OS/2 resurrected: Blue Lion becomes ArcaOS, details emerge for upcoming release | Hacker News Reader

OS/2 resurrected: Blue Lion becomes ArcaOS, details emerge for upcoming release

techrepublic.com

55 pointsprotomyth51 comments

For those interested, here's a nice article on history, decline, usage, and fan clubs surrounding OS/2:

http://techland.time.com/2012/04/02/25-years-of-ibms-os2-the...

I tried it once a few years ago to see what fuss was about. It reminded me of a slightly-better Windows 3.1. Maybe one of those zealots in the article could show me in a live demo why it was great then or if it is now in any way. Not sure. The claimed reliability of it would be a lasting benefit if that was common vs what was achieved with a primitive, predictable application. High-security methods at code or compiler level might also be applied to it if it's relatively small.

Could be some potential but I think it's probably one of history's dead ends.

As a developer using OS/2 in its heydey and the early part of its decline I would say your assessment was spot on. Before NT the pre-emptive multi-tasking and ability to run Windows executables as well as OS/2 ones was a significant merit. Once NT came along it so clearly didn't have a future.

By the by "IBM VisualAge for C++ for OS/2" has to be a contender for world's least snappy product name.

Couldn't agree more re: product names. What people would call Sushi, IBM would specifically call "dead raw cold fish on white rice".

I still twitch a bit over the WebSphere branding apocalypse when they decided their (IMO ghastly) Java app server's name should be applied to All The Things.

As a former IBMer in '90s, I would like to nominate VisualAge for Java as another example of awkward naming choices. The team I was on used VAJ (as it was always referred to in electronic communications) extensively. In speech, people would often pronounce the acronym rather than say "VisualAge" or "VisualAge for Java". Of course, they pronounced it "vadge", because how else would you pronounce VAJ? Sometimes it was said by someone being mischievous, but much more often it was said by people who had no idea that it was slang for something much more exciting.

Brilliant. Thanks for this! I loved OS/2 when I used it briefly, but my computer wasn't powerful enough to run the OS let alone making any dev environment run. IBM should have shipped their Dev environment with OS/2, and then it might have caught on as it then would have had a very low barrier to entry.

That sounds terrible. One positive, potentially, that I found was an object-based GUI or system model that supposedly let the developers handle that stuff better than Windows or UNIX/X-Windows. OS/2 fanboys always say something about it. Any insight or opinions on that?

Nope, I'm afraid I was using the Visual Age class library (which was pretty good) for most if not all of the development work I had a hand in.

I used OS/2 for years, including as a development machine (win 3.1 buildds) while at Netscape.

I just liked it's stability and network stack as compared to Windows at the time. For me, it was a more stable DOS type environment with a decent GUI in Workplace Shell.

I kept a machine running it for years (still have a vm somewhere) since I really enjoyed the original Galaxtic Civilizations from Stardock.

I used it as a development workstation back in the early 1990s in an all-IBM shop. I remember it taking an eternity to boot up (like 10 minutes?) on the PS/2 desktop machines we had. Once it was up and running it was OK as I recall.

So OS/2 had some advantages:

1. Desktop was far advanced to what Windows 3.1 had; full drag and drop that worked, apps/services could extend the desktop, etc.

2. Ability to run crashy Win16 and later Win32s programs separately from each other, each in their own protected memory space.

3. All this ran in 16-32 RAM. That is MB of RAM. 128MB for OS/2, which gives you a command line Linux environment or possibly a very constrained GUI, would be huge for an OS/2 install (at that time).

2 things IBM did not fix:

1. Cursor could be locked up for a while in certain cases (like the spinning rainbow on earlier OSX) - NT never had it because mouse ran in a seperate thread.

2. Microsoft ran rings around them PR-wise.

At the time 128MB was a lot or RAM for a Linux box too, although its GUIs weren't very capable.

You really needed 16MB of RAM for it to run well and that cost an arm and a leg back then. I remember scraping together enough to upgrade to 8MB just to get it running reasonably without swapping constantly.

Re: Linux. 16MB could run a reasonable X environment in the early 90s. I sometimes ran it in 8, but that was kind of marginal. Maybe you'd call it very constrained in not including Gnome or KDE, but it didn't feel that way.

