4 ms·

Hobbes OS/2 Archive is shutting down

74 points by isaacfrond 3y ago

genman 3y ago
Did they co-ordinate with archive.org to take over this treasure of human history?
- mikequinlan 3y ago
  TFA says >Archivists such as Jason Scott of the Internet Archive have stepped up to say that the files hosted on Hobbes are safe and already mirrored elsewhere. "Nobody should worry about Hobbes, I've got Hobbes handled," wrote Scott on Mastodon in early January. OS/2 World.com also published a statement about making a mirror.
  - textfiles 3y ago
    We didn't coordinate directly, but when people were telling me that the site was going down and I saw that it was less than 20 GB, I would rate my personal panic at a two out of a scale of 1 to 50. I figured some of the copies we already had would have almost all of it, and then they went ahead and made an easily downloadable version as well. This was hardly a four alarm fire. Happy to hold multiple copies of it going forward.
phendrenad2 3y ago
Interestingly, a sub-licensed version of OS/2 is still sold and actively upgraded (called ArcaOS). It's in a bizarre state where their license from IBM doesn't give them enough leeway to port it to 64-bit, but they have been able to add modern things like USB 3 drivers.
- icedchai 3y ago
  To be fair, porting a 30+ year old code base to 64-bit would be a huge job. And essentially pointless since there is basically zero new development happening.
sshine 3y ago
I was too young to experience OS/2. Looking at the screenshots, I am amazed at how much Windows 3/3.1/3.11 ripped off OS/2.
- bananaflag 3y ago
  It wasn't ripped off, just reused. The OS/2 1.x PM was co-developed by Microsoft, and I think they had more of a say in it, since the IBM OS/2 2.x PM had a different look.
- tempaway35641 3y ago
  I believe it was the other way round, e.g. OS 2 v1.1 was the first version to have a GUI and was released in 1988 six months after Windows 2.0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS/2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS/2
  - jsjohnst 3y ago
    > The promised user interface, Presentation Manager, was introduced with OS/2 1.1 in October 1988.[15] It had a similar user interface to Windows 2.1, which was released in May of that year. (The interface was replaced in versions 1.2 and 1.3 by a look closer in appearance to Windows 3.0.) To quote the relevant section of parent’s link.
- jsjohnst 3y ago
  Microsoft and IBM were very close in those days. In fact, Microsoft wrote (some? most? all?) of the first version of OS/2 under contract for IBM. It was in fact a disagreement between IBM and Microsoft over Windows 3.x that ultimately severed that partnership supposedly. It’s been many years since I read this, but if memory serves it was Ballmer’s handling of IBM that led to the term BOGUS having a special meaning at Microsoft in the late 80s / early 90s. Wish I could remember which book that was in because I’m finding it difficult to discover a reference today searching. Edit: It’s not the original reference I’m remembering as this was published in 2022, but did find a mention of the term in this book: https://www.google.com/books/edition/Thank_You_Ibm_Next_Edition/LaaaEAAAQBAJ?hl=en https://www.google.com/books/edition/Thank_You_Ibm_Next_Edit...
noufalibrahim 3y ago
I never get used to the idea of how important and yet how transient digital assets like this are. Now, we rely on a third party (Internet Archive) to preserve this because of their good will.
- sbarre 3y ago
  And the goodwill of the thousands of us who donate to the Internet Archive every month (or year). There are lots of people who believe in Internet history, and try to do something about it.. But yes, if everyone thinks "someone else has got this", then we will lose our history slowly but surely.
  - beej71 3y ago
    On that note, and speaking as another one of those monthly donors, everyone should consider adding IA to their donation list. It is one of the most valuable archives ever made, and it is under perpetual threat of shutdown.
k__ 3y ago
A few days ago, my girlfriend installed Corel Draw 10 in Windows 11 and it just amazed me how long good software keeps working. Corel Draw 10 is over 20 years old, and it still works. With installation wizard and everything.
- hermitcrab 3y ago
  Although it is easy to criticize Microsoft (and I often do) they are very good at keeping old apps running. I believe PerfectTablePlan v1, which I wrote in 2005 still works on the latest Windows. Apple, on the other hand, like to nuke their entire developer ecosystem from orbit every few years.
  - johncoltrane 3y ago
    Anecdotal, maybe, but three of the apps I am currently running on this M1 Pro are quite old and work the same: Adium (last build almost 7 years ago), Slate (12 years ago), and Notational Velocity (13 years). Laptops go, but my .app bundles stay ;-). I agree about Windows, though.
    - fredoralive 3y ago
      ...but any apps from 20 years ago like the Corel Draw example will have a nice "No" cross over them, as they'll be PowerPC (either Mac OS X or classic). 15 years old stuff will probably be a no go as well, as they'll largely be 32 bit x86. And frankly, most people expect 64 bit x86 support to go away sooner rather than later. Apple really are aggressive about this stuff.
    - hermitcrab 3y ago
      The latest build of my software applications (built with Qt 5) work back to macOS 10.13, which was released in 2017. If your macOS is pre 10.13 they won't run.
  - appplication 3y ago
    Not defending Apple, but one of the big transitions was stopping support for 32 bit apps. Even 20 years ago it was clear to anyone even mildly technical that 64-bit apps were the immediate future. Continuing to develop 32-bit only apps well into the 2010s was a conscious decision by developers to limit the lifetime utility of their software to a few years at most.
jasoneckert 3y ago
The OS/2 and Win95 days were a wild ride. I remember being paid by Microsoft to hand out copies of CDs entitled "Arrive in Chicago earlier than expected" to students at the University of Waterloo back in Sept 1993 (I was a student there at the time) - it held a mashup of OS/2 and Win95 that was bizarre to say the least.
- fredoralive 3y ago
  It was presumably IBM paying you, as that was a slogan they used on some betas of OS/2 Warp 3, eg. https://betawiki.net/wiki/OS/2_Warp_3_build_8.152 https://betawiki.net/wiki/OS/2_Warp_3_build_8.152 .
gcanyon 3y ago
Not to rag on New Mexico State, but I'm totally going to rag on New Mexico State -- how hard can it possibly be to "maintain" something like this? Given that the software is from the '90s, it can't possibly total more than a few gigabytes? And the bandwidth surely can't be huge. Finally, what "maintenance" is even required? NMS surely has a large connection to the internet, so what this amounts to is one lonely machine sitting in a rack in the far back corner of a server room. Or maybe they don't have a server room -- then give the responsibility to a half dozen incoming CS freshmen. And if that's too much trouble, hand it off to literally any other university. Someone has this, and it should have to fall to the informal role the Internet Archive is playing here. That said, I don't know NMSU's circumstance. The whole place could be going away for all I know.
- nunez 3y ago
  This sounds more like a response to legal action than a technical inability to continue.
  - gcanyon 3y ago
    Yep, could be.
- II2II 3y ago
  It could simply be a matter of having someone interested in monitoring the server. If they can't find anyone who is interested in OS/2, which is a strong possibility these days, they probably didn't have anyone volunteer to do so.
jug 3y ago
I must applaud the webmaster though for providing such a convenient way of downloading the entire archive in a single file. :) If only every disappearance off the surface of the web was handled this gracefully with a warning several months ahead in time...

