6 ms·

Arca Noae brings OS/2 into the 21st Century

53 points by detaro 4y ago

mdaniel 4y ago
https://www.arcanoae.com/shop/arcaos-5-personal-edition/ https://www.arcanoae.com/shop/arcaos-5-personal-edition/ > Personal Edition $129 > ArcaOS may not install or run on all systems, and Arca Noae makes no claim that it does. If you are unsure as to the suitability of your hardware for ArcaOS, please review this wiki page or contact us. *There is no trial or demonstration version available.* Wow, that's some "You must really, really want to run OS/2" level marketing right there
- someweirdperson 4y ago
  With VMs being able to run the original IBM Warp4 (didn't notice any issues when I tried), not only really really want to run it, but really really want to run it on some bare metal modern hardware. The $129 are a lot cheaper than $250 in 1995-$, inflation-corrected probably nearly doubled since then. If someone needed it back at that time, today that's a real bargain.
  - macrolime 4y ago
    I got OS/2 on a CD that came with a computer magazine in 1995. That magazine was like $10, so the OS/2 version was probably just a trial.
    - unixhero 4y ago
      The shame was that by that time, it was too late.
    - jaclaz 4y ago
      Around 1995, I remember that some German PC seller (Vobis) pre-installed OS/2 (for some time together with DOS/Windows, 3.11 at the time, if I recall correctly), so most probably there were some kind of low cost OEM versions, later they had OS/2 only: https://www.nytimes.com/1995/03/09/business/company-news-vobis-computer-drops-microsoft-s-ms-dos-software.html https://www.nytimes.com/1995/03/09/business/company-news-vob...
- ThinkBeat 4y ago
  It is a shame that there is no way to take it for a demo test drive. Open sourcing it would be awesome as well. (there is no reaso to believe they would)
  - giamma 4y ago
    There have been many requests to make it opensource, but apparently this was not possible because some part of the code are owned by both IBM and Microsoft who collaborated on OS/2 at the beginning before Microsoft decided to build its own Windows. Rumors are that while IBM was positive about open sourcing OS/2, Microsoft did not give consent. I have been an OS/2 user back in the days, the system was great at that time, much better than the Windows counterpart, with a great UI and file system (which for example did not need defrag). It was however affected by one major issue: at the UI level it had a single event queue (http://www.os2ezine.com/v1n5/queue.html http://www.os2ezine.com/v1n5/queue.html) and if some application would hang while processing its events, it would freeze the UI for good.
    - ch_123 4y ago
      Fun fact: Arca Noae doesn't even have access to the source code for OS/2. All enhancements to the core OS are implemented as drivers or binary patches.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - mdaniel 4y ago
        That's amazing; do you have a citation for that? Also, how does that work given their $129 price tag? I have to separately buy a license to OS/2 and then their software modifies the distributed binaries?
        ch_123 4y ago
        This was discussed in an interview between Bryan Lunduke and the founder of Arca Noae which is sadly no longer online. No - when you buy a copy of ArcaOS you get an OS/2 license. Arca Noae have an agreement with IBM to resell OS/2 licenses, they just don't have access to the source code.
- BirAdam 4y ago
  This is more: I’m a bank with many old systems that are reliant on OS/2 and I need some kind of update for my systems! There are other industries beyond finance, but that was a large one. Personally, I’m happy for it existing. I hope that at some point open source efforts succeed or that Arca can secure access to the source at some point in the future.
  - mdaniel 4y ago
    Unless I'm misunderstanding your assertion, wouldn't that situation apply to the business license, priced higher, than the personal license that I linked to, which explicitly states it can't be used for commercial purposes?
- mwexler 4y ago
  Funny enough, this was original list pricing for the personal edition of OS/2 Warp. See https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-1994-10-17-1994290088-story.html https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-1994-10-17-19942900... for example.
stuaxo 4y ago
Unless they bring OS/2 to CI the open source software support for it will fade away. If they did show it's OK to use in CI, then the community support will have a chance of staying alive.
- unixhero 4y ago
  Do you mean programming for the modules in the actual operating system? Then they would have to open source the entire OS. Is this what you mean will be the only way they will survive?
- kyberias 4y ago
  Is it not possible to cross-compile OS/2 software?
  - giamma 4y ago
