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OS/2 resurrected: Blue Lion becomes ArcaOS, details emerge for upcoming release
- nickpsecurity 10y agoFor those interested, here's a nice article on history, decline, usage, and fan clubs surrounding OS/2: http://techland.time.com/2012/04/02/25-years-of-ibms-os2-the-birth-death-and-afterlife-of-a-legendary-operating-system/ http://techland.time.com/2012/04/02/25-years-of-ibms-os2-the... I tried it once a few years ago to see what fuss was about. It reminded me of a slightly-better Windows 3.1. Maybe one of those zealots in the article could show me in a live demo why it was great then or if it is now in any way. Not sure. The claimed reliability of it would be a lasting benefit if that was common vs what was achieved with a primitive, predictable application. High-security methods at code or compiler level might also be applied to it if it's relatively small. Could be some potential but I think it's probably one of history's dead ends.
- dcminter 10y agoAs a developer using OS/2 in its heydey and the early part of its decline I would say your assessment was spot on. Before NT the pre-emptive multi-tasking and ability to run Windows executables as well as OS/2 ones was a significant merit. Once NT came along it so clearly didn't have a future. By the by "IBM VisualAge for C++ for OS/2" has to be a contender for world's least snappy product name.
- moonlighter 10y agoCouldn't agree more re: product names. What people would call Sushi, IBM would specifically call "dead raw cold fish on white rice".
- dcminter 10y agoI still twitch a bit over the WebSphere branding apocalypse when they decided their (IMO ghastly) Java app server's name should be applied to All The Things.
- mwfunk 10y agoAs a former IBMer in '90s, I would like to nominate VisualAge for Java as another example of awkward naming choices. The team I was on used VAJ (as it was always referred to in electronic communications) extensively. In speech, people would often pronounce the acronym rather than say "VisualAge" or "VisualAge for Java". Of course, they pronounced it "vadge", because how else would you pronounce VAJ? Sometimes it was said by someone being mischievous, but much more often it was said by people who had no idea that it was slang for something much more exciting.
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- hackbinary 10y agoBrilliant. Thanks for this! I loved OS/2 when I used it briefly, but my computer wasn't powerful enough to run the OS let alone making any dev environment run. IBM should have shipped their Dev environment with OS/2, and then it might have caught on as it then would have had a very low barrier to entry.
- nickpsecurity 10y agoThat sounds terrible. One positive, potentially, that I found was an object-based GUI or system model that supposedly let the developers handle that stuff better than Windows or UNIX/X-Windows. OS/2 fanboys always say something about it. Any insight or opinions on that?
- dcminter 10y agoNope, I'm afraid I was using the Visual Age class library (which was pretty good) for most if not all of the development work I had a hand in.
- jmspring 10y agoI used OS/2 for years, including as a development machine (win 3.1 buildds) while at Netscape. I just liked it's stability and network stack as compared to Windows at the time. For me, it was a more stable DOS type environment with a decent GUI in Workplace Shell. I kept a machine running it for years (still have a vm somewhere) since I really enjoyed the original Galaxtic Civilizations from Stardock.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- ams6110 10y agoI used it as a development workstation back in the early 1990s in an all-IBM shop. I remember it taking an eternity to boot up (like 10 minutes?) on the PS/2 desktop machines we had. Once it was up and running it was OK as I recall.
- dobs_bob 10y agoWhy?
- digi_owl 10y agoCashing in on those OS/2 updates.
- mwfunk 10y agoWhy not?
- ams6110 10y agoWell, as a commercial endeavor, I would really have to wonder if there's enough of a market to sustain a business. I'm sure there's the odd OS/2 system still running here and there but nobody today is interested in expanding that footprint. At best you'll sell upgrades to people who are still using it -- a customer base that will only shrink over time. If it were an open-source project, yeah "why not" is a fine answer.
- mwfunk 10y agoI agree, but usually when people post nothing more than "why?", they're not communicating that they're a customer or potential investor who is concerned about the long-term viability of the product or the company. Usually when people post nothing more than "why?", it's a lazy of saying "I think this is stupid", because if they did just come out and say "I think this is stupid", it would make their absence of a supporting argument all the more glaring.
- Zardoz84 10y agoATMs of Santander bank keeps running on OS/2 If you saw my face when I saw the OS/2 bootup screen on a ATM that just rebooted when I was in front of it...
- sixothree 10y agoYou should have seen my face when my bank booted into Windows XP.
- walterbell 10y agoPlease support running in a Xen/AWS VM. The virtual machine interface will be more stable than real hardware and it will be easier for users to try OS/2.
- nickpsecurity 10y agoThat's a great idea. I'll add VMware, Virtualbox, Xen, and KVM. Maybe HyperV. That baseline will cover about anyone that might try it in Windows and Linux camps where real experimentation will happen.
- wolfgke 10y agoOS/2 has (had?) difficulties running in VMware - that's why Parallels was founded; source: http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/11/half-an-operating-system-the-triumph-and-tragedy-of-os2/5/ http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/11/half-an-operating-sy....
