OS/2 by the time it was the principal opponent to Win, but nowadays who would like to use an OS that was frozen for the last 25 years ?
Could have been a contender (Score:5, Interesting)
Worked on a port of an asset management package written in DOS to Windows 3.1 and OS/2 in the early 90's, coding C++ for both.
I remember a sales guy wanted to impress with its multitasking capabilities by running installers of 4 applications at once, with another half-dozen running concurrently. It ground to a swapping halt. Still, using it overall, quite impressive capabilities on that front for the time, probably rivaled only by the Amiga in terms the consumer-level arena. Preferred coding for it over Windows MFC, as well.
Regrettably, by 2005 when working at IBM, I encountered no evidence it had ever existed. Windows and Linux boxes only, and the topic never brought up. Seems that history could have gone quite differently, with the right resources at the right time.
Re:Could have been a contender (Score:5, Informative)
Re: Could have been a contender (Score:5, Interesting)
In 1995, a kid in my dorm showed me this new OS called Be. Running on a PowerMac 603 with a single cpu and 16mb of ram, he showed me how Be could play 6 video files simultaneously. Mapped to 6 faces of a cube. And you could spin the cube around via the mouse while all 6 videos were playing. Never any input lag, or dropped frames. It was a thing of beauty.
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I still have an old IBM Laptop with BeOS on it. Boot it once in a while to make me happy. I love the game trinket with the flying balls.
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Regrettably, by 2005 when working at IBM, I encountered no evidence it had ever existed. Windows and Linux boxes only, and the topic never brought up.
I left IBM in 2007 and my department still had a couple of moderately significant products running and supported on OS/2. I don't suppose the OS/2 versions got a lot of marketing attention, or anyone buying new licenses, but it hadn't disappeared altogether. Given the nature of the product, and the customers using it, I suspect it still hasn't.
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Regrettably, by 2005 when working at IBM, I encountered no evidence it had ever existed. Windows and Linux boxes only, and the topic never brought up. Seems that history could have gone quite differently, with the right resources at the right time.
I saw OS/2 on the decline in IBM between 97 and 2000. It was used extensively in 97 and was even the primary desktop. Win95 was overtaking it in those years.
The OS had warts, big warts. The "Synchronous Message Queue" on the GUI was a huge one. Some stup
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In 1999 they were using OS/2 to control all the machinery in the hard drive factory in Rochester MN (right before they sold the hard drive division to Hitachi)
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We had most of the old OS/2 systems decommissioned in the IBM server room at worked at by 2002. The ones that remained had specialized software that nobody bothered to port to another platform. Some of them were still "running" (they needed to be rebooted weekly) when I left in 2008.
Well yeah (Score:2)
I worked at a large OS/2 site and the users hated it with a vengeance. One of the tricks which the shell would play on them would be to put 100 icons in a folder with no way to sort through them because they all had the same x,y coordinate. There was no organise by name or anything. They had to drag and drop every icon.
Outside work I saw its bootstrap being used all over the place where people needed a convenient way to boot different operating systems. There wasn't really better solution around at the time
Waterfall vs dog food (Score:2)
IBM died on consumer machines because of their testing/QA methodology. Waterfall method. Exhaustive but not reactive.
Windows programmers had to "eat their own dog food" and the chow started to taste better very quickly.
IBM was (and probably still is) like Raytheon when I worked there. It became a standard joke for those of us testing an air traffic control system (MAATS) -- we'd ask each other if bugs found months ago had been fixed. They never were.
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Were the users really too stupid to right click the folders background and choose sort or arrange? I know that Win3.x trained people that the mouse only had one button but OS/2 made full use of both including using (default but configurable) the right mouse button for drag'n'drop
I know this is slashdot.... (Score:3)
I know this is /. but it is almost 2016. At this point I think we need to assume that OS/2 is just another weird IT acronym that needs to be defined in the summaries for those who don't realise that it's more than just another app in the Appstore.
Ob (Score:5, Funny)
OS/2 is that thing like a small DIN plug for connecting a mouse, right? I have a PC somewhere with those.
I don't use it - loading the coal is really messy.
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I only just played with it (Score:4, Informative)
By the time I got ahold of a copy, it was quite some ways behind NT4 on useful desktop software, and lightyears behind on drivers.
The copy I had was a floppy diskette based installer set, with some ungodly number of diskettes in it. I remember wondering about the similarities between HPFS and NTFS.
Mostly, it felt like windows 3.1 with a 32bit UI instead of a 16 bit one, very ancient windows app support, and very little native apps.