I remember running FVWM quite comfortably back then on 16MB. I dual-booted with Windows 95, which also ran quite smoothly.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MuLinux -> 4 MiB with X11 on a 386 and 20MiB or diskless with 16 MiB of RAM

* On 1998 I ran SuSE 5.3 with KDE and GNOME (even Gnome 1 over KDE 1.x !!) on a machine with 16 or 32 MiB of RAM and a AMD 486DX5 at 133Mhz . And was working fine.

Linux and OS/2 ran on similar specs. Used both of them (triple booting with DOS etc) with 10 MB of ram happily and without too much of swap trashing with XFree86 and even with the early KDE.

That OS/2 2.0 fiasco is one of my favorite topics, particularly the parts relating to Microsoft.

I used OS/2 for some years in the 1980s and 1990s. I really liked KEdit, Rexx, and PL/I, although PL/I did need collection classes as a data structure supported by the language.

I was always frustrated at IBM's lack of vision for, and work on, OS/2. When finally I couldn't get an OS/2 device driver for an Ethernet card, I changed over to Windows 2000, Windows ..., etc. and have never looked back at OS/2.

I still use KEdit and Rexx, love both, except now use them on Windows.

I still remember the remark by an IBM CEO, likely Gerstner, that "I'm not going to drop $1 billion in another desktop operating system for an Intel processor.". Okay, Lou. You just gave away all the billions of dollars Microsoft has made with Windows since your remark.

When you said that, Lou, OS/2 and nearly all of the rest of IBM were ahead. On OS/2, you had the Mach kernel, SMP, DB/2, SNA, token ring, TCP/IP, TCP/IP on a chip, were making the chips for both Cisco and Juniper, were able to make X86 chips, had the lead in fabs, etc. You had it all. You had V/Net, an early example of what networking could do in a company, indeed, the world, but were too dumb to sell it. You stayed with SNA long after it was clear that end to end TCP/IP was much better.

Then you threw it away. Threw it all away. Turned your back on the future of computing and walked away. Gee, you had Prodigy -- it could have been Facebook. You had a Web browser -- it could have been the dominant Web browser and had special integration with IBM Web servers, which you didn't really do. You could have had Windows Server and all of the Linux server business. You could have had all the relational database business.

At one point, you actually ran ALL of the Internet, the whole thing. You gave it up. How big of a mistake was that? You could have had all of SAP -- you were way ahead in some of the crucial work.

I know; I know: You were eager to respond to your major customers, give them what they insisted they wanted. They were all welcome to call except just don't call on a Wednesday because it ruined two weekends.

IBM after WinTel: Biggest determined extraction of miserable defeat from the jaws of magnificent victory in the history of, what, the universe?

Don't worry, Lou: Your record is safe. No one will ever make such a big mistake again!

From at least the Intel 386 chip, there has been a big need for a really good operating system for X86. From all I can see from Microsoft, there is still a big need/opportunity.

Please support running in a Xen/AWS VM. The virtual machine interface will be more stable than real hardware and it will be easier for users to try OS/2.

That's a great idea. I'll add VMware, Virtualbox, Xen, and KVM. Maybe HyperV. That baseline will cover about anyone that might try it in Windows and Linux camps where real experimentation will happen.

OS/2 has (had?) difficulties running in VMware - that's why Parallels was founded; source: http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/11/half-an-operating-sy....

Oh my goodness. I'd have never imagined Parallels started so a bank could run legacy OS/2 apps. Unreal lol.

I'm actually not surprised, since I know a (quite successful) software company that was founded for the reason so that corporate consulting companies could create Powerpoint presentations on an even faster rate.

What company is that?

think-cell: https://www.think-cell.com/en/

If you've never heard of them, don't worry.

Oh my. The Learn More page was the laugh I needed today. I'm going to change industries if I ever find a need to use this product.

It's actually a quite nice tool if you have the need for some advanced visualizations in MS Office. There are also lots of corporate users, for which Office is their main working tool.

> It's actually a quite nice tool if you have the need for some advanced visualizations in MS Office.

I don't know details about their software, but I'm pretty sure that if the software weren't useful for their customers, they wouldn't make a lot of money.

> There are also lots of corporate users, for which Office is their main working tool.