- nickpsecurity 10y agoOh my goodness. I'd have never imagined Parallels started so a bank could run legacy OS/2 apps. Unreal lol.
- wolfgke 10y agoI'm actually not surprised, since I know a (quite successful) software company that was founded for the reason so that corporate consulting companies could create Powerpoint presentations on an even faster rate.
- nickpsecurity 10y agoWhat company is that?
- wolfgke 10y ago
- rodgerd 10y agoI'm torn, because on the one hand it's great if OS/2 junkies can get a fix, but on the other hand you want me, in the year 2016, to pay for an OS with: no USB 3 support, no wireless networking, and a 32-bit kernel with no support for > 4GB memory (and who knows what other shortcomings).
- jpalomaki 10y agoI guess the target market is those who have some existings systems built on top of OS/2.
- graycat 10y agoI used OS/2 for some years in the 1980s and 1990s. I really liked KEdit, Rexx, and PL/I, although PL/I did need collection classes as a data structure supported by the language. I was always frustrated at IBM's lack of vision for, and work on, OS/2. When finally I couldn't get an OS/2 device driver for an Ethernet card, I changed over to Windows 2000, Windows ..., etc. and have never looked back at OS/2. I still use KEdit and Rexx, love both, except now use them on Windows. I still remember the remark by an IBM CEO, likely Gerstner, that "I'm not going to drop $1 billion in another desktop operating system for an Intel processor.". Okay, Lou. You just gave away all the billions of dollars Microsoft has made with Windows since your remark. When you said that, Lou, OS/2 and nearly all of the rest of IBM were ahead. On OS/2, you had the Mach kernel, SMP, DB/2, SNA, token ring, TCP/IP, TCP/IP on a chip, were making the chips for both Cisco and Juniper, were able to make X86 chips, had the lead in fabs, etc. You had it all. You had V/Net, an early example of what networking could do in a company, indeed, the world, but were too dumb to sell it. You stayed with SNA long after it was clear that end to end TCP/IP was much better. Then you threw it away. Threw it all away. Turned your back on the future of computing and walked away. Gee, you had Prodigy -- it could have been Facebook. You had a Web browser -- it could have been the dominant Web browser and had special integration with IBM Web servers, which you didn't really do. You could have had Windows Server and all of the Linux server business. You could have had all the relational database business. At one point, you actually ran ALL of the Internet, the whole thing. You gave it up. How big of a mistake was that? You could have had all of SAP -- you were way ahead in some of the crucial work. I know; I know: You were eager to respond to your major customers, give them what they insisted they wanted. They were all welcome to call except just don't call on a Wednesday because it ruined two weekends. IBM after WinTel: Biggest determined extraction of miserable defeat from the jaws of magnificent victory in the history of, what, the universe? Don't worry, Lou: Your record is safe. No one will ever make such a big mistake again! From at least the Intel 386 chip, there has been a big need for a really good operating system for X86. From all I can see from Microsoft, there is still a big need/opportunity.
- patrickg_zill 10y agoSo OS/2 had some advantages: 1. Desktop was far advanced to what Windows 3.1 had; full drag and drop that worked, apps/services could extend the desktop, etc. 2. Ability to run crashy Win16 and later Win32s programs separately from each other, each in their own protected memory space. 3. All this ran in 16-32 RAM. That is MB of RAM. 128MB for OS/2, which gives you a command line Linux environment or possibly a very constrained GUI, would be huge for an OS/2 install (at that time). 2 things IBM did not fix: 1. Cursor could be locked up for a while in certain cases (like the spinning rainbow on earlier OSX) - NT never had it because mouse ran in a seperate thread. 2. Microsoft ran rings around them PR-wise.
- trm42 10y agoLinux and OS/2 ran on similar specs. Used both of them (triple booting with DOS etc) with 10 MB of ram happily and without too much of swap trashing with XFree86 and even with the early KDE.
- maw 10y agoAt the time 128MB was a lot or RAM for a Linux box too, although its GUIs weren't very capable.
- creiht 10y agoYou really needed 16MB of RAM for it to run well and that cost an arm and a leg back then. I remember scraping together enough to upgrade to 8MB just to get it running reasonably without swapping constantly.
- abecedarius 10y agoRe: Linux. 16MB could run a reasonable X environment in the early 90s. I sometimes ran it in 8, but that was kind of marginal. Maybe you'd call it very constrained in not including Gnome or KDE, but it didn't feel that way.
- lake99 10y agoI remember running FVWM quite comfortably back then on 16MB. I dual-booted with Windows 95, which also ran quite smoothly.
- bogomipz 10y agoIf you buy a metrocard for the New York City subway you are using OS/2. It runs the kiosks. Not resurrected there, just never went away.
- gcr 10y agoWow! That's awesome. Where did you learn this? I'd love to read more about MTA details like that.
- madengr 10y agoI still remember being able to download at 28k in the background while playing wolfenstein. Very cool. Windows 3.1 could never do that.