    OS/2 was running it's own native programs, usually developed in C/C++ and compiled against it's O.S. API, which were very nicely designed for the time, much cleaner and better organized than most of the competition. These are not easily portable as they rely on very specific and unique concepts. For example the UI elements (a window, an icon, but also folders and files in the filesystem views) were object oriented concepts in the API and in the UI system (made of WPS - workplace shell and PM - the presentation manager). If you wanted you could subclass the file object and define a new view for it, and all of the user interface would behave accordingly. Similarly you could subclass the folder view and for example add a new status bar, or a box with a shell at the bottom. This was very unique at the time and I believe in part still is today. The system was also in the background constantly tracking UI elements and file system content. So if you created an icon for a file (similar to a Windows shortcut) and then renamed the file, the icon would automatically be aware of the new name, because the file system would fire a "rename event" and the UI would be listening to such events and take appropriate actions. You never had a broken link; if you deleted a file from the command prompt the UI shortcut would be gone as well. It was also programmable in Object Rexx, an scripting language that would be compiled into bytecode at the first execution of the script. The file system API allowed any program to attach custom attributes to files, and the Rexx runtime would attach the bytecode as a custom attribute to the file so future invocations would skip compilation unless the script was modified. Object Rexx had bindings for most if not all of the operating system APIs, so while Object Rexx interpreters exist for other operating systems, the scripts are hardly portable unless they are trivial. OS/2 could run MS/DOS and Windows 3.1 program in a compatibility virtual machine. In this case however you would loose multi tasking for those programs because dos and Windows 3.1 did not have multi tasking. Those program would run only when in foreground. OS/2 could run Java up to Java 1.2 programs. And due to some volunteer effort there was a quite complete POSIX compatibility layer and a port of GCC which allowed compiling for OS/2 many Unix programs (Apache HTTP for example). There was also a port of XFree available but it was running full screen, so you either used the native UI, or you could switch to a XFree program which first would bring XFree to full screen and then you could work with the program window (of course alt-tabbing back to a native program would do the opposite) It was very advanced in many ways, for example it supported so called "installable file systems": you could add support for a file system by loading its driver at boot time and when a file system did not support custom attributes, they would be saved in a special hidden file in the root folder. It officially supported HPFS (its own), FAT, JFS, and there existed IFS implementations for Ext2, NTFS and more which were mostly ports from early Linux. The UI was super customizable, you could have hot corners, multiple virtual desktops, you could individually customize fonts and background of each folder (you simply dragged the font from the front palette to the folder and your preference was recorded in the file system custom attributes together with last size and position of the folder window). Similarly, to change the icon of a program, you had to open preferences and drag and drop the new icon over the previous one, so for many things it had approaches that are similar to those in place in MacOs. I remember using some old IBM IDE that was implemented by subclassing the UI views for files and folder and enabling those special views on the file system folders representing your projects. A whole IDE integrated into the desktop by subclassing standard desktop objects. As an example, the standard file system explorer window would show IDE-specific columns in details view and a toolbar with build/run/debug buttons when you were browsing a folder which corresponded to an IDE project. Cool idea even though not perfectly executed. Good memories. Edit: fixed some typos and clarified last paragraph with an example.
wdb 4y ago
Page isn’t loading for me, would this be the continuation of eComStation?
- giamma 4y ago
  Yes it is
  - wdb 4y ago
    Thank you, exciting :))
Huh1337 4y ago
Who is using OS/2 today (in business)? What are the advantages over any other solution? Is it just about maintenance of legacy systems, or is there something new built on this platform?
- microtonal 4y ago
  It's only real use is legacy systems. I have dabbled a bit with eComStation in the early aughts and even then it was already obsolete compared to Windows 2000 and later XP. Only IBM has the full source code (and obviously they don't care much about OS/2), so the only changes made for the last ~20 years are binary patches, third-party drivers, and extensions. It's a 32-bit operating system and will never transition to 64-bit. OS/2 now probably full of hundreds of well-known CVEs. So, any machine used out in the wild is trivially exploitable.
