Back in the day I ran my multi user (2 via phone line and one local) BBS on OS/2. It was incredibly stable and had amazing multi-tasking. Still have the floppy backups of my BBS.
I too used OS/2 Warp and was my first true multi-tasking OS. Also ran a BBS named "DreamQuest" using PCBoard. Terminate was my terminal program of choice. Oh the memories!
I started the Silicon Sysop (PCBoard) in Lake Ronkonkoma WAY back in the day. First running it under DoubleDOS, then moving to DESQView for quite a while. I tried Windows386 but eventually ended up running 3 lines on OS/2 Warp. Stable as hell.
What most don't realize is that OS/2 bears a large amount of credit for the internet as we know it. If you recall, Bill Gates downplayed the internet and took the position that the future was in private networks like CompuServe, Prodigy, and AOL. This is why MS created MSN, to compete with those companies. Originally, the follow-on to Win 3.1 was to be Windows 93. But then a funny thing happened - IBM started releasing beta versions of OS/2 with build in TCP/IP and a web browser. The beta testers loved it and Microsoft took notice. They had to push out the release of the new Windows while they developed a TCP/IP stack and a browser. With each new beta release, IBM added new stuff and MS was playing catch-up. Once IBM had finalized OS/2 Warp, Windows 93 was now Windows 95. Without OS/2, the online world wold be very different.
@@rino19ny not responding to give references but from my experience I used OS/2 to get my first SLIP then PPP dial-up internet connection. Windows wasn't able to do that out of the box at the time.
@@rino19ny Microsoft's position on the internet was well documented in Gates' book "The Road Ahead". I think there was a lot more at play in the two-year Windows delay than just a network stack, but anecdotally it matches my experience that OS/2 was close to disrupting the desktop OS market.
@@snafo Warp really was fantastic at the time, up until Windows 32bit apps became the standard it really was a better Windows and DOS than Microsoft's offerings. IBM should have went balls to the wall with OS/2 but they never took Bill Gates and the home market serious enough because of the internal conflict between business systems and consumer systems. Even though they had the pieces in place to beat Windows to the internet & the future, corporate politics won instead.
The initial Windows 95 black upgrade CD's didn't even bundle the Internet Explorer web browser. Back then, everyone on PC's used Netscape or AOL Online.
I remember using OS/2 back in 1993 - it was ahead of its time, and it did run DOS games very well - I remember spending hours with the Icon Editor (it doesn't appear to have changed much) making custom icons for all the games we had. One of the reasons we had to get rid of it was perhaps the fact that it ran DOS games too well as one of my brothers (aged about 2 at the time) figured out how to run a dozen games at once, bringing the mighty 486 to its knees. I would also imagine that him dropping files into the Shredder didn't help much either.
@@fifthstooge It actually wasn't difficult. In OS/2, pressing Ctrl+Esc would immediately bring up the task manager (like in Windows 3.x and early versions of NT), and when he decided that he didn't want to play Playroom anymore, he would do what he saw Dad and his brothers doing and switch over to something else
Man, OS/2 was so good. I never installed Windows 95 and jumped from DOS to OS/2 for its multi-tasking capabilities. It was literally the ONLY consumer operating system that could run a good number of games AND maintain a solid connection to either a BBS or the internet in the background with active downloads and not drop. It was only until Windows 98 SE that I switched over to Windows and I would say OS/2 was still overall the superior OS. Not until Windows 2000 would I consider Windows the superior product.
I love to see coverage of anything related to OS/2. I was a beta tester of OS/2 Warp back in the day, even then the writing was on the wall that its days were numbered.
Some will say it's the Workplace Shell but IMO the most important advancement of OS/2 was its MVDM (Multiple Virtual Dos Machine). No other OS, modern or not, has anything quite like it. I took it for granted earlier when OS/2 was my main OS.
I supported OS/2 for IBM in its heyday. One bug that was difficult to nail down was Thinkpads crashing on boot. Disabling the sound driver was a work around. Eventually a casual comment about having left a music CD in the player was the needed clue. The bootstrap assumed that ***any*** CD was a an OS and tried to boot from it! Ah, the good old days...
Ha, I remember that bug (I did OS/2 support for IBM as well, from 1.1 to Warp 4). Think my most relevant contribution to the OS/2 world was helping build the tools for linking various IBM OS/2 BBSes using IBM's internal network, and provide fast worldwide distribution of os2net files and echomail with that.
Fun fact, OS/2 was also a popular OS for ATMs in the 90s because it was more reliable than DOS or Windows, and IBM already had major contracts with banks and early payment networks for their mainframes so it made a lot of sense to use the same vendor and operating systems that had a lot of synergy. That and IBM had close ties to NCR and Diebold, the main manufacturers of ATMs and POS machines, another market IBM software dominated at the time. Sometimes you still spot one with a failed boot screen in the wild, but they've probably mostly all been replaced, unlike the IBM cash registers that it seems like every big box/department store retailer still uses to this day...
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And sometimes the software crashed nonetheless and you could see the desktop on the screen. :) But to be honest I saw windows desktops on atms much more oftenthen os/2 .. tried to use the touchscreen on those who had one, but didn't work, neither on windows nor os/2
IBM had ties to NCR? International (instead of merely national) Business Machines (instead of just cash registers), the company that T. J. Watson named out of spite towards his former employer?
one of the reasons that OS/2 in ATMs was its unhackable, another reason is banks were forced to eat IBM candies since the 70s … such as token rings… at one point token ring claimed to be faster than 10baseT ethernet running at 16Mbps.
@@kn7x802 Yeah but they were comparing it not to switched ethernet but to ethernet using wiring from cable television. I'm not sure how it was called in English. Both were terrible but Talken Ring could give better performence in some situations. Especially for close communication between nodes as ethernet had a bus.
It's probably worth pointing out that ArcaOS isn't a new operating system that enables you to run OS/2 applications, it *is* OS/2 (based on Warp 4.52), licensed from IBM, with additional software, drivers and a massively improved installer piled on to limp it along on modern hardware. You could think of it as an OS/2 distro. The multi-core support is the original Symmetrical Multiprocessing pack introduced with OS/2 2.11. Most of the interface is either straight OS/2, or add-on software that has been bundled, lightly skinned with a theme that isn't *quite* as 1990's. The reason the "Start" button says "X Button" when you hover over it is because it's part of an open source WPS enhancer called XWorkplace.
So what exactly is the point of ArcaOS? Is is just a vanity project of some old timer software engineers? Cuz they certainly aren't gonna sell any significant number of copies.
@@Christobanistan There were a lot of companies that bet big on OS/2 in the 80's and 90's since it was an IBM product. Conservative risk-averse industries like finance and public transportation can't or won't suffer bugs, downtime, and cost to port their critical business apps, so the ability to run OS/2 on modern hardware with an active support contract is a bigger deal than you might think. Companies like Micro Focus are multi-billion dollar businesses that almost exclusively sell and support legacy technologies from the 70's, 80's and 90's (think Novell, FORTRAN and COBOL). My own bank's ATMs still ran OS/2 Warp until just a few years ago.
I was an actual system installer and user of OS2 in the beginning. I used REX often as it was also the development language for IBM VM/CMS. Inside every IBM Mainframe computer was a PC running OS2 which was used to configure VM and MVS partitions as it booted up all these "virtual machines". I retired from administering some of these around 2001 and I know it was still working this way.
Nowadays they still have ThinkPads inside them as hardware management consoles but they just run RHEL. Fun fact, OS/2 was also a popular OS for ATMs in the 90s. Sometimes you still spot one with a failed boot screen in the wild, but they've probably mostly all been replaced.
I worked for IBM Endicott in the late 90's and used Warp at work. I purchased a copy from a company sale and used it for a time on my personal machine. It was pretty cool when Warp 4 came out with OpenGL support, and we had that on some of our machines, but then we actually got other machines with Windows 98 IIRC.
This was a very good video and it was an interesting look at this unique OS. I'd also really like to see a video like this one for AROS as well, and actually, I'm rather surprised there hasn't already been one yet.
Usually when I watch a video like this the install is seamless. Which it never is for me. So it was refreshing and encouraging to see you discuss the hurdles you had to overcome to install the OS. Thanks!
As someone who had an Amiga 500 and Amiga 3000 back in the day, and used OS/2 Warp as well, I can ABSOLUTELY see the Amiga tech in OS/2. The interface always reminded me of the Amiga OS, and that was one of the things that attracted me to OS/2 in the first place. Also, at the time of OS/2 Warp's release, a columnist in either PC World or PC Magazine (Jim Seymour, iirc) mentioned how using Warp reminded him of using an Amiga.
OS/2 was based on a UI standard that all Desktop were expected to follow at the time. Windows 3.0/3.1 pretty much also followed the standard. Amiga as well. MS decided to toss out the standard for certain things and that explains some the weird things you do in windows vs OS/2
REXX was a scripting language common to all IBM products, not just OS/2; it existed on mainframes, AIX UNIX boxes, AS/400 etc. Probably another reason OS/2 was popular on ATMs, since you had a common scripting language across the ATM and the back-end mainframe. I was a keen OS/2 user for a few years; I used it as a development environment for Windows 16-bit applications, which it was brilliant at. Whenever I messed up and crashed Windows (which was frequently) it was much faster to re-start Windows within OS/2 than it would have been to restart the entire machine booted into Windows natively. OS/2 deserved wider use. The press killed it, partially; every review of OS/2 I saw said basically the same thing: "This is great, but don't buy it - wait to see what Microsoft come out with" and they played that game for about 18 months while we all waited for Chicago (which then became Windows 95) to come out. IBM also shot themselves in the foot in other ways; as I said I was a hobbyist developer of Windows software at the time and I wanted to move to OS/2. Development tools for Windows were quite inexpensive generally; Borland Turbo C was about £30, and even a full MSDN subscription to Microsoft was only a couple of hundred quid. IBM wanted over £800 for the C compiler for OS/2, and there was no way I (and presumably most other hobbyist developers) would pay that.
It's not a bug but a great feature that click and drag works that way. If you ever had a user call you with an ID10t error saying they were copying files and lost them... because the mouse bumped and they unclicked somewhere random and had NO IDEA where they dropped them.
I had OS/2 preinstalled on my Escom PC I bought in 1995. Was slightly before Windows 95 was released and already had a copy of Windows 3.11. Back in the day Escom were a high street PC store, and went bust after some Microsoft licencing lawsuits... Seeing the preinstalled Mahjong game has brought back the memories, played that a lot!
Nice that someone does a review and talk about its past. There are just one tiny issue. It was first created with the goal of replacing Dos and not Windows. It was that 640k barrier that they wanted to eliminate as the primaery thing. The GUI came later on in its lifespan. Competition against Windows was only after MS jumped ship.
Microsoft didn't jump ship - they were kicked off the project by IBM. Microsoft insisted on providing a new 32-bit Windows API to work under OS/2 2.0 but IBM wouldn't allow it.
