4 ms·

Seems like a challenging project. I remember OS/2 fondly, and I remember (and have heard tales of) its stability. Still, I have read stories that claim the sour

Seems like a challenging project. I remember OS/2 fondly, and I remember (and have heard tales of) its stability. Still, I have read stories that claim the source code was a hot mess of hacks and liberally sprinkled assembly code. Apart from “hacks and glory” (which for the record is a fine justification), I don’t imagine that this project would have a lot of utility. While some old ATMs and some other legacy applications run on OS/2, I’d guess that attaining the degree of compatibility needed to satisfy those applications would be an extremely tall mountain to climb. I think there are a lot of us who remember computing of the 1990s and early 2000s fondly as being a time where you could discover an operating system that was new or novel in some way. Combine that with the fact that computers felt less laggy, and mostly used the same UI across applications (looking at you electron), and I share the nostalgia. I guess what I’m saying is that an OSS OS/2 is cool, and its authors should have songs sung about them, but this isn’t the right foundation to build a modern OS on.

kitd 6y ago
I spent about 7-8 years developing on OS/2. It lent itself to being tinkered and tailored in a much more developer-friendly way than most OSes. The rexx scripting was pervasive. There were meaningful file object attributes that could be extended and used per app. The SOM model was a bit clunky but very powerful (I went on to work with its designer later in my career). It had a bunch of powerful compilers that left all the Windows competitors for dust. And of course it looked great for a windowed GUI at the time.
- guessbest 6y ago
  When did you develop for it? I remember 89 to 95 being the heyday of OS/2, when if you wanted to get your Windows 3.1 machine on the network, you pretty much had to use OS/2 or Novell to host the network.
  - kitd 6y ago
    This was approx 1990-1998. I was working for an actuarial partnership. Our software generated customer-specific actuarial FORTRAN code, with the generator and UI in C. We used the Watcom compilers for both ends of the pipeline. They were top class, and still available AIUI.
- sdegutis 6y ago
  Scripting and generic IPC hooks are one of the coolest things computers can do, and they're more and more limited as time goes on. Just this morning I tried writing a Dark Mode menu bar app for OSX (I'm aware of NightOwl) and it's literally 5 lines of code, but I can't get it running because of sandbox headaches. Looked up all the combinations of solutions but couldn't figure it out after 30 minutes. All sorts of automation and inter-app use-cases are basically dead. All in the name of greater security, except that it can still be done with a good security model. It's possible, it's just that that's not anybody's use-case for computers anymore, except for power users who know how to use Linux, so it's been downgraded to "unsupported". (And Linux is just generally not compatible with rMBP hardware afaik.) Reading what you said about OS/2 sounds like it was a lot closer to this ideal.
- peatmoss 6y ago
  Rexx scripting was great! And it definitely felt like they were catering the OS to a powerful group of power users. To clarify my statement above about its code being a hot mess: my understanding was always that OS/2 achieved reliability through sheer force of will rather than it being built in a way that was architected to be intrinsically safe. Sort of how US nuclear subs have achieved an impressive safety record mainly due to extraordinary fastidiousness with respect to process and procedure.
guenthert 6y ago
I never saw the source code for OS/2, but if it is any like the SMB protocol from the same MS/IBM venture, I rather not see it.
- zwieback 6y ago
  Maybe, but the APIs were very clean and consistent, if a bit verbose. When I moved on to Windows APIs I felt nauseous.
guenthert 6y ago
Doesn't Internet lore hold that MS got paid by LOC from IBM for early versions of OS/2, with obvious results ...
guenthert 6y ago
Well, it's rather a OS/2 look-alike, i.e. compatible OS, rather than a reverse engineered re-implementation. Based on other free software packages, e.g. the interesting Fiasko (from the L4 family) micro kernel, one could rather see it as an example application of those.
badsectoracula 6y ago
I've only played a bit with eComStation (recent OS/2 "distribution"), but my understanding of OS/2 is that it is a very modular system which is also how people still keep adding features to it despite using the same base since the 90s. Also it seems to be thoroughly documented. I think both of these, combined with the fact that OS/2 is not a moving target anymore (unlike Windows), can make it much easier to make an open source OS/2 replacement by replacing its systems bit by bit. If anything, if you check eComStation (and i also guess Arca OS), it has a lot of newer parts than what was originally in OS/2 at all stages of the "stack" - from the bootloader, to graphics drivers, to UI, many of which seem to be open source. TBH i think the main reason there haven't been already a working OS/2 replacement is that there doesn't seem to be enough of a technical know-how in the current community and there doesn't seem to be any new interest for it by people. Haiku was pretty much in the same position, but the difference that somehow Haiku managed to get enough knowledgeable people on board despite BeOS being released on PC only a couple of years after OS/2 Warp. I guess the release of BeOS Personal for free helped spread it much further and OS/2 never had something like that.