- giamma 4y ago
  I believe there are still some very specific scenarios in which is used, probably by Banks and in the domain of control theory. There were news that in early 2000 it was still running the whole Hong Kong airport. In Italy where I live, up to 2010 if not later, you could still find kiosks for buying railway tickets that were powered by OS/2. These kiosks were quite bulky because they had CRT touch screens! The CRT screens were mounted on a vertical rack inside the kiosk which had two axis, horizontal and vertical, and when you pushed the screen to tap a button the two axis would feel the pressure and would be able to identify the area of the screen that you pushed and to pass coordinates to OS/2 as if you were using a PS/2 mouse. Of course not as precise as a smarphone touchscreen, but those UI used fairly large buttons and everything was working perfectly. In Italy I think I kept on spotting old ATMs running OS/2 until at least 2015. I know of a large Bank, this time not Italian, that was still using OS/2 for its tellers probably around 2012. They were using a Web application already, but browsing it via a Firefox port for OS/2 https://wiki.mozilla.org/Ports/os2 https://wiki.mozilla.org/Ports/os2 They needed to do so because of certain legacy devices (cash dispensers, check printers) which only worked with OS/2. The hobbes archive still recevies updates and uploads with os/2 software: https://hobbes.nmsu.edu/ https://hobbes.nmsu.edu/ and https://hobbes.nmsu.edu/?path=%2Fpub%2Fnew https://hobbes.nmsu.edu/?path=%2Fpub%2Fnew Edit: fixed URL
gattilorenz 4y ago
Page currently down. http://web.archive.org/web/20220523235443/https://www.arcanoae.com/shop/arcaos-5-personal-edition/ http://web.archive.org/web/20220523235443/https://www.arcano... Here's the "System Requirements": http://web.archive.org/web/20220523235846/https://www.arcanoae.com/wiki/arcaos/technical-specifications/ http://web.archive.org/web/20220523235846/https://www.arcano... It seems they kinda ported ALSA+FreeBSD network drivers so you can use modern-ish (for OS/2 standards at least) NICs, WiFi cards and audio cards: http://web.archive.org/web/20220523235511/https://www.arcanoae.com/wiki/multimac/ http://web.archive.org/web/20220523235511/https://www.arcano... http://web.archive.org/web/20220523235510/https://www.arcanoae.com/wiki/uniaud/ http://web.archive.org/web/20220523235510/https://www.arcano... I guess that's useful for existing OS/2 based ATMs or ticket-vending machines, where you might need to emit some "beeps" or play limited other types of audio. Can't imagine there is a huge need for multimedia capabilities on OS/2. I wonder if they really tested it on Connectix Virtual PC (which according to Wikipedia did have an OS/2 version available... maybe they tested an OS/2 inception?).
- mdaniel 4y ago
  Heh, I wonder if they're running their website on OS/2? I forgot to check the response headers from when it was up
LordLotherak 4y ago
I was really hopeful for OS/2 Warp as a mainstream desktop OS when it came out, even though they grossly understated the memory requirements (it really needed 8mb) I think the death knell was ultimately WIN-OS2 which discouraged developers to make 32-bit native software, had this strategy been implemented just a few years earlier, it would have had a chance to saturate in the market. Once properly installed and running, it was clearly ahead of the curve compared to Win 3.11, or even NT 3.x.
- lproven 4y ago
  > I was really hopeful for OS/2 Warp as a mainstream desktop OS when it came out Yes, me too. I evangelised it for a while. Then I saw NT 3.1 at work. I deployed it in production in 1993. It was worryingly good, if you could afford the hardware. Then 2Y later I got a beta of Windows Chicago, before the "Windows 95" name was formalised, and I tried it, and I shut up about OS/2. It was very clearly Game Over.
kjellsbells 4y ago
Every time OS/2 resurfaces there is a comment exchange that says, "who still uses this?!" and "I remember <Unnamed customer> was using it in <period over 10 years ago>" Does any one have a production, nameable customer in 2022, or, is anyone willing to share why they are still running OS/2 at their work even if they can't name them? I can't quite believe that an OS that found its niche primarily in heavy IBM shops like banking and retail would not, by the same token, have been replaced by the same IBM consulting teams that deployed it when it was viable.
- lproven 4y ago
  Is 2 years ago close enough? https://www.vice.com/en/article/zmp8gy/the-forgotten-operating-system-that-keeps-the-nyc-subway-system-alive https://www.vice.com/en/article/zmp8gy/the-forgotten-operati...