@@zoomosis It was mutual. IBM was taking OS/2 in a direction that Microsoft wasn't thrilled about, and when MS figured out how to virtualize DOS in Windows 3.1, the partnership was over. Back in the day, when Steve Ballmer would go with his staff to IBM to check on progress of OS/2 with IBM, the MS Guys would say in meetings with IBM that Steve was BOGUS, which stood for "Bend Over Grease Up Steve" because Steve kept giving in to IBM. They split ways, Windows 3.1 went on to crush OS/2, and then NT finished it off.
@@teekay_1 Of course, Windows NT was itself an OS/2 development which had been planned earlier; it was going to be OS/2 NT, but after the split from IBM Microsoft took it on alone, gave it the Windows UI, and the rest is history. Hence early versions of Windows NT having good OS/2 compatibility; the OS/2 HPFS filesystem, and the OS/2 execution system that allowed it to run 16-bit OS/2 1.x applications. I think the OS/2 subsystem support was finally removed in Windows 2000 or so, I can't remember.
When I started in Greenland's national shipping company back in 1994, they were actually running on OS/2 and later Warp I think, but not for many years. I thought it looked so much better than Windows 3.11 (which I got the next year for my first PC).
We had a Citrix remote access server that run OS/2. This was around the early to mid 90's. The server had several modem lines, where users could dial in and run remote Windows sessions. That operating system was rock solid and hardly ever crashed.
I remember getting a copy of OS/2 Warp 3 from my wife's command in the Navy, and I loved it enough to buy version 4 later on. It ran my BBS better than it ran in DOS, and it was really smooth compared to anything else at the time. I don't know if ArcaOS is $100+ nice, but if there was ever a sub $50 version I'd be compelled to check it out.
To be fair, the people behind this develop ArcaOS as their full time job. They need that money to pay their bills and feed their families. I actually bought the Commercial Edition to help support development.
@@SergeantExtreme that's a problem every commercial developer faces; too low a price and you don't get the true value for your work, but too high and you price yourself out of reach of some users and risk obscurity. Even a time-limited demo would bring attention to this without risking too much. Something that would, say, reset the PC / VM every 60-90 minutes. Enough to get a feel for it, and see if it's right for the evaluator.
Very interesting. I still have a new uninstalled copy of OS/2 Warp which is going to a computer museum if they want it. Another retro system is HP NewWave: it ran on Windows 3.11 and gave it an OS/2 / Mac feel - a true Object Orientated System with a proper data catalogue for all data objects that kept track of data; apps that could run other embedded apps with links to a single data source even across a network (e.g. a spreadsheet within a word document); and a high level scripting language. There were native 3rd party apps including a brilliant data analytics tool called Forest & Trees. Rumour had it MS saw it as a threat and persuade HP to drop it so MS could concentrate on writing HP drivers for new printers etc. When Win 95 came out HP said it would not run, so withdrew it. It ran it OK on Win 98 and XP and now I run it in VBox / XP under Win 7 for some legacy apps as Win 7 does not run 16bit apps.
Rexx was first on the mainframes. I worked for I BM on contract to support OS/2 and set some precedence in getting the installations completed and identifying the hardware. I found many of the bugs that were serious back in the day that have since been fixed.
I was working at IBM when the PS/2 and OS/2 were announced and starting using OS/2 with V1.0 (this was before the Presentation Manager which provided the GUI was released). Initially we used it as a replacement for the 3270 mainframe terminals. Wen I left IBM I went to work for a start-up developing a network monitoring application on OS/2. The system we were developing also use OS/2 Server. The system was rock solid. After a few years there, I went to MCI where I was part of a team that produced and maintained a OS/2-based transaction server as part of their Internet/frame relay provisioning system. The only times we had problems were when code allocated memory and failed to release it when done. It was a good, solid OS that was unfortunately killed by Microsoft's questionable marketing practices and Steve Job's hared of IBM.
Ahh takes me back to one of my 1st jobs where the company was a big IBM customer and our desktops were PS/2 Model 77's with OS/2 2.1. Such a stable platform, do your work in Lotus Smartsuite and then play dos games on it without it killing the whole system if it crashed. Just a pity the system was basically the price of a decent car at the time otherwise IBM could maybe have weathered the MS storm.
Drag and drop works much better in OS/2 than in other OSes. You can drag and drop files onto devices and folders and pretty much anyplace you want. You just have to hold down the second mouse button to drag and drop. You also have much more control in configuring things the way you want, including desktop sound effects.
I did the same thing. used OS/2 for regular use and a WWIV BBS in the background. it was a great OS, it was better than Win95 and its later iterations.
Very nice. I ran an OS/2 box with a 3270 adapter connected to a small mainframe running VM and had Rexx running on both sides trading files between the mainframe and the unix machines on the network the OS/2 box was also wired into. Great times.
The biggest issue I have sometimes with reviewing 'alternative' operating systems is that they are inevitably compared with Windows and usually along the lines of 'this is how Windows does it - anything else is weird or unusual'. Especially with legacy operating systems or operating systems which have a lot of heritage. If the point was to attract Windows users, maybe that would make sense, but things like ArcaOS have to pay homage to their history because that's their target audience. Dan is right, a lot has to do with muscle memory but one has to be careful not to confuse that with poor or illogical design versus what we expect to be 'normal' now. Clearly ArcaOS is unlikely to attract many people who aren't aware of it's OS/2 legacy but that's not their demographic.
Prior to Warp 4, OS/2 used the same button layout as Windows versions prior to Windows 95. It wasn't until Warp 4 (1996) that a close window button was introduced on the OS/2 titlebar, and it was obviously in direct response to the same button introduced in Windows 95. But IBM couldn't move it to the corner of the window because that was where the maximise button was, and it would cause existing OS/2 users to accidentally close the window they thought they were maximising. ArcaOS continues to use the same button layout as Warp 4. There are probably utilities (or even an OS/2 setting) to reorder the button layout.
@@zoomosis Was that ever a problem with Windows 95? I know even to this day Microsoft lets you double-click the window icon to close a window, since it's in the same position as the menu button in Win16, you would think they would have taken more care to prevent users from accidentally closing their windows. Did most people just double-click the title bar?
@@thetechconspiracy2 Well, Windows 2.0 introduced the "maximise" button on the top right. Immediately left of it was the "minimise" button. Double-clicking the title bar was the same as "restore", switching between maximised and non-maximised. This was also how the OS/2 1.x GUI worked. Windows 95 introduced a "close" button on the far right, shifting the minimise/maximise buttons along one spot to the left. But otherwise it was functionally identical to the Windows 2.0 behaviour. Microsoft have kept the same layout ever since. I suppose whether this was a problem depends on your muscle memory. At the time Windows 3.x was five years old so had an established user base, though it would be more like seven years before Windows 95 would become the dominant Windows version. It probably helped that Windows 95's title bar icons were smaller than the Windows 3.x equivalents, so you had to consciously look at what you were clicking on. Ironically the title bar icons became bigger again from Vista onwards. I imagine Mac users would've been the most confused, since the MacOS close button was on the left of the window. IBM were also known to deliberately do things differently to Microsoft, which might have also contributed to them putting Warp 4.0's close button in an unusual place.
AREXX was one of the very best features on the Amiga in my opinion and I'm really surprised that it didn't spread out to other systems considering how useful it was/is. [note: I guess you could say that scripting languages like LUA and Python have taken the place of REXX on modern systems]
@@JustWasted3HoursHere Honestly, AREXX was better implemented that OS/2 REXX. It was super easy to implement a "REXX port" in Amiga software which allowed programs to control each other and share information through REXX. You could build sophisticated multi-application scripts. OS/2 REXX never offered that kind of functionality!
@@madcrowmaxwell TRUTH! Nice to see some former (current?) Amiga people here. I lost many happy hours that series. Shame some selfish bastard decided to relieve me of them while I was out visiting family!
Windows NT was partly based on OS/2. There were 3 branches of the OS/2 codebase: * OS/2 1.x - at IBM’s insistence, for the 80286. The mistake that doomed OS/2 and IBM’s presence in the PC industry, the industry it had created. * OS/2 2.x - IBM went it alone with the 80386-specific version. * OS/2 3.x - Portable OS/2, planned to be ported to multiple different CPUs.
Yes, they should've seen how rapid the speed of change in the industry was taking place, but they got stuck in their business mindset and assumed getting constricted by the 80286 limitations wouldn't matter much. Also many people assumed that OS/2 only worked with PS/2, which of course because it shipped late the first computers came bundled with PC-DOS 3.3 instead.
Microsoft OS/2 1.3 was used internally by Microsoft to build the early versions of Windows NT. They would also include an OS/2 1.x subsystem in NT which allowed them to use the same OS/2 build tools from within Windows.
I don't agree with you that it was a mistake supporting 286 CPUs. When OS/2 1.0 was released 386 machines were very new and expensive. So was RAM. (Mind you, so was OS/2.) Windows 3.0, released in mid-1990, would happily run on a 286 with 1 MB RAM, still a common configuration at the time. This helped it become the success it did. Also it's not true IBM "went it alone" with 32-bit OS/2. Microsoft were a big part of the OS/2 2.0 project until IBM kicked them out. Afterwards IBM could no longer use Microsoft's CL386 compiler and had to scramble to port their own across, which became C/Set. This is one reason OS/2 2.0 was delayed until 1992.
@@zoomosis I remember NT Server 4 used to label its disk partition file system HPFS on the drive itself even though Microsoft was talking about NTFS. When I found that I thought it was amusing.
You even have Odin on your system. With Odin it is possible to run 32 bits windows 95 programs. Odin is like Wine in Linux. Have been running OS/2 for a long time but it was getting difficult to run OS/2 on "modern" hardware. Now I am running Linux, but OS/2 was always my favorite.
if that arcaOS had Sound Blaster emulation mode for dos terminal just like windows 9x had originally then it could be a killer retro machine with a capacity to deliver more horse power into it than any dosbox is capable of doing so today.
OS2 and ArcaOs can run sound blaster and with Dos gaming it can run with either EMS memory or XMS memory as required by different games but without the Dos Kludge of having a multiboot config sys requiring a reboot to use either type of upper Memory system. You simply set the required memory configuration for each game as required and it seamlessly uses to setting you gave it when starting the game and if a Dos game crashes it will not crash the underlying system and it can run Dos software in either a window or full screen.
32-bit PCs had started with Compaq in late 86, and getting to the start of the 90's the 486 was starting to establish itself. Yet... PC software was 16-bit with memory management kludges, and not keeping up with the full capability of the evolving PC hardware. OS2 2.0 (when it was released in 92) was historically important as the first mainstream option that had DOS and Windows compatibility that was proper 32-bit.
You're not wrong, though it's interesting to note that Xenix was ported to the 386 in 1987, some five years before the release of OS/2 for the 386. It's interesting to think how the PC world would look now had Xenix become the dominant desktop OS instead of Windows.
Brings back memories of me using Netscape 4.5 on OS/2 Warp 3. I had downloaded it for hours using a 28.8kbit modem and IBM Web Explorer - IBM‘s answer to MS and Netscape applications …
I ran OS/2 2.0 for a few months in college more than half a lifetime ago. It was amazing for the time and I had no problem simultaneous floppy access, modem download, DOS gaming and using OS/2 apps on a mere 386 with 8MB of memory. In the end, my 200MB hard drive wasn't enough for both OS/2 and Windows 3.1 plus apps and data. I also couldn't justify rebuying or finding new alternatives to the productivity programs I used on a regular basis so I ended up sticking with Windows. I wonder what could've been if IBM had more of a consumer focus, better marketing and incentivized migrating to OS/2.