I suppose it could have gone somewhere had IBM actually gone hard-nosed about it after being snubbed my MS when they released NT4. NT4 had some nasty warts-- no PnP support, No USB support, and a number of others. A proper reboot of the OS/2 ecosystem with proper win32 app support, WDM driver support (So it could use windows drivers, even if just using a wrapper to do so) along with proper OpenGL, USB, and PnP support would have gone a long way back in the day.
These days the features of OS/2 are so obsolete it isn't even funny. ReactOS is extreme bleeding edge alpha, and would be more useful than an OS/2 deployment.
The real windows alternatives out there today are OSX and Linux.
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By the time USB became available, Windows 95 had already destroyed OS/2 in the marketplace. WDM drivers didn't exist until Windows 98.
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PnP was useless until windows XP before then all operating system Butchered it badly.
There is a reason it was called Plug and Pray.
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AmigaOS handled PnP nicely. I'd say that AmigaOS 2.1 and 3.0 handled PnP at least as well as XP, and Linux anno 2004. Parts of that is that Commodore early on introduced a hardware manufacturer ID registry that Autoconfig, which also predates PCI configuration, could use.
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Had Windows 98SE melt when I tried three network cards rather than two (at least two of them were ISA) but otherwise I always got lucky.
Later on I had a motherboard with USB 2.0 ports, still with 98SE. Did that work? I have no idea, since I had no peripherals or drives to plug in there! I used the game port a bit and even the parallel port for some doodad.
Re: I only just played with it (Score:2)
Sp3 had pnp. USB wasn't really in use until 1999 anyways, and by then we had 2000
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IBM didn't have a license for Win32. It did support Win32s, through it's support for Windows 3.1/3.11, but the fully Win32 API wasn't going to happen. The only reason it even ran Windows 3.1 apps was because it retained the licensing agreement with Microsoft. But Win32 was never going to happen.
I remember going to a launch event in Vancouver for Warp 4, where they announced they had developed a set of tools that allowed for easier porting of Win32 programs over to OS/2 (much like Microsoft is trying to do n
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I ran WaffleBBS in a DOS VDM under OS/2 2.1 for a couple of years. It was cool in a modest sort of way, but then I moved over to Linux where it was just a few configuration changes and I could give people shell accounts, all on a 486 with 16mb of RAM and a couple of 200mb hard drives.
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I've seen a few people try to recreate it on the web, but they never really get the same feel. The sense of community and of being a member of a club is gone now. But I am proud to have run one back in the day. Because Waffle had a decent UUCP client, I also hosted a few Usenet groups and had my own email subdomain. It was from this that I first received an email from someone in New Zealand around 1990 and got the chill up my spine realizing he'd sent it out just a *few hours* before. I also had a Fidonet f
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Yeah, for sure. It was a great time, but it's not coming back again. I never ran my own BBS, but I was a sysop on a big Amiga board back then and implemented PC door support by hanging an ancient XT running RemoteAccess off the Amiga via some glue code I wrote for the Amy. It was also cool having the weekend get-togethers at the local restau
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IBM had a license for Windows up to ver 4, which is why Win95 was version 4.095.
The real problems with Win32s was that they required a VxD (or whatever the Win3.x device drivers was called) which had to be rewritten for Winos2. For a while there was an arms race where IBM would port the latest Win32s and MS would release a new one that broke Win32s on WinOS2.
Then MS realized that OS/2 could only address 1 GB, 512 MBs per session and 512 MBs for the kernel. This was for 16 bit compatibility where a 286 could
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I still have a box for OS/2 3.something, and it came as forty 5 1/4 floppies. It's like 5 pounds worth of install media. OS/2 warp 4 at least came on 3 1/2 floppies.
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Yes, I remember this. I had a copy of OS/2 v2.11 that came on 40+ 5.25" floppy disks. Just insane.
OS\2 Warp: Boxed Copy (Score:2)
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Just give it lots of RAM. 16M minimum.
I guess that's lots... when you're looking for SIMMs.
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I should add that although OS/2 3.0 could run off 4MB of RAM, you'll pull your eyes out waiting for it to boot.
Systems were frustrating to use on less than 16M.
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My brother bought OS/2 3.0 and installed everything on a 486DLC with 4 MBs of ram, totally unusable due to swapping so he gave it to me.
First thing I noticed was that doing the install from 3.5 floppies, after copying the first 5 floppies to the HD and rebooting, the OS was actually usable, at least for reading the documentation as not much else had been loaded. So you could play with it while it was installing.