53 points by detaro 4y ago

https://www.arcanoae.com/shop/arcaos-5-personal-edition/ https://www.arcanoae.com/shop/arcaos-5-personal-edition/ > Personal Edition $129 > ArcaOS may not install or run on all systems, and Arca Noae makes no claim that it does. If you are unsure as to the suitability of your hardware for ArcaOS, please review this wiki page or contact us. *There is no trial or demonstration version available.* Wow, that's some "You must really, really want to run OS/2" level marketing right there

someweirdperson 4y ago
With VMs being able to run the original IBM Warp4 (didn't notice any issues when I tried), not only really really want to run it, but really really want to run it on some bare metal modern hardware. The $129 are a lot cheaper than $250 in 1995-$, inflation-corrected probably nearly doubled since then. If someone needed it back at that time, today that's a real bargain.
- macrolime 4y ago
  I got OS/2 on a CD that came with a computer magazine in 1995. That magazine was like $10, so the OS/2 version was probably just a trial.
  - unixhero 4y ago
    The shame was that by that time, it was too late.
  - jaclaz 4y ago
    Around 1995, I remember that some German PC seller (Vobis) pre-installed OS/2 (for some time together with DOS/Windows, 3.11 at the time, if I recall correctly), so most probably there were some kind of low cost OEM versions, later they had OS/2 only: https://www.nytimes.com/1995/03/09/business/company-news-vobis-computer-drops-microsoft-s-ms-dos-software.html https://www.nytimes.com/1995/03/09/business/company-news-vob...
ThinkBeat 4y ago
It is a shame that there is no way to take it for a demo test drive. Open sourcing it would be awesome as well. (there is no reaso to believe they would)
- giamma 4y ago
  There have been many requests to make it opensource, but apparently this was not possible because some part of the code are owned by both IBM and Microsoft who collaborated on OS/2 at the beginning before Microsoft decided to build its own Windows. Rumors are that while IBM was positive about open sourcing OS/2, Microsoft did not give consent. I have been an OS/2 user back in the days, the system was great at that time, much better than the Windows counterpart, with a great UI and file system (which for example did not need defrag). It was however affected by one major issue: at the UI level it had a single event queue (http://www.os2ezine.com/v1n5/queue.html http://www.os2ezine.com/v1n5/queue.html) and if some application would hang while processing its events, it would freeze the UI for good.
  - ch_123 4y ago
    Fun fact: Arca Noae doesn't even have access to the source code for OS/2. All enhancements to the core OS are implemented as drivers or binary patches.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - mdaniel 4y ago
      That's amazing; do you have a citation for that? Also, how does that work given their $129 price tag? I have to separately buy a license to OS/2 and then their software modifies the distributed binaries?
      - ch_123 4y ago
        This was discussed in an interview between Bryan Lunduke and the founder of Arca Noae which is sadly no longer online. No - when you buy a copy of ArcaOS you get an OS/2 license. Arca Noae have an agreement with IBM to resell OS/2 licenses, they just don't have access to the source code.
BirAdam 4y ago
This is more: I’m a bank with many old systems that are reliant on OS/2 and I need some kind of update for my systems! There are other industries beyond finance, but that was a large one. Personally, I’m happy for it existing. I hope that at some point open source efforts succeed or that Arca can secure access to the source at some point in the future.
- mdaniel 4y ago
  Unless I'm misunderstanding your assertion, wouldn't that situation apply to the business license, priced higher, than the personal license that I linked to, which explicitly states it can't be used for commercial purposes?
mwexler 4y ago
Funny enough, this was original list pricing for the personal edition of OS/2 Warp. See https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-1994-10-17-1994290088-story.html https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-1994-10-17-19942900... for example.

stuaxo 4y ago

Unless they bring OS/2 to CI the open source software support for it will fade away. If they did show it's OK to use in CI, then the community support will have a chance of staying alive.