74 points by isaacfrond 3y ago

genman 3y ago

Did they co-ordinate with archive.org to take over this treasure of human history?

mikequinlan 3y ago
TFA says >Archivists such as Jason Scott of the Internet Archive have stepped up to say that the files hosted on Hobbes are safe and already mirrored elsewhere. "Nobody should worry about Hobbes, I've got Hobbes handled," wrote Scott on Mastodon in early January. OS/2 World.com also published a statement about making a mirror.
- textfiles 3y ago
  We didn't coordinate directly, but when people were telling me that the site was going down and I saw that it was less than 20 GB, I would rate my personal panic at a two out of a scale of 1 to 50. I figured some of the copies we already had would have almost all of it, and then they went ahead and made an easily downloadable version as well. This was hardly a four alarm fire. Happy to hold multiple copies of it going forward.

phendrenad2 3y ago

Interestingly, a sub-licensed version of OS/2 is still sold and actively upgraded (called ArcaOS). It's in a bizarre state where their license from IBM doesn't give them enough leeway to port it to 64-bit, but they have been able to add modern things like USB 3 drivers.

icedchai 3y ago
To be fair, porting a 30+ year old code base to 64-bit would be a huge job. And essentially pointless since there is basically zero new development happening.

sshine 3y ago

I was too young to experience OS/2. Looking at the screenshots, I am amazed at how much Windows 3/3.1/3.11 ripped off OS/2.

bananaflag 3y ago
It wasn't ripped off, just reused. The OS/2 1.x PM was co-developed by Microsoft, and I think they had more of a say in it, since the IBM OS/2 2.x PM had a different look.
tempaway35641 3y ago
I believe it was the other way round, e.g. OS 2 v1.1 was the first version to have a GUI and was released in 1988 six months after Windows 2.0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS/2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS/2
- jsjohnst 3y ago
  > The promised user interface, Presentation Manager, was introduced with OS/2 1.1 in October 1988.[15] It had a similar user interface to Windows 2.1, which was released in May of that year. (The interface was replaced in versions 1.2 and 1.3 by a look closer in appearance to Windows 3.0.) To quote the relevant section of parent’s link.
jsjohnst 3y ago
Microsoft and IBM were very close in those days. In fact, Microsoft wrote (some? most? all?) of the first version of OS/2 under contract for IBM. It was in fact a disagreement between IBM and Microsoft over Windows 3.x that ultimately severed that partnership supposedly. It’s been many years since I read this, but if memory serves it was Ballmer’s handling of IBM that led to the term BOGUS having a special meaning at Microsoft in the late 80s / early 90s. Wish I could remember which book that was in because I’m finding it difficult to discover a reference today searching. Edit: It’s not the original reference I’m remembering as this was published in 2022, but did find a mention of the term in this book: https://www.google.com/books/edition/Thank_You_Ibm_Next_Edition/LaaaEAAAQBAJ?hl=en https://www.google.com/books/edition/Thank_You_Ibm_Next_Edit...

