ArcaOS 5.1.0 (OEM OS/2 Warp Operating System) Now Available (arcanoae.com) 46
Slashdot reader martiniturbide writes: ArcaOS 5.1.0 is an OEM distribution of IBM's discontinued OS/2 Warp operating system. This new version of ArcaOS offers UEFI compatibility allowing it to run in modern x86 hardware and also includes the ability to install to GPT-based disk layouts.
At OS2World 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.
At OS2World 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.
I tried OS2 Warp back in the day (Score:3, Interesting)
It was very pretty and looked and felt a lot better than the Windows of the time but my hardware was very low end so it took about 30 minutes to boot up but it did run ok after that.
It's too bad IBM screwed up the OS wars so badly and so gravely misunderstood the PC market. OS/2 was waaaaay nicer than Windows even with a 30 minute boot up time on my garbage system.
Re:I tried OS2 Warp back in the day (Score:5, Informative)
It's too bad IBM screwed up the OS wars so badly and so gravely misunderstood the PC market. OS/2 was waaaaay nicer than Windows even with a 30 minute boot up time on my garbage system
Yes. And the Workplace Shell continues to be the very best – by at least one order of magnitude – OS GUI I've seen until today in terms of ergonomics, functionality, configurability and extendability, all those nice Linux Desktop Environments included. Many of which, by the way, already are so much better than Windows up to and including Windows 11, the only advantage of which is that, for a change, it does look quite nice.
Now I would agree that IBM's being unaccustomed to marketing directed to tiny little personal computer end users didn't help, but it wasn't just that. As part of a competition case against Microsoft (that Microsoft lost), testimony came up that Microsoft had blackmailed IBM, effectively forcing IBM's software division to stop marketing OS/2 to end users, lest Microsoft would stop selling Windows to IBM's hardware division. Of course it's hard to know for sure, but as that was before OS/2 became able to really challenge Windows, it might have been the crucial nail in the coffin.
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True but a high spec machine was 100 mhz and cpu speed gains were much more dramatic at the time than now.
Hardware was one reason, MS shenanigans was another and IBM did suck at marketing. There was no one thing that killed it.
Re: I tried OS2 Warp back in the day (Score:3)
OS/2's requirements always about 3 years ahead of what us normal people were willing to spend on hardware. By the time we caught up, things like Win95 steamrolled it in the consumer desktop OS market.
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OS/2 was never going to succeed in the PC market regardless of how pretty and stable it was, it was a resource pig that made things like chrome seem tame, which made it slow as a dog on anything but high specced machines. Users were never going to willingly pay hundreds if not thousands more to have a usable machine.
Yep, needed a 386 and 8MB ram, then Warp V4 needed a 486 and 16 MB of ram, or a Pentium if you wanted to use voice navigation or dictation.
Even now Chrome (qt5webengine) needs a couple of GB's of ram on OS/2, very resource heavy compared to Windows
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If I remember correctly, OS/2's resource demands were only unreasonably high in its earlier phase, and then they didn't rise as quickly as hardware became cheaper, either. Myself, I started using OS/2 2.1 way before I had a real income from my first IT job...
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If I remember correctly, OS/2's resource demands were only unreasonably high in its earlier phase, and then they didn't rise as quickly as hardware became cheaper, either. Myself, I started using OS/2 2.1 way before I had a real income from my first IT job...
I found OS/2 2.1 and 2.11 to be resource hogs that were also crippled by the lack of high-power consumer hardware. Even on an old HP 16MB server tower it could be a dog.
OS/2 Warp 3.x got better with resource management while hardware was starting to catch up.
OS/2 Warp 4.x, the last version I ever used, was a better resource manager while hardware was really getting capable.
Having said all of that, if the applications running on top of OS/2 were dogs, like MS SQL Server 4.x on OS/2, then it all went in the d
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I know, ran it on a 386/33 with 4 MB's of ram. Currently with SeaMonkey, Thunderbird and a Chrome based browser running,
total physical memory: 12,169 MB
accessible to system: 3,241 MB
additional (PAE) memory: 8,928 MB
resident memory: 180 MB
available virtual memory: 1,133 MB
vailable process memory:
Private low memory: 352 MB
Private high memory: 1,572 MB
Shared low memory: 244 MB
Shared high memory: 287 MB
It's the shared low memory that causes the system to become unstable when it goes below 10 MB or so
Re: I tried OS2 Warp back in the day (Score:1)
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Re:I tried OS2 Warp back in the day (Score:4, Informative)
The killer feature for OS2 was the experimental API for off-loading tasks to a server. It was possible to have a beefy OS2 or IBM server and allow for much lower-powered workstations to hand discrete compute jobs off to the server and then have the results seamlessly handed back to the client. I had a client that used this for a particular database. This allowed the OS2 boxes to run the application at some 20x the speed of the identical boxes running Windows.
The same client has a testing version of Lotus circa 1992 that used this API and was amazing for its time. It was also possible to use this to have the same spreadsheet worked on by up to 20 people at the same time. For the time, this was mind-blowing stuff.