I only had a 386/33 with 4MBs but by tuning it just right, using a third party shell rather then
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Re: OS\2 Warp: Boxed Copy (Score:2)
Get ready to fight cache settings and you'll need a sub 8gb disk, preferably sub 2gb disk.
The ide cd detection is a joke. Also have MS-DOS with edit handy to go in and fix config.sys... and make os/2 boot disks backups so you can run chkdsk, since os/2 can easily get itself into a scenario where it can't repair itself.
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Why not just run it virtualized? I haven't done it, but I've heard plenty of people run OS/2 under Virtualbox.
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Last time I had to fiddle with cache settings was installing Win2k. Currently running OS/2 ver 4.52 on a TB Hard drive, Sata HD and DVD, 2 cores, 2 GBs of ram using JFS for the file system so chkdks usually consist of checking the journal and like with last nights power failure, takes a couple of minutes to boot up in worst case scenario. Basically need JFS anyways to get a large cache, large file (2GB+ files) support and large HD support. No more needing to know why that 0xDEADBEEF address was needed on HP
Good idea? (Score:2)
It's a whole other world from when that had its last release. How well have those OS/2 ATMs been holding out against network attacks? Is this old code full of buffer overflows and ancient ping packet crashes?
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS/2
"The annual convention of OS/2 users" (Score:3)
...held in the phone booth behind the convention center...
Re: "The annual convention of OS/2 users" (Score:2)
Last year it was at a hostel iirc.
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Is it still 32-bit only? (Score:2)
for my next trick (Score:2)
Fond memories -- have a kvm volume for chuckles (Score:2)
From about the time Warp came out through the first year of Windows 95 a person could argue they had the most kick ass desktop with OS/2 and Object Desktop. My main system through our first year of home broadband but I cant imagine using it today compared to linux. Dont miss the zombie threads desktop sounds and streaming music clashing would create though.
Book bag (Score:2)
I'm looking forward to it! (Score:3)
I haven't used OS/2 in many years, since around 2000 I'd say. Installation was always a challenge but once it was running it was solid and a fun system to use. I had custom built a computer specifically for OS/2 with a Pentium Pro 200 MHz, Matrox Millenium II video and Sound Blaster AWE64 which I ran for quite a long time. I'm looking forward to playing with this release although I admit it won't be a primary or even secondary OS for me at all.
I saw the future. (Score:2)
Driver support meant I couldn't use it. Probably just as well because the install was "touchy", and I had no tech skills at all. I went with NT for better support. And NT was pretty cool too, but...
I never forgot that feeling of looking into s
Editor David (Score:2)
Soooo.... Editor David is David but not an Editor...
Used it to run a DOS game... (Score:2)
... that couldn't run in MSDOS because my computer at the time had too little memory. Booting into OS/2 and starting it worked great - and the fact a large chunk of memory was virtual and on a HDD caused no problems.
OS/2 was created as the next generation DOS, the first versions didn't even have a GUI. And it was a very good DOS.
I ran my web business with OS/2 (Score:2)
In the late 90s I was able to produce spectacular performance with OS/2, DB2, Java and Caucho's Resin (a Java httpd) while serving dynamic web pages. Due to the (server) stability of OS/2 and its multi threaded nature, IBMs commitment to Java, DB2 wih Java integration and early XML/XSL implementations, I was able to produce a bleeding edge content management system. I'm talking approx. 1997 to 2001. When IBM killed off OS/2 I switched to Linux which by then had Java implementations that could match OS/2s, a
memories ... (Score:2)
Yeah, it was a bitch to install, but I enjoyed OS/2 at the time, and had Win3.11, OS/2, DOS 6.2 and Linux (I want to say it was Yggdrasil) all booting from OS/2's boot manager on the same 40 GB hard drive. I had no room for actual applications, but i had a great time tinkering with the OS'es! My first foray onto the World Wide Web was via OS/2's WebExplorer 1.0. I loved their NR/2 Newsreader with it's MDI UI - I keep thinking I'm going to build something similar in PyQT, but never quite get around to it.
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I'm quite attached to mine...
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Barbara Hudson wasn't. You're cisist, you are.
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Re:OS/2 (Score:5, Interesting)
We would all be using it. If only ms fucked up nt 4.