noufalibrahim 3y ago

I never get used to the idea of how important and yet how transient digital assets like this are. Now, we rely on a third party (Internet Archive) to preserve this because of their good will.

sbarre 3y ago
And the goodwill of the thousands of us who donate to the Internet Archive every month (or year). There are lots of people who believe in Internet history, and try to do something about it.. But yes, if everyone thinks "someone else has got this", then we will lose our history slowly but surely.
- beej71 3y ago
  On that note, and speaking as another one of those monthly donors, everyone should consider adding IA to their donation list. It is one of the most valuable archives ever made, and it is under perpetual threat of shutdown.

k__ 3y ago

A few days ago, my girlfriend installed Corel Draw 10 in Windows 11 and it just amazed me how long good software keeps working. Corel Draw 10 is over 20 years old, and it still works. With installation wizard and everything.

hermitcrab 3y ago
Although it is easy to criticize Microsoft (and I often do) they are very good at keeping old apps running. I believe PerfectTablePlan v1, which I wrote in 2005 still works on the latest Windows. Apple, on the other hand, like to nuke their entire developer ecosystem from orbit every few years.
- johncoltrane 3y ago
  Anecdotal, maybe, but three of the apps I am currently running on this M1 Pro are quite old and work the same: Adium (last build almost 7 years ago), Slate (12 years ago), and Notational Velocity (13 years). Laptops go, but my .app bundles stay ;-). I agree about Windows, though.
  - fredoralive 3y ago
    ...but any apps from 20 years ago like the Corel Draw example will have a nice "No" cross over them, as they'll be PowerPC (either Mac OS X or classic). 15 years old stuff will probably be a no go as well, as they'll largely be 32 bit x86. And frankly, most people expect 64 bit x86 support to go away sooner rather than later. Apple really are aggressive about this stuff.
  - hermitcrab 3y ago
    The latest build of my software applications (built with Qt 5) work back to macOS 10.13, which was released in 2017. If your macOS is pre 10.13 they won't run.
- appplication 3y ago
  Not defending Apple, but one of the big transitions was stopping support for 32 bit apps. Even 20 years ago it was clear to anyone even mildly technical that 64-bit apps were the immediate future. Continuing to develop 32-bit only apps well into the 2010s was a conscious decision by developers to limit the lifetime utility of their software to a few years at most.

jasoneckert 3y ago

The OS/2 and Win95 days were a wild ride. I remember being paid by Microsoft to hand out copies of CDs entitled "Arrive in Chicago earlier than expected" to students at the University of Waterloo back in Sept 1993 (I was a student there at the time) - it held a mashup of OS/2 and Win95 that was bizarre to say the least.

fredoralive 3y ago
It was presumably IBM paying you, as that was a slogan they used on some betas of OS/2 Warp 3, eg. https://betawiki.net/wiki/OS/2_Warp_3_build_8.152 https://betawiki.net/wiki/OS/2_Warp_3_build_8.152 .

gcanyon 3y ago

Not to rag on New Mexico State, but I'm totally going to rag on New Mexico State -- how hard can it possibly be to "maintain" something like this? Given that the software is from the '90s, it can't possibly total more than a few gigabytes? And the bandwidth surely can't be huge. Finally, what "maintenance" is even required? NMS surely has a large connection to the internet, so what this amounts to is one lonely machine sitting in a rack in the far back corner of a server room. Or maybe they don't have a server room -- then give the responsibility to a half dozen incoming CS freshmen. And if that's too much trouble, hand it off to literally any other university. Someone has this, and it should have to fall to the informal role the Internet Archive is playing here. That said, I don't know NMSU's circumstance. The whole place could be going away for all I know.

nunez 3y ago
This sounds more like a response to legal action than a technical inability to continue.
- gcanyon 3y ago
  Yep, could be.
II2II 3y ago
It could simply be a matter of having someone interested in monitoring the server. If they can't find anyone who is interested in OS/2, which is a strong possibility these days, they probably didn't have anyone volunteer to do so.

jug 3y ago

I must applaud the webmaster though for providing such a convenient way of downloading the entire archive in a single file. :) If only every disappearance off the surface of the web was handled this gracefully with a warning several months ahead in time...