MS OS/2 SDK Document Dump | Hacker News Reader

MS OS/2 SDK Document Dump

os2museum.com

94 pointseaguyhn19 comments

I love to see projects like this. I’ve always lamented that my father threw away his set of System 360 manuals while cleaning out the garage. He also had boxes of early computer science books - nothing like them today, first half of the books were always dedicated to explaining the professor’s particular diagraming style and symbology, second half of the book was the actual computer science content. I’m always on the lookout for books like that when I hit the used book stores but have never found any.

Oh boy, what fun memories! I paid $3,000 in 1987 for the SDK and to go to the developers conference. Steve Ballmer shouted, “OS/2 is the operating system for the next ten years!” He was about right.

Ah OS/2! You could use the computer even while formatting a floppy.

As I recall, IBM would send you OS/2 for free, on a bunch of the new-style 3.5" floppies. I think it was about two dozen floppies.

Not that I knew of.

OS/2 1, the 286 version, was quite expensive enterprise software. I evaluated 1.0 in my first job.

OS/2 2, the 386 version, was relatively cheap. I paid about £40 for a copy, and it's one of the very few pieces of x86 PC software I've ever bought in my life.

OS/2 3 "Warp" did have a free evaluation version, and was distributed on magazine cover disks. However it took much of a CD and was not readily available on floppies.

https://twitter.com/AlvinGrissomII/status/108455170211465216...

Surely not in early 90's Portugal, where OS/2 was only available in IBM PS/2 PC with MCA architecture, with a tax of additional 500 € (more than one month salary minimum wage) versus the 386SX/DX OEM PCs.

There was a widespread belief that it needed a PS/2 and MCA, but it didn't.

I ran it on Librex laptops and several generic clones. No version ever _needed_ MCA.

It's just one of many things that doomed it. :-(

Might have been the case, but on my small town buying such IBM model was the only way to get OS/2.

No one was selling it on OEM clones, and buying a PC clone was already expensive enough, to even think about trying to get an additional alternative OS at IBM prices.

I remember testing the networking component of a game by running two simultaneous Windows 3.1 sessions, and fuzz testing DOS apps in multiple VMs (using DPMI, even!)

Even while running a BBS in the background, too!

OS/2 for free? That must've been well after Windows 95 came out, with OS/2 then deemed unsalvageable by IBM itself.

If anyone's still interested, there's a free demo CD of the later successor to OS/2, eComStation.

http://www.ecomstation.com/democd/index.php?file=9

This is what it looks like:

http://toastytech.com/guis/ecsd.html

You could use an Amiga while formatting a floppy, back in 1985, a couple years before OS/2 was released.

I never got to actually use OS/2. However, when I was a kid I filled out one of those survey cards from a computer magazine, and I started getting all kinds of catalogs and stuff.

One of those catalogs was from Indelible Blue. It was basically a catalog full of OS/2 software. REXX scripting always fascinated me.

https://books.google.com/books?id=kzoEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA89-IA1&l...

It's great that it's being preserved instead of thrown away. I'm curious -is there plans for mirroring it on bitsavers too?

Should probably be mirrored on the Internet Archive as well.

These old docs are always interesting. I also love old books on archaic programming languages and operating systems. But there's usually just so much stuff to read through. It makes me wish for modern books that boil down the complexity of the old systems into a condensed manual. Something like The New Apple II User's Guide.

That is actually fucking great. I don't know if that Necasek guy reads HN, but thanks!

Scan quality is great

Useful, thanks

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