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geek_at

My dad worked for IBM for 30 years and he was called "Mr OS/2" because he was pretty good at selling it.

I have so many memories of OS/2 events when he took me.

Still have some OS/2 Merch

- Team OS/2 Denim Jacket https://pictshare.net/wxj2nz.png

- Back https://pictshare.net/rxny3i.png

- OS/2 Sweater https://pictshare.net/vhtgcj.png

- OS/2 Ambassador coins in Epoxy https://pictshare.net/nelpoj.png

Now he's retired but still tells me at least once a month when he has a computer problem about "How easy that would have been to fix in OS/2 and REXX" :)

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"How easy that would have been to fix in OS/2 and REXX"

I loved REXX when I used OS/2. Besides using it for scripting, I wrote a few programs using Watcon VX-REXX which was similar to Visual Basic but used REXX. I was most proud of the graphical ftp program I created. I uploaded it to the OS/2 BBS but can't find it in any of the archives of the site.

In the mid-2000s I used REXX one final time to program an IVR system. I was not and had never been a developer by profession but I was the only one with any familiarity with REXX, so it fell to me.

REXX is still available for many different OSes including most flavors of Unix: https://regina-rexx.sourceforge.io/

There is also an "Object Oriented" flavor called OORexx and one that works with Java for scripting purposes called NetRexx etc., all listed here: http://rexxinfo.org/downloads/index_downloads.html

REXX was awesome. Completely blew away cmd.com batch scripts. I used it in DOS constantly. Shame it died with OS/2.

I last used REXX last year, to write BDD tests for my Amiga software on AmigaOS 3.2. IBM still support it on MVS and z/OS, too.

https://hobbes.nmsu.edu/

I've searched Hobbes and other repositories. It isn't there. There is another VX-REXX based ftp program there.

ObjectREXX is there.

https://hobbes.nmsu.edu/download/pub/os2/dev/proglang/orexx/...

As mentioned in my comment I was looking for my old program I uploaded to OS/2 BBS and not a REXX implementation.

Around that timeframe, I was selling computers out of a tiny shop --- one of the salespeople convinced a customer to buy a computer w/ OS/2 which we installed (my only experience w/ it) and then delivered to the customer and set up.

Naturally, they then went to Wal-Mart to buy a printer since it was cheaper there, but the customer called us to ask how to install it --- I was able to do this over the phone by just asking the customer what they saw on the screen and walking them through it (remember kids, this was before Plug-and-Play).

If I could get a copy of OS/2 for Pens, I'd buy it in a heartbeat.

Maybe he would appreciate a computer with this updated version of OS/2 https://hackaday.com/2023/02/16/arcaos-os-2-updated-for-the-...

Sadly ArcaOS isn't so usable nowadays. The biggest issue is that an ancient version of Firefox is the only viable option for a web browser.

>The biggest issue is that an ancient version of Firefox is the only viable option for a web browser.

There was some work done on porting Palemoon, Otter Browser, and QtWebEngine to ArcaOS. A preview version of a QtWebEngine-based browser[0] was available for download and may work with newer websites (given QtWebEngine is based on Chromium), but I have not tested it myself.

[0] https://www.os2world.com/cms/index.php/past-news/80-news/sof...

When usability == browsing Amazon...

I run it on a ThinkPad X61 and it is very fun

I remember back in the 90s, I was a little kid at the time, maybe 12 years old, and I was so proud that I had Windows 95.

An acquaintance of the family then commented that Windows 95 was absolute shit. He had OS/2 Warp and it was superior in every way, especially for power users. Honestly it made me feel quite envious, but he wouldn't explain how I would get hold of OS/2 Warp so I just let it be.

> He had OS/2 Warp and it was superior in every way, especially for power users.

The technology of OS/2 Warp was a better than Win9x, but once you started caring about having native 32-bit software it didn't really matter. Windows ran away with that market in short order, leaving too few options over on OS/2 for most users.

In a sense, that was always the OS/2 story... it never did a quite good enough job of both running users' existing software and attracting a big enough space of OS/2 specific software to be differentiated as an OS platform.

Yeah, OS/2 Warp was sometimes the best way to run DOS and Windows 3.1 software, but as soon as you had some good or fun Windows 95 software there was never any reason to go back to OS/2 Warp because you probably didn't own any OS/2 specific software.

This is all completely correct, but ca. 1995 I managed to pick up what I think was called Lotus “SmartSuite” for OS/2. It included Ami Pro, which I expect I’ll go to my grave believing was the best word processor I ever used.

The layout controls in particular were amazing.

Nope.

It kept crashing because the GUI message pump was essentially shared.

This is just the tip of the iceberge, there were a lot of bad technical decisions that made it unstable.

Comparing Windows NT with OS/2, I'd totally agree with you.

Comparing Windows 95 with OS/2, there was way too much 16-bit legacy in Windows. Major parts of Windows 95 were still 16 bit code and protected with a giant lock serializing all access. Windows 95 was a great tactical solution, but not a great OS.

Clearly it was more important that a bug in a user mode GUI app didn't render the system unusable compared to having 16 bit code and a few locks in a mostly serial environment.

The story of OS/2 is a project that dragged on for decades with the benefits only harvested when Windows NT put a GUI and app ecosystem on it.

As someone who had OS/2 Warp installed on a machine for a bit I'm somewhat dubious about the claim that it was just plain better than Win95. My memories of OS/2 Warp included locking up the entire GUI when an application (a goddamn notepad application at that!) crashed and finding it amazingly unintuitive in so many respects. On top of that everything it did felt sluggish, even on fast hardware of the era (a Pentium 75 with 16GB of memory).

When Windows 95 came out there really wasn't a question as to who was going to be the thing going forward. Even beyond Microsoft's already dominant position in the marketplace.

> 16GB of memory

Speaking of memory, I think yours is failing! Ain't no way!

Yeah, 16MB. Orders of magnitude get lost easily when talking about computer technology. Hell, the computer I owned before that (A Commodore 64) had 64KB of memory and that was a lot when it came out. And now 16GB is probably the most common memory size you see on PCs in the wild.

Indeed: Pentium 75 is P54C and from 1995, while PAE (Address Extension to get beyond 4GB) was only introduced in the Pentium Pro (P6) series in 1995.

oh god that denim jacket goes so hard. It's something you'd see at like a LGR old computer con

He my dad did the same.

We also have a basement full of Warp memorabilia. I only remember how shitty it felt to be the OS/2 kid when all the others were on Windows 95 (not that I didn’t defend OS/2 as the superior system).

I have an OS/2 poster somewhere. It is a picture of a tree with three different fruit on it. Each representing the three worlds it lived in - OS/2, Windows, and DOS.

That's wonderful. I used OS/2 for a bit as a young man and loved it. As a professional developer-in-the-making, I learned REXX as well (although in college we were using it on IBM big-iron at the time too). I can't remember what class it was, but I was daydreaming and wrote an arbitrary (integer) root finding algorithm in REXX one day. eg: show me the 6th root of 872378294, using a variation of finding a square root iteratively.

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