I too have great memories of Os/2 as well. But more than half a life span? 2021 minus 1992 is 29 and two times 29 is 58 years old. Are you telling me that people dont get past 58 years of age in your country? Why?
I was an IBM OS/2 4 Warp beta tester. Something great about it was the OS had voice recognition/voice control built in. It was a great OS, we beta testers had a lot of issues with the network part, but when I was beta test for Windows it too had network issues. Once networking was figured out it ran great. At the time I had 2 or 3 Redhat Linux, 1 Windows and 2 OS/2 machines networked. Internet, not dial up, was always an issue. I would call the cable company and end up helping troubleshooting internet issues, the techs liked talking with me as OS/2 4 had great network tools built in. Just as when Redhat left consumers for commercial, a tear was shed when IBM and MS divorced and OS/2 went commercial. I may try this OS in a few months.
The WPS was a certainly a bit clunky in it's file handling. IIRC, right click then drag was the way to drag files around. Either alt or control (or both maybe, I can't remember) were the way to toggle between moving and copying.
It was also very inconsistent. You could move a file between folders with right-click-drag without using the keyboard, but if you tried dragging the file to the desktop in the same way it would instead create an alias. If you actually wanted to drag a file or folder to the desktop you had to hold down Shift, then right-click and drag. it was also possible to have both an alias and a file with the same name, which was extra confusing. Plus aliases didn't work like UNIX symlinks or NT's junctions, which limited their use.
To drag files with the mouse you drag with Button 2 (right mouse button in right-hand mode; IBM labeled them buttons 1 & 2 to prevent the right click/left click confusion with left-handed users. Index finger rests on Button 1). It makes good sense when you think about how many users accidentally drag files into a random directory when attempting to select more than one. "Pickup" is there as an accessibility option for people that don't have the dexterity to press and hold the mouse down while moving it (or using a trackball). To this day I still drag files with the right mouse button by habit.
I can see this coming popular among retrogamers who don't want the hassle of digging up old hardware and just want a way of using old DOS and Windows software on modern hardware without the need to use emulators or multiple virtual platforms.
A number of mistakes on this. The last version of Microsoft/IBM of OS/2 was 1.2. The 1st version done solely by IBM was 1.3, the 1st version that was rock solid, btw. Windows 3.1 didn't come out until AFTER OS/2 2.0. The workplace shell was revolutionary in April of 1992. I used to keep each application I was using in a full screen & would just tab between them. It was glorious, and I still miss it. The greatest thing about OS/2 was that I could cut and paste between OS/2, Windows, and DOS programs - and it did not matter that the programs themselves did not know how to cut & paste. I could also have 736K memory available in the lower 640K. If you weren't around back then, you have no idea how revolutionary that was.
Try right-click and drag for drag and drop: can make shadow objects or move / copy files depending on the destination and a key press. Doing this will illustrate on the screen the action with a line and direction arrow. I run ArcaOS on a laptop from 2003 and is very responsive, having just 2gb of memory. I use the Warp 3.0 theme as I found that to be best for my use. Thank you for trying OS/2 as a novice user experience demo.
I was around at the time. Contracting with the Sears-IBM venture known as Advantis. When I talked t the IBM folks and saw things like when they made software they did a bang up good job. Problem being they never continued to support them or advertise them. It was the death of software when they bought them. Such as Harvard graphic Lotus 123 and Ami Pro. Also there own Displaywrite 4. I would like to see Arca bring this up to 32 and 34 bit programs.
About 1994 I saved up some money to build a 486 computer system. The last thing I needed was the OS. I debated if I wanted Warp 3 or Win95 and I settled on Warp 3. Huge mistake, the install failed and I could never get it going. I gave up and I just used Windows 3.11. It served me well and I was still using it 1997-98 when I got my internet. OS/2 looks cool, but knowing what I know now I should have just gone with 95.
Drag & drop was done with the right mouse button. WPS was/is an object -oriented shell. Each object on the desktop can be individually configured with fonts and colours etc. And drag & drop could be used to install hardware too.
Great over view. The one items channels like your channels is they hardly ever touch on the development tools for these platforms. I wished more people would touch on that subject
The two pillars of OS success. Backwards compatibility, and ease of future development. Windows success demonstrated the first, and NeXT (and now MacOS) demonstrated the latter.
Indeed. By the mid-1990s there were several native OS/2 C/C++ development environments to choose from, with their own strengths and weaknesses. IBM CSet++, Borland, Watcom, Metaware & later EMX. Microsoft even had their own 32-bit OS/2 C compiler (CL386.EXE) from their early work on OS/2 2.0 before the split with IBM. It was never released publicly but has been leaked in the years since.
A coworker and I went to Seattle back in the day when Microsoft was developing OS/2 for training in it. Our employer was considering developing OS/2 software for a potential customer. At that time, my recollection is that Microsoft was developing both MS and IBM versions of OS/2. The instructor joked that the developers would work on the MS platform except for when people from IBM were around and then they would use the IBM platform.
A part of me is thinking “who would spend $129 for this?” but it’s so cool it also has me kind of wanting to buy a copy. [edit] I never considered industry where they might want to run old software on modern hardware
I used OS/2 until 2004. I had a multiboot with Windows, OS/2 and some Linux distribution. the disk had a problem and I gave up installing OS/2 on the new disk. The OS/2 interface is still better than any of the dozens of Linux interfaces. I know they need money to support themselves however, $129 is a lot of money for the product. I paid $99 for a copy but, to tell the truth, I still haven't been able to do anything useful with it. Not even a simple thing like writing my diaries.
I remember going to a couple of trade shows back in 1994 where both MS and IBM were pushing there OSs . I was quite keen on OS2 as we were using on the Compass Voicemail platform . During one of the OS demos some one asked the question would the Microsoft's new 32 bit Office 95 work on OS2 / Warp and when the presenter said no that nailed it for me and I went to Win 95 as I wanted MS Office .
The main thing this would be good for is to have a really fast DOS machine. This PC may be old, but it's WAY faster than any machine ever made which could run DOS. Dosbox has a lot of limitations, especially for the later DOS games. I can't imagine there is a single DOS game that would not run full speed on this machine.
As a hobbyist I like OS/2. I even bought eComstation back some years ago. But it ceased development shortly thereafter. Arca Noae brought out it's current OS 5.0 out back in 2017. That's almost 5 years ago. I keep looking to see if there's been any updates since then but sadly no. On there website they indicate that the next release, 5.1 would be a paid upgrade, whenever that shows up. Its glacial speed is a shame really, so I held off for that reason too.
other than an occasional minor wart this was a really smooth and rather well polished OS release - no doubt the developers are on a financial shoe string in respect to funding any development, so kudos to them for a good job. For a retro person it offers what looks to be pleasant access to pretty much any PC OS stack of the 90s and prior back to original IBM PC. No offense to Amiga fans but this GUI desktop looks nicer than anything ever offered on the Amiga.
I wrote my first real game on OS/2 back in OS/2's 16-bit days. I called it "TetrOS/2", and you can probably guess what sort of game it was. :) I was running OS/2 because I was a CompSci nerd (LOL) and believed it was the future. (And couldn't afford SCO Unix - there was no Linux yet), but was jealous that all my friends had Tetris.
I've watched a good few of your Amiga videos but never really knew just how much time and knowledge you have for other OS's. Without being unfair to your contemporaries, there are a lot of 8bit and 16bit guys out there who just stick within that sandbox (not a bad thing). But it's interesting to see how comfortable you are around pretty much any operating system from 8bit up to 64bit.
OS/2 didn't develop into something a common uneducated user could pick up and start working with, like MS Windows did. IBM wanted OS/2 to be primarily a business desktop system, so they did not really care about providing for any advanced graphics and sound, alienating gamers, musicians, graphics designers, etc..). And as the time went on, suddenly there were just no drivers available for new HW and very little to no new SW to possibly take advantage of these - so naturally, OS/2 died out as a anyone's-general-use operating system. Not surprisingly, it vanished from offices shortly thereafter. ArcaOS seems as the second (!!) incarnation of a system that long-belongs to the past.
Hi .. Just One correction Os/2 was running from the end 1988, and the Olympic Games of Barcelona in the 92, were completely done with OS/2 Warp, mix up with Macintosh MacOs 9.2 . I was the the CEO Results Manager for the Olympic Games of Barcelona, working with SEIKO and XEROX We start trial with Os/2 ver 1, by that time with EDS in the pre Olimpics, till 3 month before the Olimpics that we upgrade the 50.000 computers Ps/2 50 ,70 & 90 to the latest version OS/2 Warp. This were time for the Braves
There would be Apple tech in there, IBM and Apple had a joint venture, I think OpenDoc was part of it. Everything in OS/2 is an object. You could rename a file and its associations remained. Way cool, but maybe overloaded the PCs of the day. What development languages and software are available. I noticed EMX at one point, that's a port of GNU software to OS/2, bt of voirse IBM had compilers for C & C++, PL/1 and COBOL. And a free device driver developer's kit.
When I was able to pick up OS/2 Warp it changed so much of my expectations of future PC experience, sadly Windows has failed to reach my expectations, various Linux distributions have done better but all fall short. as the hardware slowly makes huge improvements, the OS lingers back in the past.
Looks nostalgic... I've been daily using OS/2 ~20 years ago and I can remember all the features you show in the video. Well, nothing has changed since then. Same apps from the 90s, same UI. They just renamed this corpse and trying to sell it again, as Serenity Systems did. We all know how will it end. It was a nice OS for the 90s, a lot of things had evolved since: hardware, UI concepts, user expectations. But not this OS. Just bury it. Its place is in history. PS its kernel is partially 16-bit, as IBM made it in the early 90s
You took the words from my mouth.. Indeed, as good as OS/2 was back in the 90's, it gradually started to suck more and more towards the end of millennium (lack of drivers for new HW, lack of SW, etc..), finally dying in the early 2000's. Today, it is pretty much a dead (Arca)zombie made from another dead (eComm)zombie of yesterday.
I have worked with eComm in the past. It had a lot of changes under the hood. It incorporated a full posix core inside the OS, so many Linux software would run on it. Furthermore, it is like OS/2 still didn't run well under a virtual environment, it blue screen every time I attempted to install it in a VM. Yes there were ways around the issue but wasn't a simple installation. If they fixed that, it would make running OS/2 under a virtual environment much easier. As for the question of who would still be running this? There are still a lot of embedded vendors still running OS/2 in their Telecom hardware. It was also so heavily used in the ATM market, I wouldn't be surprised if there still wasn't a ton of banks using it in their ATM's in the wild.
OS/2 was a joint development between Microsoft and IBM. The goal was always stated by both companies that this new OS would replace Windows, hence the backward compatibility. However, Gates double-crossed IBM and devoted major resources to Windows development in parallel, incorporating many of the functions that were developed for OS/2. Gates did not inform IBM that this development was going on, and late in OS/2's development he launched Windows 95, catching IBM off-guard. It was a significant improvement over Windows 3.x, and users ate it up. So Gates abandoned IBM and OS/2, defaulting on what IBM stupidly believed was an agreement. Gates is and always has been a deceitful little liar, who's only major products were either derivative or complete copies of someone else's work.