unixhero 4y ago
Do you mean programming for the modules in the actual operating system? Then they would have to open source the entire OS. Is this what you mean will be the only way they will survive?
kyberias 4y ago
Is it not possible to cross-compile OS/2 software?
- giamma 4y ago
  OS/2 was running it's own native programs, usually developed in C/C++ and compiled against it's O.S. API, which were very nicely designed for the time, much cleaner and better organized than most of the competition. These are not easily portable as they rely on very specific and unique concepts. For example the UI elements (a window, an icon, but also folders and files in the filesystem views) were object oriented concepts in the API and in the UI system (made of WPS - workplace shell and PM - the presentation manager). If you wanted you could subclass the file object and define a new view for it, and all of the user interface would behave accordingly. Similarly you could subclass the folder view and for example add a new status bar, or a box with a shell at the bottom. This was very unique at the time and I believe in part still is today. The system was also in the background constantly tracking UI elements and file system content. So if you created an icon for a file (similar to a Windows shortcut) and then renamed the file, the icon would automatically be aware of the new name, because the file system would fire a "rename event" and the UI would be listening to such events and take appropriate actions. You never had a broken link; if you deleted a file from the command prompt the UI shortcut would be gone as well. It was also programmable in Object Rexx, an scripting language that would be compiled into bytecode at the first execution of the script. The file system API allowed any program to attach custom attributes to files, and the Rexx runtime would attach the bytecode as a custom attribute to the file so future invocations would skip compilation unless the script was modified. Object Rexx had bindings for most if not all of the operating system APIs, so while Object Rexx interpreters exist for other operating systems, the scripts are hardly portable unless they are trivial. OS/2 could run MS/DOS and Windows 3.1 program in a compatibility virtual machine. In this case however you would loose multi tasking for those programs because dos and Windows 3.1 did not have multi tasking. Those program would run only when in foreground. OS/2 could run Java up to Java 1.2 programs. And due to some volunteer effort there was a quite complete POSIX compatibility layer and a port of GCC which allowed compiling for OS/2 many Unix programs (Apache HTTP for example). There was also a port of XFree available but it was running full screen, so you either used the native UI, or you could switch to a XFree program which first would bring XFree to full screen and then you could work with the program window (of course alt-tabbing back to a native program would do the opposite) It was very advanced in many ways, for example it supported so called "installable file systems": you could add support for a file system by loading its driver at boot time and when a file system did not support custom attributes, they would be saved in a special hidden file in the root folder. It officially supported HPFS (its own), FAT, JFS, and there existed IFS implementations for Ext2, NTFS and more which were mostly ports from early Linux. The UI was super customizable, you could have hot corners, multiple virtual desktops, you could individually customize fonts and background of each folder (you simply dragged the font from the front palette to the folder and your preference was recorded in the file system custom attributes together with last size and position of the folder window). Similarly, to change the icon of a program, you had to open preferences and drag and drop the new icon over the previous one, so for many things it had approaches that are similar to those in place in MacOs. I remember using some old IBM IDE that was implemented by subclassing the UI views for files and folder and enabling those special views on the file system folders representing your projects. A whole IDE integrated into the desktop by subclassing standard desktop objects. As an example, the standard file system explorer window would show IDE-specific columns in details view and a toolbar with build/run/debug buttons when you were browsing a folder which corresponded to an IDE project. Cool idea even though not perfectly executed. Good memories. Edit: fixed some typos and clarified last paragraph with an example.

wdb 4y ago

Page isn’t loading for me, would this be the continuation of eComStation?

giamma 4y ago
Yes it is
- wdb 4y ago
  Thank you, exciting :))

Huh1337 4y ago

Who is using OS/2 today (in business)? What are the advantages over any other solution? Is it just about maintenance of legacy systems, or is there something new built on this platform?