kitd 6y ago

I spent about 7-8 years developing on OS/2. It lent itself to being tinkered and tailored in a much more developer-friendly way than most OSes. The rexx scripting was pervasive. There were meaningful file object attributes that could be extended and used per app. The SOM model was a bit clunky but very powerful (I went on to work with its designer later in my career). It had a bunch of powerful compilers that left all the Windows competitors for dust. And of course it looked great for a windowed GUI at the time.

guessbest 6y ago
When did you develop for it? I remember 89 to 95 being the heyday of OS/2, when if you wanted to get your Windows 3.1 machine on the network, you pretty much had to use OS/2 or Novell to host the network.
- kitd 6y ago
  This was approx 1990-1998. I was working for an actuarial partnership. Our software generated customer-specific actuarial FORTRAN code, with the generator and UI in C. We used the Watcom compilers for both ends of the pipeline. They were top class, and still available AIUI.
sdegutis 6y ago
Scripting and generic IPC hooks are one of the coolest things computers can do, and they're more and more limited as time goes on. Just this morning I tried writing a Dark Mode menu bar app for OSX (I'm aware of NightOwl) and it's literally 5 lines of code, but I can't get it running because of sandbox headaches. Looked up all the combinations of solutions but couldn't figure it out after 30 minutes. All sorts of automation and inter-app use-cases are basically dead. All in the name of greater security, except that it can still be done with a good security model. It's possible, it's just that that's not anybody's use-case for computers anymore, except for power users who know how to use Linux, so it's been downgraded to "unsupported". (And Linux is just generally not compatible with rMBP hardware afaik.) Reading what you said about OS/2 sounds like it was a lot closer to this ideal.
peatmoss 6y ago
Rexx scripting was great! And it definitely felt like they were catering the OS to a powerful group of power users. To clarify my statement above about its code being a hot mess: my understanding was always that OS/2 achieved reliability through sheer force of will rather than it being built in a way that was architected to be intrinsically safe. Sort of how US nuclear subs have achieved an impressive safety record mainly due to extraordinary fastidiousness with respect to process and procedure.

guenthert 6y ago

I never saw the source code for OS/2, but if it is any like the SMB protocol from the same MS/IBM venture, I rather not see it.

zwieback 6y ago
Maybe, but the APIs were very clean and consistent, if a bit verbose. When I moved on to Windows APIs I felt nauseous.

guenthert 6y ago

Doesn't Internet lore hold that MS got paid by LOC from IBM for early versions of OS/2, with obvious results ...

guenthert 6y ago

Well, it's rather a OS/2 look-alike, i.e. compatible OS, rather than a reverse engineered re-implementation. Based on other free software packages, e.g. the interesting Fiasko (from the L4 family) micro kernel, one could rather see it as an example application of those.

badsectoracula 6y ago

I've only played a bit with eComStation (recent OS/2 "distribution"), but my understanding of OS/2 is that it is a very modular system which is also how people still keep adding features to it despite using the same base since the 90s. Also it seems to be thoroughly documented. I think both of these, combined with the fact that OS/2 is not a moving target anymore (unlike Windows), can make it much easier to make an open source OS/2 replacement by replacing its systems bit by bit. If anything, if you check eComStation (and i also guess Arca OS), it has a lot of newer parts than what was originally in OS/2 at all stages of the "stack" - from the bootloader, to graphics drivers, to UI, many of which seem to be open source. TBH i think the main reason there haven't been already a working OS/2 replacement is that there doesn't seem to be enough of a technical know-how in the current community and there doesn't seem to be any new interest for it by people. Haiku was pretty much in the same position, but the difference that somehow Haiku managed to get enough knowledgeable people on board despite BeOS being released on PC only a couple of years after OS/2 Warp. I guess the release of BeOS Personal for free helped spread it much further and OS/2 never had something like that.