Gates and his Microsoft have always played dirty and sought to control computing. Just how much freely shared code Microsoft has used and benefited from (and then copyright it) we'll never know.
That's close but not exactly the right timeline... IBM and MS parted ways prior to the release of OS/2 2.0. In fact, IBM started becoming the primary developer with OS/2 1.3. The original plan was that IBM would finish development of 2.0 and Microsoft would work on v3 "NT OS/2" which was designed from the ground up for 386-based and later PCs. After the break-up, NT OS/2 became Windows NT. Windows NT (and later Windows 2000) could even run 16-but command line OS/2 apps and there was a Presentation Manager add-on that would allow NT to run 16-bit GUI apps, too. Although Windows 95 cemented Microsoft's hold on personal computers, it was still a DOS based product at its core.
You're so warped and your bunk history is apparent. Bill Gates is a hero. IBM and MS split in 1990, well before Windows 95. OS/2 was a direct competitor to Windows. How do you truly innovate in a GUI? Should spreadsheets be in 3D? Is that enough of a non-copy to satisfy your "Simpsons did it!" morality? Does every single piece of software not made by the same company need to be drastically different to infuriate consumers and make things more complicated and harder to learn/migrate? IBM tried to take Windows away from Gates in 1989, wanting to take over the OS for some promotion for Windows 3.0, directly flying in the face of the earlier deal that said MS could sell their OS to other companies. Gates said no; that's the "huge betrayal" Gates perpetrated: not letting IBM own his OS for a single marketing campaign. When Gates proved he wouldn't give away his future empire for a couple beans, IBM immediately stopped writing programs for Windows. MS, for their part, completed their contractual obligation to work on OS/2. OS/2 was created to replace DOS, not Windows. Despite being "a better DOS than DOS and a better Windows than Windows," IBM's reign of terror over the computing world ended thanks in large part to Gates' Windows. Fnck you, you lying piece o' $#it.
My company used to have some OS2/warp machines and they were very good. I'm not a expert but i liked the OS. Especially if you copied files in the background you could barely notice any delay in the OS. So yeah it was pretty good imo. But it wasn't chosen by people and it "died".
I too loved OS/2. It felt much Amiga'ish on so many levels. It just had this feel that only NT 3.51 and AmigaOS had. Win95 felt sluggish, and only April Test Release of Win95 had a tiny bit of that feel.
OS/2 could format a floppy without halting everything else in the OS. They should have made it less expensive than DOS/Windows including to third party clone makers.
@@brostenen Well, looks like Microsoft repeated history again, with Windows 7, because back in 2009, I tried Windows 7 beta and it was super fast! RTM Windows 7 seemed slow on the same Core 2 arch-based system! It seemed slower than the beta!
@@RJARRRPCGP I did not know. Now I am thinking, how many Windows versions that had that same. Although RTM is not really Alpha, Beta or test realease's.
Another reason they can't release the source code is that 2 major .DLL's that allowed Windows to run under OS/2 specifically Mirrors.dll and oasis.dll which were written by Microgeafix. Which is out of business. And still Microsoft code is in OS/2 as well. So IBM's hands are tied.
@@UltimatePerfection They would have to spend money to pull out all the code they could release and once all that pulled out what was left could be released but that might not be a useable OS so someone would have to write that replacement code. It might be cool if they did a big git dump of all the OS/2 source files and let people who care attempt to rebuild the missing pieces but that doesn't really seem to be IBM's style.
Truth be told, I developed a rather large visual basic 3 application back in 1992 that I still use. Over the years I have considered porting it, but it works fine as is, so I never really bothered. At one stage I was using it on a dedicated machine with OS/2 Warp 4 until I moved my work to Windows 7. I also had a look at the eComstation live CD and I would consider Arca Os as an alternative. It looks elegant and runs a modern Firefox as well as tons of legacy software, most of which is now free or abandonware. Honestly, if Dos was still a part of modern operating systems like it is in OS/2 I would probably still be programming in it. As a matter of fact, I use QB64 on linux, but in Arca Os I could still run my original Quick Basic 4.5, Turbo Pascal 4-6, Prolog etc (I still have them on working floppies) by just installing them like I did 30 or more years ago. Nevertheless, I often wonder what OS/2 would have become if it didn't have a Windows subsystem. That fact alone meant that developers had no need to create dedicated native OS/2 software.
A quick and easy way to blow windows away is boot windows setup, once you select language, press Shift+F10 (CMD prompt), run diskpart, use list disk to find the disk number, then select 0 (or what ever the disk number should be) then clean - clean will remove everything
Ow yes. The install (pre-internet, not able to google) took me two months and tons of swearing...just to get OS/2 installed...NOW I remember why I run Linux...thanks for reminding me why OS/2 never made it :)
My workstation at IBM ran Warp4. It was FAR superior to ANY Microsoft OS. It was also easier to support with a single Config file that was basically like a Registry you could access even pre-boot. (It was much more robust than the old DOS config.) In my training materials on HPFS we were shown a number of security issues with NTFS and how HPFS was immune to them, which is a bit scary considering how wide-spread NTFS is now.
Wait a sec... OS/2 was never intended to be a competitor to Windows, it was supposed to be the next development stage/ successor of IBM's PC-DOS. IBM and Microsoft could never figure out where OS/2 would fit in the world of MS-DOS/Windows though, which led to the breakup.
Well not quite. After Windows 3.0 became a huge success in 1990, Microsoft initially wanted to create a 32-bit Windows API as a subsystem of OS/2 2.x, but IBM wouldn't allow it. IBM feared the Windows subsystem would take over OS/2. That probably would've happened but IBM still would've benefited from it. Instead they kicked Microsoft off the project. Ironically one of the biggest selling points of OS/2 at the time was how well it ran Windows programs, and IBM marketed it as such, despite their internal dislike of Windows.
I had demo of OS/2 from some cebit alike local thing. I was able to start it but my hardware was lacking in so many parts at the time that I just tested it out of curiosity. I think that OS/2 was an interesting idea but for someone who would invest huge amount of money into it for about 2-5 years till hardware was able to give decent specs for majority of people, not just millioneirs who could run it on the top of the shelf PCs.
Moving icons is actually easier in OS/2 than in Windows. Windows operates a gui for a single-button mouse. Meaning that drag and select are both done using the LMB, meaning that sometimes youvdrag whenbyou wnt to select and vv.. In OS/2 select is LMB, drag is RMB, this is much more user friendly. Msvrested on their laurels wrt user friendliness, coz they came from the archaic simpleton called windows 3, meaning that coming nowhere near OS/2 was a big leap forward.
Back in the 90s, we used the server version for file sharing, printing and cc:mail. Had Win 3.1 for desktops (not 3.11) then moved to Win 95. Not sure why but it seemed to work fairly well.
Still have my copy of sim city 2000 for OS/2. Have it installed on my thinkpad 770 running ecomstation. Really enjoyed OS/2 wouldn’t mind having a copy of arcaOS to mess around with but not for that price.
@@brodriguez11000 but who buys windows retail? You either get a copy with your machine or get an outlook/0ffice365 subscription and get both windows and office for a small monthly fee. Always the absolute latest version that way. So compared to that it's expensive. And do remember that not everyone has the same expendable income. For me it's little, for others...
@@brodriguez11000 I have never paid for a copy of windows. To be honest I have several PC to stopped running windows within a few days of getting the hardware with that said most of my machines now a days I keep dual boot with Linux and generally when I boot up to windows It requires a ton of updates since it spends so little time in windows.
I used os2 warp for a few weeks ..in the end it was easier to use windows, inferior technically but just worked and had game support. Be interested to check this out as things have moved on since fiddling with dma, irq and slot choices. Open source os2 would be awesome
@@eklipsegirlnux was always supposed to be a server enterprise OS, very technical. It’s easy to like Windows more when a lot of commonplace functions are usually already automated without need of running any commands. Though, a lot of the background telemetry and needless features of Microsoft within newer releases of Windows all bog down system performance and can leave some systems throttling because of intense resource usage, the state of Windows 10 is worse than even 8.1 which was average for the time.
I mostly used the CD version although I still had a floppy version but you generally didn't need all the floppy to install the OS. There were like 9 Disk with Printer drivers and a bunch with Video drivers and the installer would ask you for 1 of those disks.
Back in the day I ran my multi user (2 via phone line and one local) BBS on OS/2. It was incredibly stable and had amazing multi-tasking. Still have the floppy backups of my BBS.
I too used OS/2 Warp and was my first true multi-tasking OS. Also ran a BBS named "DreamQuest" using PCBoard. Terminate was my terminal program of choice. Oh the memories!
Which BBS? I had a two-line Oracomm BBS until I went back to windows for Renegade BBS.
@@katsdenvids I used VBBS.
You should restart your BBS dude
I started the Silicon Sysop (PCBoard) in Lake Ronkonkoma WAY back in the day. First running it under DoubleDOS, then moving to DESQView for quite a while. I tried Windows386 but eventually ended up running 3 lines on OS/2 Warp. Stable as hell.
What most don't realize is that OS/2 bears a large amount of credit for the internet as we know it. If you recall, Bill Gates downplayed the internet and took the position that the future was in private networks like CompuServe, Prodigy, and AOL. This is why MS created MSN, to compete with those companies. Originally, the follow-on to Win 3.1 was to be Windows 93. But then a funny thing happened - IBM started releasing beta versions of OS/2 with build in TCP/IP and a web browser. The beta testers loved it and Microsoft took notice. They had to push out the release of the new Windows while they developed a TCP/IP stack and a browser. With each new beta release, IBM added new stuff and MS was playing catch-up. Once IBM had finalized OS/2 Warp, Windows 93 was now Windows 95. Without OS/2, the online world wold be very different.
you got documentation to back what you said?
@@rino19ny not responding to give references but from my experience I used OS/2 to get my first SLIP then PPP dial-up internet connection. Windows wasn't able to do that out of the box at the time.
@@rino19ny Microsoft's position on the internet was well documented in Gates' book "The Road Ahead". I think there was a lot more at play in the two-year Windows delay than just a network stack, but anecdotally it matches my experience that OS/2 was close to disrupting the desktop OS market.
@@snafo Warp really was fantastic at the time, up until Windows 32bit apps became the standard it really was a better Windows and DOS than Microsoft's offerings. IBM should have went balls to the wall with OS/2 but they never took Bill Gates and the home market serious enough because of the internal conflict between business systems and consumer systems. Even though they had the pieces in place to beat Windows to the internet & the future, corporate politics won instead.
The initial Windows 95 black upgrade CD's didn't even bundle the Internet Explorer web browser. Back then, everyone on PC's used Netscape or AOL Online.
I remember using OS/2 back in 1993 - it was ahead of its time, and it did run DOS games very well - I remember spending hours with the Icon Editor (it doesn't appear to have changed much) making custom icons for all the games we had. One of the reasons we had to get rid of it was perhaps the fact that it ran DOS games too well as one of my brothers (aged about 2 at the time) figured out how to run a dozen games at once, bringing the mighty 486 to its knees. I would also imagine that him dropping files into the Shredder didn't help much either.