No,
I remember spending a week or so trying to get 0S/2 Warp working on allegedly supported hardware, could never get the graphics driver out of 640x480 16 colours, networking was flaky (to say the least), so the guy I was setting it up for asked about Linux, a day or so later produced a Caldera Network Desktop disc, and the rest, as they say, is history (They later switched to Redhat). Asking around at the time, I couldn't get any sensible answers as to why it didn't work, ISTR a lot of other people had hardware issues with OS/2.
Next job, several years later, two OS/2 machines were the bane of my existence (the Windows team refused to look at them, so they fell within my purview), First one, you so much as looked at it the wrong way, it went into snafu (and took the equipment it was running with it, at a horrendous cost per hour..no choice, the control software was OS/2 only and the company no longer existed). Just firing up the machine to run this equipment was like preparing for a fscking space launch. The other, I'll have to admit wasn't so much the OS itself which caused me grief, more the user..and anyone who has had the misfortune of supporting the sole OS/2 zealot in an organisation will tell you that Windows zealots have nothing on them...maybe VMS zealots come close, just maybe, (especially ones who have the only VAX cluster in the organisation in their office...and they're the sole user)
So again, no, OS/2 was fucked up in its own right, it would never have been a serious alternative choice if Microsoft had fucked up NT4
Re:OS/2 (Score:4, Informative)
The problem with OS2 has always been crap drivers. Linux did not hav ethis problem because the community releasing drivers and every user had the ability to compile one. OS/2 did not give you that ability so you were stuck.
Any side OS needs drivers, and the device makers will not write them for you.
Re: OS/2 (Score:3, Insightful)
I bet you didn't really run linux around that time. It was very rare that mainstream hardware actually worked. Winmodems & hp inkjets *shiver*.
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I bet you didn't really run linux around that time. It was very rare that mainstream hardware actually worked. Winmodems & hp inkjets *shiver*.
It was very rare that *new* mainstream hardware actually worked. If you waited a few months, the needed drivers came out, and all was well.
Linux was for people who didn't necessarily need the latest, shiniest new thing, it was for people who knew their shit. If it almost never worked (ever) on mainstream hardware, then it would have gone the way of OS/2...because that's actually what the problem was with OS/2. Mainstream hardware didn't work...and because there was no open-source community empowered to f
Mixed blessing of free drivers (Re: OS/2) (Score:2)
In 1994 I was struggling with a modem, that worked fine under Windows, but would not work under FreeBSD.
This wasn't a "winmodem" in the sense it required a driver to function. But it had to be initialized and would not work without that.
To my delight, certain phk added the code [freebsd.org] necessary to allow a userspace program (which he also wrote) to load the modem's firmware into the chip — you had to load different code (supplied on ma
Re: Mixed blessing of free drivers (Re: OS/2) (Score:2)
Oh god, I had one of those Digicom modem things. IIRC it also presented itself as an MCI device to Windows, which let it do basic sound things. First "sound card" we had, if I'm remembering it right.
I got it working in Linux the worst way possible - I booted DOS to load the firmware, and then loadlin'd over to Linux. Worked for awhile though until I got a real modem working (which was isapnp, another adventure all its own)
I think it's still in a closet or basement at my parents' house. Should pull it out an
Commas (Score:2)
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OS/2 has supported USB since 1998 or so. The problem was that IBM wrote the drivers according to the official spec whereas everyone else was using the MS implementation, which as usual did not follow the spec.
Currently the biggest problem is with Large Floppy Support, eg USB drives over 2GBs have to be partitioned and have the correct LVM info added.
Re: OS/2 (Score:2)
IIRC windmodems didn't come out until way late in the 33.6k era, (almost 56k era) and were the result of their builder going with a cheaper software based controller, which meant a fatter, more complex driver. That also meant they were slower in some situations, hence I avoided them anyways (they were also only about $20 or so cheaper.)
I also remember hearing about the struggle to get them to work in Linux, and IIRC it took so long for the Linux kernel to finally support them that they already became irrele
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I mean, you could still get real modem cards even post-winmodem. But the existence of them meant that you had to be really careful.
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Though I don't know many that ran OS/2 in a corpo
Re:OS/2 (Score:4, Informative)
In the mid-90's into the mid-2000's, OS/2 was very popular in the banking industry. I'd say about half of my customers ran OS/2 on the teller's machines and most other desktops that had to do with customer data (most likely because most of these banks used IBM AS/400 Mainframes, and the clients to these apps were written for OS/2). I started seeing a lot of banks switch to Windows-based PCs in the mid 2000's, then connecting to the mainframes via terminal software.
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OS/2 was only as bad as you complain about because so few used it. ...
