New OS/2 Warp Operating System 'ArcaOS' 5.0 Released (arcanoae.com) 145
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."
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."
Bring out your dead (Score:2, Funny)
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 (Score:4, Informative)
--Maybe... But it should certainly run REXX.
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| Rex and its Amiga version Arexx were awesome
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).
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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.
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Proud of their work (Score:3)
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..but does it matter? (Score:2)
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.
This. (Score:1)
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 nin
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WTF?
Who spewed this wordy blather here?
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Boy did your parents fail you.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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--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 backgrou
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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....w
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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.
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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.
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Re: Proud of their work..but does it matter? (Score:2)
great DOS support
But would it run X-COM: UFO Defense?
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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.
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Re: Proud of their work..but does it matter? (Score:2)
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 $99 dollars all by itself!
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If you want to freak people out, install Temple OS [youtube.com].
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The aspergers is strong in this one.
Re: Proud of their work (Score:2)
Linux is free because big non MS companies invest in it so they dont have to pay programmers and their investor to reinvent the wheel twice a month.
Linux is only "junk" if your computing experience amounts to wordprocessing and/or using an expensive version of MS paint.
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um 9.9 tanks of gas for my small car
and I never said it should be free, im not pissing away 9.9 tanks of gas to use os/2 and firefox... I might consider 20, hell at 20$ I bet they would sell a fuckton more copies
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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)
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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 $229 version as a business expense, and possibly apply depreciation on it. (I'm not a tax accountant)
A case for an OS/2 (Score:2)
While I can and do see the point behind the commercial version, the price of the personal version puts me off of even considering trying it, guess you really have to be a diehard OS/2 personal user.
I am not saying that it should be FREEEEEEE and all that, just 99$ 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 wa
Holy Crap expensive (Score:2)
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 (Score:1)
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/
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The personal license will retail for $129, with an introductory price of $99 for the first 90 days following release. This includes six months of support and maintenance updates and fixes.
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The last version of Netscape that existed was Netscape 9, which was some earlier version of FireFox (before that went the Chrome route). The closest thing to that might be to port Pale Moon & Fossamail to this platform. Maybe rebrand it so that it won't sound so weird.
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Actually the closest thing to the Netscape would be clone Seamonkey over, as the interface is basically the old Netscape interface from the 90's and is more or less unchanged. It would look right at home on OS/2.
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Literally, because OS/2 was already dead! Back then! In 1999! Prince is already dead! Why is this coming out of the grave!
It may as well have been dead when WIndows 95 came out. OS/2 3.0 (Warp) was superior, or some of us thought so anyway, but wasn't able to gain enough traction in the market. I pirated it when it came it (poor kid) and used it for a while, but M$ 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.
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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 m
Excessive traffic (Score:2)
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For the Young... Some Background. (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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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; moreove
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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:
-
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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.
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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.
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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.
Litera
Re:For the Young... Some Background. (Score:5, Informative)
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. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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
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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 s
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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.
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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 permis
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
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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 yo
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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.
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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.
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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 start
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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.
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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
Re:For the Young... Some Background. (Score:4, Insightful)
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/... [wikipedia.org]). 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.
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... Just my 2 cents.
Awesome, thanks! Just another $98.98, I'll be able to try out a copy myself!
Is it worth what it costs? (Score:2)
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OS/2 had its chance, but it is too late now (Score:2)
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
Does anyone /need/ it? (Score:2)
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.
"Called upon to ... open source any OS/2 software" (Score:2)
"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
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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.
Kinda Neat, But So What? (Score:2)
Checking it out... (Score:1)
Interesting but too expensive (Score:2)
Kinda expensive (Score:2)
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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
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Did they ever fix the single input queue? (Score:1)
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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 avail