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The Hobbes OS/2 Archive logs off permanently in April
- parasubvert 3y agoThat's a blast from the past. OS/2 and Hobbes were essential back in the 90s when you wanted to avoid Microsoft OSes, as Linux was still pretty raw until the late 90s. I guess some never really felt like it was worth migrating, and fair enough!
- h2odragon 3y agoThere's a subset of the finance world thats very fond of both "commercial support" and "security by obscurity." OS/2, Alpha servers, they kept hold of lots of stuff 2 decades past its peak.
- observer987 3y ago"if ain't broke, don't fix it" - unknown
- criddell 3y agoSee also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38929369 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38929369 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39187744 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39187744
- nsxwolf 3y agoIt's always sad to see stuff like this go. These simple, beautiful sites are like payphones. One day we'll all crowd around the last one as it too goes.
- lstodd 3y agoOS/2 once ran the majority of russian fidonet. Is fondly remembered as half-axle, as OS in russian is same as 'Ocь' === axle.
- lolatmmachines 3y agolol what will happen to all the ATM machines that run OS/2?!
- II2II 3y agoAssuming that some remain, I believe ArcaOS was licensed from IBM to provide support in such circumstances. Not to mention that you aren't going to use software from Hobbes on an ATM. For what it's worth, I have seen OS/2 used in banks within the past decade (though I believe those banks have since migrated to Windows).
- Osiris 3y agoeComStation is/was licensed to continue OS/2 development and support.
- wolverine876 3y agoHas anyone started an alternative archive? Or has the Internet Archive or someone similar gathered the material?
- nantes 3y agoLooks like it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39232295 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39232295
- LeoPanthera 3y agoAlready on the Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/hobbes-os2-archive_202401 https://archive.org/details/hobbes-os2-archive_202401 Unlike Wikipedia, IA not well-funded. Why not consider a donation?
- ilamont 3y agoFor an organization that is not well-funded, it has taken some remarkably risky actions that few nonprofits or commercial ventures would ever attempt. I wonder if there's isn't some uber-wealthy Silicon Valley connection waiting in the wings to bail IA out if operating costs, legal fees and financial penalties overwhelm its budget.
- textfiles 3y agoConspiracy theories are always amusing, but I can assure you there isn't some billionaire sitting with a check in case things go incredibly south. I would tell you that things you are defining is risky are simply steps being taken for a library in the 21st century. Anyone not addressing these issues is going to have a very bad wake up in 5 to 10 years.
- drivers99 3y agoThe archive is 18GB. Since it's probably mostly zip files, that's probably about the size of everything extracted. So a static version wouldn't be too bad to just put in S3 and CloudFront or something, and that wouldn't require much work. I used to know someone who helped run it at NMSU in the 90s. (Can't remember which of two acquaintances, or maybe it was both.)
- rsync 3y agoWe have a copy of this. We gave someone a free account to archive this and when they finished we chflag -R schg'd the directory so it is immutable. We are not publishing this - there is no web or anonymous access to an rsync.net account - but if you're reading this in 2035, know that we have a copy of this. Related: If you are involved in any way in preserving/archiving usenet, please be in touch. We will give you whatever (storage) resources you require.
- blagie 3y agoOff-topic: Can you explain why cloud storage is so expensive? You charge 1c per gigabyte per month, so $120/TB/year. I can buy a 20TB HDD for around $300-$400 in my bedroom. On your rack, same drive runs $2,400 / year. Your prices are in-line with everyone else. This is an almost the definition of a frictionless commodity market, so if things could be done cheaper, someone would. What's stopping me from plugging a 20TB HDD into a RaspberryPI, tossing it on a high speed connection (and charging for transfer), and getting 6x annual returns for providing the world's cheapest (if not fastest / most reliable) storage? For backups (as opposed to e.g. web hosting), that's good enough. What am I missing?
- acdha 3y agoHow much business do you lose when that single drive fails and you have to tell your customers you lost their data? There’s a baseline cost to managing arrays of disks and the software which runs them, keeping everything patched, paying for the building and power, answering support questions, etc. The reason this can seem massively cheaper on your own is that you aren’t paying yourself wages or rent, or otherwise dealing with the cost of spending your time juggling disks rather than doing something else.
- blagie 3y agoI can speculate too, but the reason I asked OP is because he would know and have actual numbers. Regarding your questions: 1) Loss of data only matters in some contexts. For cloud backups, it really doesn't matter much since it's already a backup. It only matters if the cloud provider AND my local system go down at the same time. 2) Still, at scale, avoiding loss of data is CHEAP. Something analogous to RAID6, with data striped across data centers, means the overhead can be quite low. 3) Yes, I do pay people salaries. Buying disks -- even stupidly and just having two copies of everything -- works out a lot cheaper than cloud storage. Ask any video shop if they use (1) cloud storage or (2) a storage closet full of hard drives. The numbers don't work out for me. By my estimate, I could provide the same service which rsync does for *much* less money and dominate the cloud storage market. I'm obviously wrong, or someone would have done so already, but I don't know how I'm wrong.
- throwmemoney 3y agoWould `lrzip` help here? How does the 18GB compressed down to by how much using lrzip? Anyone tried and able to give us some stats?