microtonal 4y ago
It's only real use is legacy systems. I have dabbled a bit with eComStation in the early aughts and even then it was already obsolete compared to Windows 2000 and later XP. Only IBM has the full source code (and obviously they don't care much about OS/2), so the only changes made for the last ~20 years are binary patches, third-party drivers, and extensions. It's a 32-bit operating system and will never transition to 64-bit. OS/2 now probably full of hundreds of well-known CVEs. So, any machine used out in the wild is trivially exploitable.
giamma 4y ago
I believe there are still some very specific scenarios in which is used, probably by Banks and in the domain of control theory. There were news that in early 2000 it was still running the whole Hong Kong airport. In Italy where I live, up to 2010 if not later, you could still find kiosks for buying railway tickets that were powered by OS/2. These kiosks were quite bulky because they had CRT touch screens! The CRT screens were mounted on a vertical rack inside the kiosk which had two axis, horizontal and vertical, and when you pushed the screen to tap a button the two axis would feel the pressure and would be able to identify the area of the screen that you pushed and to pass coordinates to OS/2 as if you were using a PS/2 mouse. Of course not as precise as a smarphone touchscreen, but those UI used fairly large buttons and everything was working perfectly. In Italy I think I kept on spotting old ATMs running OS/2 until at least 2015. I know of a large Bank, this time not Italian, that was still using OS/2 for its tellers probably around 2012. They were using a Web application already, but browsing it via a Firefox port for OS/2 https://wiki.mozilla.org/Ports/os2 https://wiki.mozilla.org/Ports/os2 They needed to do so because of certain legacy devices (cash dispensers, check printers) which only worked with OS/2. The hobbes archive still recevies updates and uploads with os/2 software: https://hobbes.nmsu.edu/ https://hobbes.nmsu.edu/ and https://hobbes.nmsu.edu/?path=%2Fpub%2Fnew https://hobbes.nmsu.edu/?path=%2Fpub%2Fnew Edit: fixed URL

gattilorenz 4y ago

Page currently down. http://web.archive.org/web/20220523235443/https://www.arcanoae.com/shop/arcaos-5-personal-edition/ http://web.archive.org/web/20220523235443/https://www.arcano... Here's the "System Requirements": http://web.archive.org/web/20220523235846/https://www.arcanoae.com/wiki/arcaos/technical-specifications/ http://web.archive.org/web/20220523235846/https://www.arcano... It seems they kinda ported ALSA+FreeBSD network drivers so you can use modern-ish (for OS/2 standards at least) NICs, WiFi cards and audio cards: http://web.archive.org/web/20220523235511/https://www.arcanoae.com/wiki/multimac/ http://web.archive.org/web/20220523235511/https://www.arcano... http://web.archive.org/web/20220523235510/https://www.arcanoae.com/wiki/uniaud/ http://web.archive.org/web/20220523235510/https://www.arcano... I guess that's useful for existing OS/2 based ATMs or ticket-vending machines, where you might need to emit some "beeps" or play limited other types of audio. Can't imagine there is a huge need for multimedia capabilities on OS/2. I wonder if they really tested it on Connectix Virtual PC (which according to Wikipedia did have an OS/2 version available... maybe they tested an OS/2 inception?).

mdaniel 4y ago
Heh, I wonder if they're running their website on OS/2? I forgot to check the response headers from when it was up

LordLotherak 4y ago

I was really hopeful for OS/2 Warp as a mainstream desktop OS when it came out, even though they grossly understated the memory requirements (it really needed 8mb) I think the death knell was ultimately WIN-OS2 which discouraged developers to make 32-bit native software, had this strategy been implemented just a few years earlier, it would have had a chance to saturate in the market. Once properly installed and running, it was clearly ahead of the curve compared to Win 3.11, or even NT 3.x.

lproven 4y ago
> I was really hopeful for OS/2 Warp as a mainstream desktop OS when it came out Yes, me too. I evangelised it for a while. Then I saw NT 3.1 at work. I deployed it in production in 1993. It was worryingly good, if you could afford the hardware. Then 2Y later I got a beta of Windows Chicago, before the "Windows 95" name was formalised, and I tried it, and I shut up about OS/2. It was very clearly Game Over.

kjellsbells 4y ago

Every time OS/2 resurfaces there is a comment exchange that says, "who still uses this?!" and "I remember <Unnamed customer> was using it in <period over 10 years ago>" Does any one have a production, nameable customer in 2022, or, is anyone willing to share why they are still running OS/2 at their work even if they can't name them? I can't quite believe that an OS that found its niche primarily in heavy IBM shops like banking and retail would not, by the same token, have been replaced by the same IBM consulting teams that deployed it when it was viable.

lproven 4y ago
Is 2 years ago close enough? https://www.vice.com/en/article/zmp8gy/the-forgotten-operating-system-that-keeps-the-nyc-subway-system-alive https://www.vice.com/en/article/zmp8gy/the-forgotten-operati...