@@fifthstooge It actually wasn't difficult. In OS/2, pressing Ctrl+Esc would immediately bring up the task manager (like in Windows 3.x and early versions of NT), and when he decided that he didn't want to play Playroom anymore, he would do what he saw Dad and his brothers doing and switch over to something else
Man, OS/2 was so good. I never installed Windows 95 and jumped from DOS to OS/2 for its multi-tasking capabilities. It was literally the ONLY consumer operating system that could run a good number of games AND maintain a solid connection to either a BBS or the internet in the background with active downloads and not drop. It was only until Windows 98 SE that I switched over to Windows and I would say OS/2 was still overall the superior OS. Not until Windows 2000 would I consider Windows the superior product.
I love to see coverage of anything related to OS/2. I was a beta tester of OS/2 Warp back in the day, even then the writing was on the wall that its days were numbered.
Some will say it's the Workplace Shell but IMO the most important advancement of OS/2 was its MVDM (Multiple Virtual Dos Machine). No other OS, modern or not, has anything quite like it. I took it for granted earlier when OS/2 was my main OS.
@S K Some of the software I run today requites Windows, and Windows today is pretty decent.Especially with WSL.
I supported OS/2 for IBM in its heyday. One bug that was difficult to nail down was Thinkpads crashing on boot. Disabling the sound driver was a work around. Eventually a casual comment about having left a music CD in the player was the needed clue. The bootstrap assumed that ***any*** CD was a an OS and tried to boot from it! Ah, the good old days...
This wouldn't be ThinkPads with the MWave DSP, would it?
Ha, I remember that bug (I did OS/2 support for IBM as well, from 1.1 to Warp 4). Think my most relevant contribution to the OS/2 world was helping build the tools for linking various IBM OS/2 BBSes using IBM's internal network, and provide fast worldwide distribution of os2net files and echomail with that.
Fun fact, OS/2 was also a popular OS for ATMs in the 90s because it was more reliable than DOS or Windows, and IBM already had major contracts with banks and early payment networks for their mainframes so it made a lot of sense to use the same vendor and operating systems that had a lot of synergy. That and IBM had close ties to NCR and Diebold, the main manufacturers of ATMs and POS machines, another market IBM software dominated at the time. Sometimes you still spot one with a failed boot screen in the wild, but they've probably mostly all been replaced, unlike the IBM cash registers that it seems like every big box/department store retailer still uses to this day...
And sometimes the software crashed nonetheless and you could see the desktop on the screen. :) But to be honest I saw windows desktops on atms much more oftenthen os/2 .. tried to use the touchscreen on those who had one, but didn't work, neither on windows nor os/2
IBM had ties to NCR? International (instead of merely national) Business Machines (instead of just cash registers), the company that T. J. Watson named out of spite towards his former employer?
one of the reasons that OS/2 in ATMs was its unhackable, another reason is banks were forced to eat IBM candies since the 70s … such as token rings… at one point token ring claimed to be faster than 10baseT ethernet running at 16Mbps.
@@kn7x802 Yeah but they were comparing it not to switched ethernet but to ethernet using wiring from cable television. I'm not sure how it was called in English.
Both were terrible but Talken Ring could give better performence in some situations. Especially for close communication between nodes as ethernet had a bus.
@@kn7x802 : for a brief moment in time, TR was faster than Ethernet.
It's probably worth pointing out that ArcaOS isn't a new operating system that enables you to run OS/2 applications, it *is* OS/2 (based on Warp 4.52), licensed from IBM, with additional software, drivers and a massively improved installer piled on to limp it along on modern hardware. You could think of it as an OS/2 distro. The multi-core support is the original Symmetrical Multiprocessing pack introduced with OS/2 2.11. Most of the interface is either straight OS/2, or add-on software that has been bundled, lightly skinned with a theme that isn't *quite* as 1990's. The reason the "Start" button says "X Button" when you hover over it is because it's part of an open source WPS enhancer called XWorkplace.
So what exactly is the point of ArcaOS? Is is just a vanity project of some old timer software engineers? Cuz they certainly aren't gonna sell any significant number of copies.
@@Christobanistan There were a lot of companies that bet big on OS/2 in the 80's and 90's since it was an IBM product. Conservative risk-averse industries like finance and public transportation can't or won't suffer bugs, downtime, and cost to port their critical business apps, so the ability to run OS/2 on modern hardware with an active support contract is a bigger deal than you might think. Companies like Micro Focus are multi-billion dollar businesses that almost exclusively sell and support legacy technologies from the 70's, 80's and 90's (think Novell, FORTRAN and COBOL). My own bank's ATMs still ran OS/2 Warp until just a few years ago.
I used OS/2 Warp in high school. My father was a huge proponent of it. I loved it. I still played all of my DOS games with it. I loved it.
I was an actual system installer and user of OS2 in the beginning. I used REX often as it was also the development language for IBM VM/CMS. Inside every IBM Mainframe computer was a PC running OS2 which was used to configure VM and MVS partitions as it booted up all these "virtual machines". I retired from administering some of these around 2001 and I know it was still working this way.
Nowadays they still have ThinkPads inside them as hardware management consoles but they just run RHEL. Fun fact, OS/2 was also a popular OS for ATMs in the 90s. Sometimes you still spot one with a failed boot screen in the wild, but they've probably mostly all been replaced.
I worked for IBM Endicott in the late 90's and used Warp at work. I purchased a copy from a company sale and used it for a time on my personal machine. It was pretty cool when Warp 4 came out with OpenGL support, and we had that on some of our machines, but then we actually got other machines with Windows 98 IIRC.
This was a very good video and it was an interesting look at this unique OS. I'd also really like to see a video like this one for AROS as well, and actually, I'm rather surprised there hasn't already been one yet.
Usually when I watch a video like this the install is seamless. Which it never is for me. So it was refreshing and encouraging to see you discuss the hurdles you had to overcome to install the OS. Thanks!
Too many memories. OS/2 should've become the defacto os in the world.
Why? It was a more restrictive OS then windows which would run on any PC.
@@hamobu OS/2 ran on the same pc's that windows could.
@@nismo4x4n sure but it was bundled with IBM PCs
@@hamobu there was quite a few third party manufacturers that also had os2 installed by default and you could buy it in a store.
@@nismo4x4n I stand corrected.
As someone who had an Amiga 500 and Amiga 3000 back in the day, and used OS/2 Warp as well, I can ABSOLUTELY see the Amiga tech in OS/2. The interface always reminded me of the Amiga OS, and that was one of the things that attracted me to OS/2 in the first place. Also, at the time of OS/2 Warp's release, a columnist in either PC World or PC Magazine (Jim Seymour, iirc) mentioned how using Warp reminded him of using an Amiga.
OS/2 was based on a UI standard that all Desktop were expected to follow at the time. Windows 3.0/3.1 pretty much also followed the standard. Amiga as well. MS decided to toss out the standard for certain things and that explains some the weird things you do in windows vs OS/2
REXX was a scripting language common to all IBM products, not just OS/2; it existed on mainframes, AIX UNIX boxes, AS/400 etc. Probably another reason OS/2 was popular on ATMs, since you had a common scripting language across the ATM and the back-end mainframe.
I was a keen OS/2 user for a few years; I used it as a development environment for Windows 16-bit applications, which it was brilliant at. Whenever I messed up and crashed Windows (which was frequently) it was much faster to re-start Windows within OS/2 than it would have been to restart the entire machine booted into Windows natively.
OS/2 deserved wider use. The press killed it, partially; every review of OS/2 I saw said basically the same thing: "This is great, but don't buy it - wait to see what Microsoft come out with" and they played that game for about 18 months while we all waited for Chicago (which then became Windows 95) to come out.
IBM also shot themselves in the foot in other ways; as I said I was a hobbyist developer of Windows software at the time and I wanted to move to OS/2. Development tools for Windows were quite inexpensive generally; Borland Turbo C was about £30, and even a full MSDN subscription to Microsoft was only a couple of hundred quid. IBM wanted over £800 for the C compiler for OS/2, and there was no way I (and presumably most other hobbyist developers) would pay that.
It's not a bug but a great feature that click and drag works that way. If you ever had a user call you with an ID10t error saying they were copying files and lost them... because the mouse bumped and they unclicked somewhere random and had NO IDEA where they dropped them.
I had OS/2 preinstalled on my Escom PC I bought in 1995. Was slightly before Windows 95 was released and already had a copy of Windows 3.11. Back in the day Escom were a high street PC store, and went bust after some Microsoft licencing lawsuits...
Seeing the preinstalled Mahjong game has brought back the memories, played that a lot!
Nice that someone does a review and talk about its past. There are just one tiny issue.
It was first created with the goal of replacing Dos and not Windows. It was that 640k barrier that they wanted to eliminate as the primaery thing. The GUI came later on in its lifespan. Competition against Windows was only after MS jumped ship.
Microsoft didn't jump ship - they were kicked off the project by IBM. Microsoft insisted on providing a new 32-bit Windows API to work under OS/2 2.0 but IBM wouldn't allow it.
@@zoomosis I have to look into that.
@@zoomosis It was mutual. IBM was taking OS/2 in a direction that Microsoft wasn't thrilled about, and when MS figured out how to virtualize DOS in Windows 3.1, the partnership was over.
Back in the day, when Steve Ballmer would go with his staff to IBM to check on progress of OS/2 with IBM, the MS Guys would say in meetings with IBM that Steve was BOGUS, which stood for "Bend Over Grease Up Steve" because Steve kept giving in to IBM.
They split ways, Windows 3.1 went on to crush OS/2, and then NT finished it off.
@@teekay_1 Of course, Windows NT was itself an OS/2 development which had been planned earlier; it was going to be OS/2 NT, but after the split from IBM Microsoft took it on alone, gave it the Windows UI, and the rest is history. Hence early versions of Windows NT having good OS/2 compatibility; the OS/2 HPFS filesystem, and the OS/2 execution system that allowed it to run 16-bit OS/2 1.x applications. I think the OS/2 subsystem support was finally removed in Windows 2000 or so, I can't remember.
When I started in Greenland's national shipping company back in 1994, they were actually running on OS/2 and later Warp I think, but not for many years.
I thought it looked so much better than Windows 3.11 (which I got the next year for my first PC).
We had a Citrix remote access server that run OS/2. This was around the early to mid 90's. The server had several modem lines, where users could dial in and run remote Windows sessions. That operating system was rock solid and hardly ever crashed.
I remember getting a copy of OS/2 Warp 3 from my wife's command in the Navy, and I loved it enough to buy version 4 later on. It ran my BBS better than it ran in DOS, and it was really smooth compared to anything else at the time.
I don't know if ArcaOS is $100+ nice, but if there was ever a sub $50 version I'd be compelled to check it out.
To be fair, the people behind this develop ArcaOS as their full time job. They need that money to pay their bills and feed their families. I actually bought the Commercial Edition to help support development.
@@SergeantExtreme that's a problem every commercial developer faces; too low a price and you don't get the true value for your work, but too high and you price yourself out of reach of some users and risk obscurity.