Though I don't know many that ran OS/2 in a corporate environment without paying someone like EDS lots of money for support.
So few used it because OS/2 was only as bad as you complain about. And that's why it cost a lot of money for support.
There...fixed that for you.
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A friend of mine and I both used OS/2 as a DOS multitasker for running FidoNet BBSes back in the '90s. I remember one time he was unable to install because he had an Oak brand VGA card which was somehow not 100% compatible with the IBM original. I never really cared much for it other than it was probably the best multitasking environment for DOS programs. I still have that old PC stowed away somewhere, and it still boots OS/2.
As far as OS/2 being fucked up, I would say that the blame lays mostly with IBM,
Re: OS/2 (Score:2)
The kernel was fundamentaly 16 bit, hence the 16 bit asm device drivers.
Microsoft wanted windows api on os/2, but I'm sad no. Not surprisingly since ms was 100% in control of os/2 nt, they switched the primary api to a 32 bit windows api.
Now that the OS/2 betas of football have shown up, Ms had mvdm working on an os/2 1.0 prerelease in 1987!!
I used to think it was ms who screwed up os/2, but it's pretty clear that Ms could have delivered a killer 32bit os in the late 80s!
IBM never got the kernel out of 16b
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The kernel was 32 bit. The only 16 bit piece left as of OS/2 4 was the HPFS driver.
Re: OS/2 (Score:2)
Lol, you wish. It's 16 bit.
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OS/2 2.0 still retained significant 16 bit code, by 2.1 and Warp 3, much of that had been excised, with HPFS being the notable exception.
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Most of the device driver infrastructure was still 16 bit along with legacy APIs from OS/2 1.x and cmd.exe.
The real test was that OS/2 got as much of a speedup on a Pentium Pro as any 32 bit OS unlike Win9X which did have critical 16 bit code.
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Most all device drivers are still 16 bit or at least need a 16 bit shim like Uniaud, the Alsa port (so support most current sound cards etc) which has a 16 bit shim to load the 32 bit part. The Gradd video drivers are 32 bit.
As for HPFS, the story I heard was that IBM and MS agreed that a modern file system was needed and that that would each write one and use whichever was the best. The rules included being written in C and compilable for a 286. MS showed up with HPFS386, didn't mention it was written in 3
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Actually most of the drivers were 16-bit. The network and disk drivers were all 16-bit. I know because I worked on them. There was no easy way to write 32-bit drivers in OS/2 (at least through OS/2 4.0 and whatever the next release was called.
It was a real PITA since I worked on a very large driver (around 100,000 lines of C++) and had to make sure classes could fit in a 64K segment. The driver was around 1MB in size. C++ on the other hand was even more tricky. While it worked out well I was limited to only
Re:OS/2 (Score:4, Insightful)
We would all be using it. If only ms fucked up nt 4.
MS did, and we don't use OS/2.
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I'm posting this from an OS/2 box (SeaMonkey 2.35ESR that I compiled), works fine on my old C2D and dial-up connection.
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...IBM had bothered to ship Warp with a decent set of drivers. No hardware support, no users. Too late IBM..
...If IBM didn't conceitedly underestimate MS/DOS/Windows, yes.
Re: We would be using it today if... (Score:2)
Try $99! QuickC for Windows, and turbo c were both $99
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Why is this ancient operating system still being supported?
Pride.
Re:I've got a question: (Score:5, Informative)
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I do.
One of the local banks still uses OS/2 for it's ATM's. And I believe Chicago's Train system uses it for the Kiosks.
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The funny thing was that you could often get better performance running Windows software within OS/2 as opposed to a native install under DOS.
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Mostly due to the faster file system. It was also nice that you could run each Windows program in its own session, Win3.1 wasn't too bad if only one program was running.
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There were two versions of OS/2 Warp. One came with Windows 3.1 built in, and that version was legendary for the fact that it could run Windows apps faster than a native Windows system (the rumor I heard was that it was because IBM had recompiled Windows 3.1 with the Watcom compiler). The other version, which I owned, was cheaper, but required you have a copy of Windows 3.1, and then OS/2 could use its native DOS support to run Windows apps. You could also run the Windows apps either in the IBM GUI where th
Re:Ah the memories (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: Huh? Billions of people are using it! (Score:2)
Yep, free of IBM's interference OS/2 NT lives on.
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If BeOS can live a zombie life as Haiku, why can't we have a zombie version of OS/2 as well?
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Lots of people love OS/X . No-one loves Finder.