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The killer feature for OS2 was the experimental API for off-loading tasks to a server. It was possible to have a beefy OS2 or IBM server and allow for much lower-powered workstations to hand discrete compute jobs off to the server and then have the results seamlessly handed back to the client
I mean, you just described DCOM, which Windows had since NT4/Win95
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The killer feature for OS2 was the experimental API for off-loading tasks to a server. It was possible to have a beefy OS2 or IBM server and allow for much lower-powered workstations to hand discrete compute jobs off to the server and then have the results seamlessly handed back to the client
I mean, you just described DCOM, which Windows had since NT4/Win95
And was a rip off from distributed SOM, just like COM was a bad rip off of SOM.
The Windows 95 interface was just a bad copy of the WPS, just like the Win 3.x (NT 3.x) interface was a bad copy of the OS/2 1.x interface. Even Internet Explorer go its idea of being a DLL that any application could use from OS/2's Web Explorer, mostly a big DLL so any program could use it to display HTML. released as part of the IAK (Internet Access Kit) included with Warp v3 in 1994.
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Cool story, bro. Irrelevant to the current topic being discussed.
You do know that Microsoft created OS/2 with IBM, right? How much of that "copied" stuff was just less about borrowing and more about using their developed IP from the OS/2 join venture?
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Seems that SOM came with OS/2 V2, after the divorce and was solely an IBM thing, though through licensing agreements MS likely had rights to it.
Things like the OS/2 v1.x graphical interface likely were mostly developed by MS, still the OS/2 Progman and Fileman equivalents were much better then the Win 3.x versions, free floating windows and such, forget the proper terms.
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Yes, but for the time, it actually worked on OS2, where it didn't work on the Windows boxes of the time.
I'd sell one of my kidneys... (Score:4, Insightful)
... to get the Workplace Shell back, on an up-to-date operating system with lavish software support (which leaves about three, of which OS/2-eComStation-ArcaOS isn't one). No other OS UI I've seen over the last 40 years comes even close.
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for all practical ALIKE TO REAP volume of Ne7BSD Software lawyers The curtains flew
I think your BSD 'fortune' files are corrupt. /sarcasm
OS/2 Was awesome! (Score:3, Insightful)
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This was true. I was running a four lines bbs in 1994 on OS/2 with Maximus
Maybe we need ReactOS-for-OS/2 (Score:3)
Maybe someone should start a project similar to the ReactOS Windows clone project but aiming to clone OS/2.
Re:Maybe we need ReactOS-for-OS/2 (Score:4, Informative)
The ReactOS people originally wanted to support OS/2 as the NT kernel was capable, unluckily no OS/2 developers were interested. The OS/2 development environment was much like a herd of cats.
At this point the problem would be the remaining 16 bit code in OS/2, just won't work in a 64 bit environment so some low level things would have to be rewritten and there's few capable developers and those aren't interested.
The real shame is that the OS/2 PPC code seems to have been lost, at one time it was hoped that it would be open sourced. It was pure 32 bit C (and perhaps some C++) code written to be portable.
Operating systems are stupid (Score:2)
Applications is where its at. Operating systems don't make any sense.
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Yep, stick in the floppy and turn the machine on and your application runs until you turn the machine off and stick in a different floppy and repeat the procedure.
Re: Operating systems are stupid (Score:2)
Arguably the better user experience. Assuming every computer is compatible and has no extra hardware or unusual extensions.
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In a way, it is how I first used a computer, an Apple //. Still I came to a point where I found myself wishing to run more then one application at a time, even if only 2 editors or a calculator. Later I wanted to have something running in the background such as terminator downloading a file while I did something else, which was about the time I discovered OS/2. With only 4MB of ram on a 386, I first used it as a DOS replacement and it was wonderful having multiple DOS or Win 3.1 sessions all multitasking. W
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I went the DESQview route. I was able to host my small BBS and continue to use my 486 for general programming and word processing without a hitch. Gaming was a little bit beyond DESQview's capabilities in most but all cases.
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Ballmer knew.
Faster than Linux (Score:2, Troll)
How is it that on a 486/25 16MB I could have Word in one window, be playing Wing Commander in another window, and format a floppy disk in another window, and move the windows, without a single stutter?
But now with a Zen2/3400 64GB machine with 8 real cores and Linux 6 I can copy a file to a USB drive from shell and dragging a window locks up refresh for 10-20 seconds pretty much every time?
OS/2 did something right that Linux doesn't.
BeOS did it right on PPC too.
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Part of it was being tuned as a client rather then a server. By default OS/2 would give the foreground application a slight priority and IO boost making it feel much more responsive.
Re: Faster than Linux (Score:2)
Part of it is that USB really sucks on the host side. Also, Linux inherited a lot of Unix baggage that make asynchronous file operation cumbersome and rarely implemented correctly. On the plus side, your Linux box likely has 400-1000 tasks running without you even realizing how much crap it has been doing behind the scenes.
I have always wondered (Score:2)
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Windows 2000 (Score:3)
"offers UEFI compatibility allowing it to run in modern x86 hardware and also includes the ability to install to GPT-based disk layouts"
Now, can they do the same for Windows 2000?
I'd be really interested in buying that.
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Yes, feature wise Windows 2000 kinda was the peak. The only problem with it was there were many security critical bugs.
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But teh price! (Score:2)
OS/2 was stable (Score:1)