Even a time-limited demo would bring attention to this without risking too much. Something that would, say, reset the PC / VM every 60-90 minutes. Enough to get a feel for it, and see if it's right for the evaluator.
Very interesting. I still have a new uninstalled copy of OS/2 Warp which is going to a computer museum if they want it. Another retro system is HP NewWave: it ran on Windows 3.11 and gave it an OS/2 / Mac feel - a true Object Orientated System with a proper data catalogue for all data objects that kept track of data; apps that could run other embedded apps with links to a single data source even across a network (e.g. a spreadsheet within a word document); and a high level scripting language. There were native 3rd party apps including a brilliant data analytics tool called Forest & Trees.
Rumour had it MS saw it as a threat and persuade HP to drop it so MS could concentrate on writing HP drivers for new printers etc. When Win 95 came out HP said it would not run, so withdrew it. It ran it OK on Win 98 and XP and now I run it in VBox / XP under Win 7 for some legacy apps as Win 7 does not run 16bit apps.
Finally a review! Thanks for this one. I've got a dedicated Warp machine and was wondering if it would be worth upgrading to ArcaOS. Now I know.
Rexx was first on the mainframes. I worked for I BM on contract to support OS/2 and set some precedence in getting the installations completed and identifying the hardware. I found many of the bugs that were serious back in the day that have since been fixed.
I was working at IBM when the PS/2 and OS/2 were announced and starting using OS/2 with V1.0 (this was before the Presentation Manager which provided the GUI was released). Initially we used it as a replacement for the 3270 mainframe terminals. Wen I left IBM I went to work for a start-up developing a network monitoring application on OS/2. The system we were developing also use OS/2 Server. The system was rock solid. After a few years there, I went to MCI where I was part of a team that produced and maintained a OS/2-based transaction server as part of their Internet/frame relay provisioning system. The only times we had problems were when code allocated memory and failed to release it when done. It was a good, solid OS that was unfortunately killed by Microsoft's questionable marketing practices and Steve Job's hared of IBM.
Ahh takes me back to one of my 1st jobs where the company was a big IBM customer and our desktops were PS/2 Model 77's with OS/2 2.1. Such a stable platform, do your work in Lotus Smartsuite and then play dos games on it without it killing the whole system if it crashed. Just a pity the system was basically the price of a decent car at the time otherwise IBM could maybe have weathered the MS storm.
Drag and drop works much better in OS/2 than in other OSes. You can drag and drop files onto devices and folders and pretty much anyplace you want. You just have to hold down the second mouse button to drag and drop. You also have much more control in configuring things the way you want, including desktop sound effects.
Love these whacky OS's! Great vid as always 😊
I ran a multiline BBS in the early 90s and at the time os/2 was the best os for that.
you and me both
I'd love to hear about your software/hw config as, while I missed the golden years of the BBS, it's been fascinating to stumble upon the history
Did the same.
Yep, I did the same thing. At the time I was running modified version of WWIV BBS.
I did the same thing. used OS/2 for regular use and a WWIV BBS in the background. it was a great OS, it was better than Win95 and its later iterations.
Very nice. I ran an OS/2 box with a 3270 adapter connected to a small mainframe running VM and had Rexx running on both sides trading files between the mainframe and the unix machines on the network the OS/2 box was also wired into. Great times.
The biggest issue I have sometimes with reviewing 'alternative' operating systems is that they are inevitably compared with Windows and usually along the lines of 'this is how Windows does it - anything else is weird or unusual'. Especially with legacy operating systems or operating systems which have a lot of heritage. If the point was to attract Windows users, maybe that would make sense, but things like ArcaOS have to pay homage to their history because that's their target audience. Dan is right, a lot has to do with muscle memory but one has to be careful not to confuse that with poor or illogical design versus what we expect to be 'normal' now. Clearly ArcaOS is unlikely to attract many people who aren't aware of it's OS/2 legacy but that's not their demographic.
Prior to Warp 4, OS/2 used the same button layout as Windows versions prior to Windows 95.
It wasn't until Warp 4 (1996) that a close window button was introduced on the OS/2 titlebar, and it was obviously in direct response to the same button introduced in Windows 95. But IBM couldn't move it to the corner of the window because that was where the maximise button was, and it would cause existing OS/2 users to accidentally close the window they thought they were maximising.
ArcaOS continues to use the same button layout as Warp 4.
There are probably utilities (or even an OS/2 setting) to reorder the button layout.
@@zoomosis Was that ever a problem with Windows 95? I know even to this day Microsoft lets you double-click the window icon to close a window, since it's in the same position as the menu button in Win16, you would think they would have taken more care to prevent users from accidentally closing their windows. Did most people just double-click the title bar?
@@thetechconspiracy2 Well, Windows 2.0 introduced the "maximise" button on the top right. Immediately left of it was the "minimise" button. Double-clicking the title bar was the same as "restore", switching between maximised and non-maximised. This was also how the OS/2 1.x GUI worked.
Windows 95 introduced a "close" button on the far right, shifting the minimise/maximise buttons along one spot to the left. But otherwise it was functionally identical to the Windows 2.0 behaviour. Microsoft have kept the same layout ever since.
I suppose whether this was a problem depends on your muscle memory. At the time Windows 3.x was five years old so had an established user base, though it would be more like seven years before Windows 95 would become the dominant Windows version.
It probably helped that Windows 95's title bar icons were smaller than the Windows 3.x equivalents, so you had to consciously look at what you were clicking on. Ironically the title bar icons became bigger again from Vista onwards.
I imagine Mac users would've been the most confused, since the MacOS close button was on the left of the window.
IBM were also known to deliberately do things differently to Microsoft, which might have also contributed to them putting Warp 4.0's close button in an unusual place.
REXX was originally developed by IBM for their mainframe products such as VMS.
use to write a ton of os/2 rexx scripts back when i was working in the field.....
AREXX was one of the very best features on the Amiga in my opinion and I'm really surprised that it didn't spread out to other systems considering how useful it was/is. [note: I guess you could say that scripting languages like LUA and Python have taken the place of REXX on modern systems]
VMS was never owned by IBM! It was developed by Digital which later was acquired by Compaq and now merged with HP.
@@JustWasted3HoursHere Honestly, AREXX was better implemented that OS/2 REXX. It was super easy to implement a "REXX port" in Amiga software which allowed programs to control each other and share information through REXX. You could build sophisticated multi-application scripts. OS/2 REXX never offered that kind of functionality!
@@madcrowmaxwell TRUTH! Nice to see some former (current?) Amiga people here. I lost many happy hours that series. Shame some selfish bastard decided to relieve me of them while I was out visiting family!
Windows NT was partly based on OS/2. There were 3 branches of the OS/2 codebase:
* OS/2 1.x - at IBM’s insistence, for the 80286. The mistake that doomed OS/2 and IBM’s presence in the PC industry, the industry it had created.
* OS/2 2.x - IBM went it alone with the 80386-specific version.
* OS/2 3.x - Portable OS/2, planned to be ported to multiple different CPUs.
Yes, they should've seen how rapid the speed of change in the industry was taking place, but they got stuck in their business mindset and assumed getting constricted by the 80286 limitations wouldn't matter much. Also many people assumed that OS/2 only worked with PS/2, which of course because it shipped late the first computers came bundled with PC-DOS 3.3 instead.
Microsoft OS/2 1.3 was used internally by Microsoft to build the early versions of Windows NT. They would also include an OS/2 1.x subsystem in NT which allowed them to use the same OS/2 build tools from within Windows.
IBM had promised OS/2 support for 80286 to major customers. Whereas Microsoft is a fundamentally dishonest company, IBM kept their word.
I don't agree with you that it was a mistake supporting 286 CPUs. When OS/2 1.0 was released 386 machines were very new and expensive. So was RAM. (Mind you, so was OS/2.)
Windows 3.0, released in mid-1990, would happily run on a 286 with 1 MB RAM, still a common configuration at the time. This helped it become the success it did.
Also it's not true IBM "went it alone" with 32-bit OS/2. Microsoft were a big part of the OS/2 2.0 project until IBM kicked them out. Afterwards IBM could no longer use Microsoft's CL386 compiler and had to scramble to port their own across, which became C/Set. This is one reason OS/2 2.0 was delayed until 1992.
@@zoomosis I remember NT Server 4 used to label its disk partition file system HPFS on the drive itself even though Microsoft was talking about NTFS. When I found that I thought it was amusing.
You even have Odin on your system.
With Odin it is possible to run 32 bits windows 95 programs. Odin is like Wine in Linux.
Have been running OS/2 for a long time but it was getting difficult to run OS/2 on "modern" hardware.
Now I am running Linux, but OS/2 was always my favorite.
On modern hardware it's a lot easier getting eComStation or ArcaOS to run in a virtual machine under Linux, especially using VirtualBox.
if that arcaOS had Sound Blaster emulation mode for dos terminal just like windows 9x had originally then it could be a killer retro machine with a capacity to deliver more horse power into it than any dosbox is capable of doing so today.
You could probably install a Sound Blaster card into a PC running ArcaOS.
OS2 and ArcaOs can run sound blaster and with Dos gaming it can run with either EMS memory or XMS memory as required by different games but without the Dos Kludge of having a multiboot config sys requiring a reboot to use either type of upper Memory system.
You simply set the required memory configuration for each game as required and it seamlessly uses to setting you gave it when starting the game and if a Dos game crashes it will not crash the underlying system and it can run Dos software in either a window or full screen.
32-bit PCs had started with Compaq in late 86, and getting to the start of the 90's the 486 was starting to establish itself. Yet... PC software was 16-bit with memory management kludges, and not keeping up with the full capability of the evolving PC hardware. OS2 2.0 (when it was released in 92) was historically important as the first mainstream option that had DOS and Windows compatibility that was proper 32-bit.
You're not wrong, though it's interesting to note that Xenix was ported to the 386 in 1987, some five years before the release of OS/2 for the 386. It's interesting to think how the PC world would look now had Xenix become the dominant desktop OS instead of Windows.
Brings back memories of me using Netscape 4.5 on OS/2 Warp 3. I had downloaded it for hours using a 28.8kbit modem and IBM Web Explorer - IBM‘s answer to MS and Netscape applications …
I ran OS/2 2.0 for a few months in college more than half a lifetime ago. It was amazing for the time and I had no problem simultaneous floppy access, modem download, DOS gaming and using OS/2 apps on a mere 386 with 8MB of memory. In the end, my 200MB hard drive wasn't enough for both OS/2 and Windows 3.1 plus apps and data. I also couldn't justify rebuying or finding new alternatives to the productivity programs I used on a regular basis so I ended up sticking with Windows. I wonder what could've been if IBM had more of a consumer focus, better marketing and incentivized migrating to OS/2.
I too have great memories of Os/2 as well.
But more than half a life span? 2021 minus 1992 is 29 and two times 29 is 58 years old. Are you telling me that people dont get past 58 years of age in your country? Why?