That's exactly what I think, too. I wish it were different (i.e. open source software and file formats that are easy to parse everywhere), but the reality is unluckily different. And if there are customers (say, banks or corporate consulting companies) which for some reason have to use MS Office but are willing to spend large amounts of money to ease some pain points or increase productivity, I consider it as a perfectly valid business opportunity.

This is orthogonal to the question whether you (as a hacker) consider the product to be "sexy" (especially if you live in an anti-Microsoft bubble).

Makes sense. Still thought it was funny. Far as anti-Microsoft bubble, some of us avoid Microsoft by default less for ideology and more since they intentionally piss off customers. Win8 Metro, fighting over start menu, ditching their own frameworks/tools they hype us on, forcing customers to buy better HW just to boot an OS, having BSA develop snitches, surveillance in Win10, and so on. Microsoft, even to former admirers like me, is too much of a liability and cost centet to do business with. Which is funny given NT workstations were the lower cost and liability alternative to UNIX workstations once upon a time. ;)

They not only make a lot of money, they also give a decent chunk of it to their programmers:

"We pay very competitive salaries, and offer our developers EUR 120,000 annually following one year of employment. If necessary, we will go out of our way to help you relocate to Berlin, and will do what we can to help you acquire a work permit."

https://www.think-cell.com/en/career/jobs/development.shtml

Ohhhh shiiit! I think I might put in an application! Just have this surge of interest in improving PowerPoints suddenly. Haha.

You joke, but Microsoft managed to get some of the brightest minds in programming language design to take a look at Excel, too.

"Improving the world's most popular functional language: user-defined functions in Excel" (http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/Papers...)

Yeah, it didn't sway me to apply either, but I like that they are trying the supply & demand thing. Unlike most companies in Berlin that think experienced programmers should make 65k.

edit: Another reason I didn't apply is because I'm not qualified for the job. :)

If you buy a metrocard for the New York City subway you are using OS/2. It runs the kiosks. Not resurrected there, just never went away.

Wow! That's awesome.

Where did you learn this? I'd love to read more about MTA details like that.

I'm torn, because on the one hand it's great if OS/2 junkies can get a fix, but on the other hand you want me, in the year 2016, to pay for an OS with: no USB 3 support, no wireless networking, and a 32-bit kernel with no support for > 4GB memory (and who knows what other shortcomings).

I guess the target market is those who have some existings systems built on top of OS/2.

I still remember being able to download at 28k in the background while playing wolfenstein. Very cool. Windows 3.1 could never do that.

Why?

Cashing in on those OS/2 updates.

Why not?

Well, as a commercial endeavor, I would really have to wonder if there's enough of a market to sustain a business. I'm sure there's the odd OS/2 system still running here and there but nobody today is interested in expanding that footprint. At best you'll sell upgrades to people who are still using it -- a customer base that will only shrink over time.

If it were an open-source project, yeah "why not" is a fine answer.

I agree, but usually when people post nothing more than "why?", they're not communicating that they're a customer or potential investor who is concerned about the long-term viability of the product or the company. Usually when people post nothing more than "why?", it's a lazy of saying "I think this is stupid", because if they did just come out and say "I think this is stupid", it would make their absence of a supporting argument all the more glaring.

ATMs of Santander bank keeps running on OS/2

If you saw my face when I saw the OS/2 bootup screen on a ATM that just rebooted when I was in front of it...

You should have seen my face when my bank booted into Windows XP.

Honestly for an ATM, DOS would be fine.

I agree it's not a growth market, but there's a lot of OS/2 in places you wouldn't expect, like ATMs and point of sale systems, if you keep the price low enough you can avoid increasing the pressure to upgrade, and you can make a comfortable income for a while.

This explain why Santander's ATMs (4B ATM) have the same UI since 90's and can't send an email instead of printing on paper when you do some operation on it.

As a general thought, hooking up ATM machines to the general internet sounds like it would be a source of "fun" for years to come.

For your point though, most probably it wouldn't be the ATM that does it. The ATM would send/queue a notification to some other resource in the bank network, for that to do the whole email notification piece. But that should be possible today (or even years ago).

> The ATM would send/queue a notification to some other resource in the bank network, for that to do the whole email notification piece.

Reminds me of those people using `resource' as a synonym for `warm body'..

(You are absolutely right in your intended meaning, though.)

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