I was an IBM OS/2 4 Warp beta tester. Something great about it was the OS had voice recognition/voice control built in. It was a great OS, we beta testers had a lot of issues with the network part, but when I was beta test for Windows it too had network issues. Once networking was figured out it ran great. At the time I had 2 or 3 Redhat Linux, 1 Windows and 2 OS/2 machines networked. Internet, not dial up, was always an issue. I would call the cable company and end up helping troubleshooting internet issues, the techs liked talking with me as OS/2 4 had great network tools built in. Just as when Redhat left consumers for commercial, a tear was shed when IBM and MS divorced and OS/2 went commercial. I may try this OS in a few months.
The WPS was a certainly a bit clunky in it's file handling. IIRC, right click then drag was the way to drag files around. Either alt or control (or both maybe, I can't remember) were the way to toggle between moving and copying.
It was also very inconsistent.
You could move a file between folders with right-click-drag without using the keyboard, but if you tried dragging the file to the desktop in the same way it would instead create an alias. If you actually wanted to drag a file or folder to the desktop you had to hold down Shift, then right-click and drag.
it was also possible to have both an alias and a file with the same name, which was extra confusing. Plus aliases didn't work like UNIX symlinks or NT's junctions, which limited their use.
@@zoomosis The desktop wasn't meant to have actual files placed on it. Especially, when backing up the WPS with Stardock or just achieving it!
To drag an object, you drag it with the right mouse button. It can be customized to be dragged with the left mouse button just like Windows.
To drag files with the mouse you drag with Button 2 (right mouse button in right-hand mode; IBM labeled them buttons 1 & 2 to prevent the right click/left click confusion with left-handed users. Index finger rests on Button 1). It makes good sense when you think about how many users accidentally drag files into a random directory when attempting to select more than one. "Pickup" is there as an accessibility option for people that don't have the dexterity to press and hold the mouse down while moving it (or using a trackball). To this day I still drag files with the right mouse button by habit.
I can see this coming popular among retrogamers who don't want the hassle of digging up old hardware and just want a way of using old DOS and Windows software on modern hardware without the need to use emulators or multiple virtual platforms.
I've never ever seen OS/2 live.. It's always been like those distant relatives you heard stories about but have no idea how they really look or act.
A number of mistakes on this.
The last version of Microsoft/IBM of OS/2 was 1.2. The 1st version done solely by IBM was 1.3, the 1st version that was rock solid, btw.
Windows 3.1 didn't come out until AFTER OS/2 2.0.
The workplace shell was revolutionary in April of 1992. I used to keep each application I was using in a full screen & would just tab between them. It was glorious, and I still miss it.
The greatest thing about OS/2 was that I could cut and paste between OS/2, Windows, and DOS programs - and it did not matter that the programs themselves did not know how to cut & paste.
I could also have 736K memory available in the lower 640K. If you weren't around back then, you have no idea how revolutionary that was.
Try right-click and drag for drag and drop: can make shadow objects or move / copy files depending on the destination and a key press. Doing this will illustrate on the screen the action with a line and direction arrow.
I run ArcaOS on a laptop from 2003 and is very responsive, having just 2gb of memory. I use the Warp 3.0 theme as I found that to be best for my use.
Thank you for trying OS/2 as a novice user experience demo.
I was around at the time. Contracting with the Sears-IBM venture known as Advantis. When I talked t the IBM folks and saw things like when they made software they did a bang up good job. Problem being they never continued to support them or advertise them. It was the death of software when they bought them. Such as Harvard graphic Lotus 123 and Ami Pro. Also there own Displaywrite 4. I would like to see Arca bring this up to 32 and 34 bit programs.
About 1994 I saved up some money to build a 486 computer system. The last thing I needed was the OS. I debated if I wanted Warp 3 or Win95 and I settled on Warp 3. Huge mistake, the install failed and I could never get it going. I gave up and I just used Windows 3.11. It served me well and I was still using it 1997-98 when I got my internet. OS/2 looks cool, but knowing what I know now I should have just gone with 95.
Drag & drop was done with the right mouse button. WPS was/is an object -oriented shell. Each object on the desktop can be individually configured with fonts and colours etc. And drag & drop could be used to install hardware too.
Great topic. Nice one, Dan!
Great over view. The one items channels like your channels is they hardly ever touch on the development tools for these platforms. I wished more people would touch on that subject
The two pillars of OS success. Backwards compatibility, and ease of future development. Windows success demonstrated the first, and NeXT (and now MacOS) demonstrated the latter.
Indeed. By the mid-1990s there were several native OS/2 C/C++ development environments to choose from, with their own strengths and weaknesses. IBM CSet++, Borland, Watcom, Metaware & later EMX.
Microsoft even had their own 32-bit OS/2 C compiler (CL386.EXE) from their early work on OS/2 2.0 before the split with IBM. It was never released publicly but has been leaked in the years since.
What a rush of memories! Thanks.
A coworker and I went to Seattle back in the day when Microsoft was developing OS/2 for training in it. Our employer was considering developing OS/2 software for a potential customer. At that time, my recollection is that Microsoft was developing both MS and IBM versions of OS/2. The instructor joked that the developers would work on the MS platform except for when people from IBM were around and then they would use the IBM platform.
We used to use OS/2 interacting with a pagination service, way back. It's odd, but neat to see in 2022.
OS/2是我用過最好的作業系統，很高興聽到這個ArcaOS👍
A part of me is thinking “who would spend $129 for this?” but it’s so cool it also has me kind of wanting to buy a copy. [edit] I never considered industry where they might want to run old software on modern hardware
I used OS/2 until 2004. I had a multiboot with Windows, OS/2 and some Linux distribution. the disk had a problem and I gave up installing OS/2 on the new disk. The OS/2 interface is still better than any of the dozens of Linux interfaces. I know they need money to support themselves however, $129 is a lot of money for the product. I paid $99 for a copy but, to tell the truth, I still haven't been able to do anything useful with it. Not even a simple thing like writing my diaries.
I remember going to a couple of trade shows back in 1994 where both MS and IBM were pushing there OSs . I was quite keen on OS2 as we were using on the Compass Voicemail platform . During one of the OS demos some one asked the question would the Microsoft's new 32 bit Office 95 work on OS2 / Warp and when the presenter said no that nailed it for me and I went to Win 95 as I wanted MS Office .
There’s a tool out there that will convert Windows NT binaries to run in an OS/2 environment: Odin.
Odin actually comes with ArcaOS. It does API translation between Win32 & OS/2 APIs, kind of similar to WINE in Linux.
The main thing this would be good for is to have a really fast DOS machine. This PC may be old, but it's WAY faster than any machine ever made which could run DOS. Dosbox has a lot of limitations, especially for the later DOS games. I can't imagine there is a single DOS game that would not run full speed on this machine.
@@tarstarkusz why wouldn't you just use FreeDOS?
@@Drewitall54 drivers. Lack of drivers.,
@@tarstarkusz drivers for what?
I have OS2 Warp in a VM, to be honest it did not live up to my memories, it is easy to lose track of just how long ago it was...
As a hobbyist I like OS/2. I even bought eComstation back some years ago. But it ceased development shortly thereafter. Arca Noae brought out it's current OS 5.0 out back in 2017. That's almost 5 years ago. I keep looking to see if there's been any updates since then but sadly no. On there website they indicate that the next release, 5.1 would be a paid upgrade, whenever that shows up. Its glacial speed is a shame really, so I held off for that reason too.
Drag with the right mouse button. That can be modified with shift, control, and / or alt.
other than an occasional minor wart this was a really smooth and rather well polished OS release - no doubt the developers are on a financial shoe string in respect to funding any development, so kudos to them for a good job. For a retro person it offers what looks to be pleasant access to pretty much any PC OS stack of the 90s and prior back to original IBM PC. No offense to Amiga fans but this GUI desktop looks nicer than anything ever offered on the Amiga.
The Amiga's handicap was the 640x200 resolution.
I wrote my first real game on OS/2 back in OS/2's 16-bit days. I called it "TetrOS/2", and you can probably guess what sort of game it was. :)
I was running OS/2 because I was a CompSci nerd (LOL) and believed it was the future. (And couldn't afford SCO Unix - there was no Linux yet), but was jealous that all my friends had Tetris.
Presumably you used Microsoft C 6.0 at the time? That must've been a bit of a pain.
I've watched a good few of your Amiga videos but never really knew just how much time and knowledge you have for other OS's.
Without being unfair to your contemporaries, there are a lot of 8bit and 16bit guys out there who just stick within that sandbox (not a bad thing).
But it's interesting to see how comfortable you are around pretty much any operating system from 8bit up to 64bit.
OS/2 didn't develop into something a common uneducated user could pick up and start working with, like MS Windows did. IBM wanted OS/2 to be primarily a business desktop system, so they did not really care about providing for any advanced graphics and sound, alienating gamers, musicians, graphics designers, etc..). And as the time went on, suddenly there were just no drivers available for new HW and very little to no new SW to possibly take advantage of these - so naturally, OS/2 died out as a anyone's-general-use operating system. Not surprisingly, it vanished from offices shortly thereafter.
ArcaOS seems as the second (!!) incarnation of a system that long-belongs to the past.
Hi .. Just One correction Os/2 was running from the end 1988, and the Olympic Games of Barcelona in the 92, were completely done with OS/2 Warp, mix up with Macintosh MacOs 9.2 . I was the the CEO Results Manager for the Olympic Games of Barcelona, working with SEIKO and XEROX We start trial with Os/2 ver 1, by that time with EDS in the pre Olimpics, till 3 month before the Olimpics that we upgrade the 50.000 computers Ps/2 50 ,70 & 90 to the latest version OS/2 Warp. This were time for the Braves
There would be Apple tech in there, IBM and Apple had a joint venture, I think OpenDoc was part of it. Everything in OS/2 is an object. You could rename a file and its associations remained. Way cool, but maybe overloaded the PCs of the day.
What development languages and software are available. I noticed EMX at one point, that's a port of GNU software to OS/2, bt of voirse IBM had compilers for C & C++, PL/1 and COBOL. And a free device driver developer's kit.
When I worked for a large international bank, we used OS2/Warp around 2004 as out desktop OS
When I was able to pick up OS/2 Warp it changed so much of my expectations of future PC experience, sadly Windows has failed to reach my expectations, various Linux distributions have done better but all fall short. as the hardware slowly makes huge improvements, the OS lingers back in the past.
this OS and BEos makes me reminisce the past. makes you wonder if any of the two had full dev support and let it reach it's full potential.
Looks nostalgic...
I've been daily using OS/2 ~20 years ago and I can remember all the features you show in the video. Well, nothing has changed since then. Same apps from the 90s, same UI. They just renamed this corpse and trying to sell it again, as Serenity Systems did. We all know how will it end.
It was a nice OS for the 90s, a lot of things had evolved since: hardware, UI concepts, user expectations. But not this OS.
Just bury it. Its place is in history.
PS its kernel is partially 16-bit, as IBM made it in the early 90s
You took the words from my mouth.. Indeed, as good as OS/2 was back in the 90's, it gradually started to suck more and more towards the end of millennium (lack of drivers for new HW, lack of SW, etc..), finally dying in the early 2000's. Today, it is pretty much a dead (Arca)zombie made from another dead (eComm)zombie of yesterday.
And you think Windows has evolved? 🤣
@@Design_no your question means you got no idea about OS internals
@@Design_no Yes, I do.
I have worked with eComm in the past. It had a lot of changes under the hood. It incorporated a full posix core inside the OS, so many Linux software would run on it. Furthermore, it is like OS/2 still didn't run well under a virtual environment, it blue screen every time I attempted to install it in a VM. Yes there were ways around the issue but wasn't a simple installation. If they fixed that, it would make running OS/2 under a virtual environment much easier.
As for the question of who would still be running this? There are still a lot of embedded vendors still running OS/2 in their Telecom hardware. It was also so heavily used in the ATM market, I wouldn't be surprised if there still wasn't a ton of banks using it in their ATM's in the wild.
Is there soundblaster support in dos games ?
REXX had been around for years before OS/2. It's used as a scripting language in the IBM mainframe operating systems.
Drag-and-drop is done with the right mouse button. A little odd, but can be changed in settings.
man.... i miss OS/2..... might spend on this and see if i can get my old bbs stuff running....
FPV= Ford Performance Vehicles in Australia.. I have one in my profile pic 👍
OS/2 was a joint development between Microsoft and IBM. The goal was always stated by both companies that this new OS would replace Windows, hence the backward compatibility. However, Gates double-crossed IBM and devoted major resources to Windows development in parallel, incorporating many of the functions that were developed for OS/2.
Gates did not inform IBM that this development was going on, and late in OS/2's development he launched Windows 95, catching IBM off-guard. It was a significant improvement over Windows 3.x, and users ate it up. So Gates abandoned IBM and OS/2, defaulting on what IBM stupidly believed was an agreement. Gates is and always has been a deceitful little liar, who's only major products were either derivative or complete copies of someone else's work.
Gates and his Microsoft have always played dirty and sought to control computing. Just how much freely shared code Microsoft has used and benefited from (and then copyright it) we'll never know.
That's close but not exactly the right timeline... IBM and MS parted ways prior to the release of OS/2 2.0. In fact, IBM started becoming the primary developer with OS/2 1.3. The original plan was that IBM would finish development of 2.0 and Microsoft would work on v3 "NT OS/2" which was designed from the ground up for 386-based and later PCs. After the break-up, NT OS/2 became Windows NT. Windows NT (and later Windows 2000) could even run 16-but command line OS/2 apps and there was a Presentation Manager add-on that would allow NT to run 16-bit GUI apps, too. Although Windows 95 cemented Microsoft's hold on personal computers, it was still a DOS based product at its core.
You're so warped and your bunk history is apparent. Bill Gates is a hero. IBM and MS split in 1990, well before Windows 95. OS/2 was a direct competitor to Windows. How do you truly innovate in a GUI? Should spreadsheets be in 3D? Is that enough of a non-copy to satisfy your "Simpsons did it!" morality? Does every single piece of software not made by the same company need to be drastically different to infuriate consumers and make things more complicated and harder to learn/migrate?
IBM tried to take Windows away from Gates in 1989, wanting to take over the OS for some promotion for Windows 3.0, directly flying in the face of the earlier deal that said MS could sell their OS to other companies. Gates said no; that's the "huge betrayal" Gates perpetrated: not letting IBM own his OS for a single marketing campaign. When Gates proved he wouldn't give away his future empire for a couple beans, IBM immediately stopped writing programs for Windows. MS, for their part, completed their contractual obligation to work on OS/2.
OS/2 was created to replace DOS, not Windows. Despite being "a better DOS than DOS and a better Windows than Windows," IBM's reign of terror over the computing world ended thanks in large part to Gates' Windows.
Fnck you, you lying piece o' $#it.
My company used to have some OS2/warp machines and they were very good. I'm not a expert but i liked the OS. Especially if you copied files in the background you could barely notice any delay in the OS. So yeah it was pretty good imo. But it wasn't chosen by people and it "died".
I too loved OS/2. It felt much Amiga'ish on so many levels. It just had this feel that only NT 3.51 and AmigaOS had. Win95 felt sluggish, and only April Test Release of Win95 had a tiny bit of that feel.
OS/2 could format a floppy without halting everything else in the OS. They should have made it less expensive than DOS/Windows including to third party clone makers.
@@brostenen Well, looks like Microsoft repeated history again, with Windows 7, because back in 2009, I tried Windows 7 beta and it was super fast! RTM Windows 7 seemed slow on the same Core 2 arch-based system! It seemed slower than the beta!
@@RJARRRPCGP I did not know. Now I am thinking, how many Windows versions that had that same. Although RTM is not really Alpha, Beta or test realease's.
Its interesting to hear that OS/2 is the Original OS that made for Windows, ReactOS and ArcaOS
Another reason they can't release the source code is that 2 major .DLL's that allowed Windows to run under OS/2 specifically Mirrors.dll and oasis.dll which were written by Microgeafix. Which is out of business. And still Microsoft code is in OS/2 as well. So IBM's hands are tied.
Then rewrite it using a clean room approach.
@@UltimatePerfection They would have to spend money to pull out all the code they could release and once all that pulled out what was left could be released but that might not be a useable OS so someone would have to write that replacement code. It might be cool if they did a big git dump of all the OS/2 source files and let people who care attempt to rebuild the missing pieces but that doesn't really seem to be IBM's style.
Left mouse button to select then hold right button down to drag and drop. That has been the way in OS/2 since Presentation Manager was a thing.
OS/2 still in use in older VCS. :)
Truth be told, I developed a rather large visual basic 3 application back in 1992 that I still use. Over the years I have considered porting it, but it works fine as is, so I never really bothered. At one stage I was using it on a dedicated machine with OS/2 Warp 4 until I moved my work to Windows 7. I also had a look at the eComstation live CD and I would consider Arca Os as an alternative. It looks elegant and runs a modern Firefox as well as tons of legacy software, most of which is now free or abandonware. Honestly, if Dos was still a part of modern operating systems like it is in OS/2 I would probably still be programming in it. As a matter of fact, I use QB64 on linux, but in Arca Os I could still run my original Quick Basic 4.5, Turbo Pascal 4-6, Prolog etc (I still have them on working floppies) by just installing them like I did 30 or more years ago. Nevertheless, I often wonder what OS/2 would have become if it didn't have a Windows subsystem. That fact alone meant that developers had no need to create dedicated native OS/2 software.
A quick and easy way to blow windows away is boot windows setup, once you select language, press Shift+F10 (CMD prompt), run diskpart, use list disk to find the disk number, then select 0 (or what ever the disk number should be) then clean - clean will remove everything
Ow yes. The install (pre-internet, not able to google) took me two months and tons of swearing...just to get OS/2 installed...NOW I remember why I run Linux...thanks for reminding me why OS/2 never made it :)
My workstation at IBM ran Warp4. It was FAR superior to ANY Microsoft OS. It was also easier to support with a single Config file that was basically like a Registry you could access even pre-boot. (It was much more robust than the old DOS config.)
In my training materials on HPFS we were shown a number of security issues with NTFS and how HPFS was immune to them, which is a bit scary considering how wide-spread NTFS is now.
Yes gonna do that again!
Wait a sec... OS/2 was never intended to be a competitor to Windows, it was supposed to be the next development stage/ successor of IBM's PC-DOS. IBM and Microsoft could never figure out where OS/2 would fit in the world of MS-DOS/Windows though, which led to the breakup.
Well not quite. After Windows 3.0 became a huge success in 1990, Microsoft initially wanted to create a 32-bit Windows API as a subsystem of OS/2 2.x, but IBM wouldn't allow it. IBM feared the Windows subsystem would take over OS/2. That probably would've happened but IBM still would've benefited from it. Instead they kicked Microsoft off the project. Ironically one of the biggest selling points of OS/2 at the time was how well it ran Windows programs, and IBM marketed it as such, despite their internal dislike of Windows.
ArcaOS is really worth the money. It is pure joy.
I had demo of OS/2 from some cebit alike local thing.
I was able to start it but my hardware was lacking in so many parts at the time that I just tested it out of curiosity.
I think that OS/2 was an interesting idea but for someone who would invest huge amount of money into it for about 2-5 years till hardware was able to give decent specs for majority of people, not just millioneirs who could run it on the top of the shelf PCs.
Use the right mouse button to create shadow of files or shift, ctrl plus right mouse button to copy cut files. Love OS/2
Moving icons is actually easier in OS/2 than in Windows. Windows operates a gui for a single-button mouse. Meaning that drag and select are both done using the LMB, meaning that sometimes youvdrag whenbyou wnt to select and vv.. In OS/2 select is LMB, drag is RMB, this is much more user friendly.
Msvrested on their laurels wrt user friendliness, coz they came from the archaic simpleton called windows 3, meaning that coming nowhere near OS/2 was a big leap forward.
Back in the 90s, we used the server version for file sharing, printing and cc:mail. Had Win 3.1 for desktops (not 3.11) then moved to Win 95. Not sure why but it seemed to work fairly well.
Thanks for great video!
Dan could you Tell wher to get pimiga?
GIMP and PMView and Galactic Civilizations were apps I bought for OS/2 in the day.
I used to be Level 1 and 1.5 support for OS/2 back in the day. Good times.
Still have my copy of sim city 2000 for OS/2. Have it installed on my thinkpad 770 running ecomstation. Really enjoyed OS/2 wouldn’t mind having a copy of arcaOS to mess around with but not for that price.
About in line with the price of a retail copy of windows.
@@brodriguez11000 but who buys windows retail? You either get a copy with your machine or get an outlook/0ffice365 subscription and get both windows and office for a small monthly fee. Always the absolute latest version that way.
So compared to that it's expensive. And do remember that not everyone has the same expendable income. For me it's little, for others...
@@brodriguez11000 I have never paid for a copy of windows. To be honest I have several PC to stopped running windows within a few days of getting the hardware with that said most of my machines now a days I keep dual boot with Linux and generally when I boot up to windows It requires a ton of updates since it spends so little time in windows.
I used os2 warp for a few weeks ..in the end it was easier to use windows, inferior technically but just worked and had game support. Be interested to check this out as things have moved on since fiddling with dma, irq and slot choices. Open source os2 would be awesome
@Abstractism true but then you are not using os2... personally prefer linux.
@@bitsnpcs4172 I think it's safe to say it still doesn't have game support anything like Windows does :)
Windows is not inferior technically, it’s just fine. And on top that it just works. Can’t say the same for Linux, it is overrated.
@@eklipsegirlnux was always supposed to be a server enterprise OS, very technical. It’s easy to like Windows more when a lot of commonplace functions are usually already automated without need of running any commands. Though, a lot of the background telemetry and needless features of Microsoft within newer releases of Windows all bog down system performance and can leave some systems throttling because of intense resource usage, the state of Windows 10 is worse than even 8.1 which was average for the time.
OS/2 definition of pain, installing your os from 44 floppy discs !
That just sucked so hard. Even more after I dropped them and got them out of order.
@@massmike11 It's slightly better than a game of 52 pickup.
I mostly used the CD version although I still had a floppy version but you generally didn't need all the floppy to install the OS. There were like 9 Disk with Printer drivers and a bunch with Video drivers and the installer would ask you for 1 of those disks.