Hobbes OS/2 Archive is shutting down | Hacker News Reader

Hobbes OS/2 Archive is shutting down

arstechnica.com

74 pointsisaacfrond37 comments

Not to rag on New Mexico State, but I'm totally going to rag on New Mexico State -- how hard can it possibly be to "maintain" something like this? Given that the software is from the '90s, it can't possibly total more than a few gigabytes? And the bandwidth surely can't be huge. Finally, what "maintenance" is even required?

NMS surely has a large connection to the internet, so what this amounts to is one lonely machine sitting in a rack in the far back corner of a server room. Or maybe they don't have a server room -- then give the responsibility to a half dozen incoming CS freshmen.

And if that's too much trouble, hand it off to literally any other university. Someone has this, and it should have to fall to the informal role the Internet Archive is playing here.

That said, I don't know NMSU's circumstance. The whole place could be going away for all I know.

This sounds more like a response to legal action than a technical inability to continue.

Yep, could be.

It could simply be a matter of having someone interested in monitoring the server. If they can't find anyone who is interested in OS/2, which is a strong possibility these days, they probably didn't have anyone volunteer to do so.

A few days ago, my girlfriend installed Corel Draw 10 in Windows 11 and it just amazed me how long good software keeps working.

Corel Draw 10 is over 20 years old, and it still works. With installation wizard and everything.

Although it is easy to criticize Microsoft (and I often do) they are very good at keeping old apps running. I believe PerfectTablePlan v1, which I wrote in 2005 still works on the latest Windows. Apple, on the other hand, like to nuke their entire developer ecosystem from orbit every few years.

Anecdotal, maybe, but three of the apps I am currently running on this M1 Pro are quite old and work the same: Adium (last build almost 7 years ago), Slate (12 years ago), and Notational Velocity (13 years). Laptops go, but my .app bundles stay ;-).

I agree about Windows, though.

...but any apps from 20 years ago like the Corel Draw example will have a nice "No" cross over them, as they'll be PowerPC (either Mac OS X or classic). 15 years old stuff will probably be a no go as well, as they'll largely be 32 bit x86. And frankly, most people expect 64 bit x86 support to go away sooner rather than later. Apple really are aggressive about this stuff.

The latest build of my software applications (built with Qt 5) work back to macOS 10.13, which was released in 2017. If your macOS is pre 10.13 they won't run.

Not defending Apple, but one of the big transitions was stopping support for 32 bit apps. Even 20 years ago it was clear to anyone even mildly technical that 64-bit apps were the immediate future. Continuing to develop 32-bit only apps well into the 2010s was a conscious decision by developers to limit the lifetime utility of their software to a few years at most.

In the case of macOS though, Apple chose to make many APIs not work in 64 bit. So it wasn't just a matter of fixing all their pointer sizes, they needed to totally change frameworks too. i.e. Apple nuked their ecosystem from orbit.

> it was clear to anyone even mildly technical that 64-bit apps were the immediate future

But dropping support for 32 bit apps was a conscious decision by Apple. Windows users rather complain until today that Microsoft dropped backward support for 16 bit apps under 64 bit Windows versions.

Gotta give credit to Microsoft too for their legendary commitment to backwards compatibility.

Interestingly, a sub-licensed version of OS/2 is still sold and actively upgraded (called ArcaOS). It's in a bizarre state where their license from IBM doesn't give them enough leeway to port it to 64-bit, but they have been able to add modern things like USB 3 drivers.

To be fair, porting a 30+ year old code base to 64-bit would be a huge job. And essentially pointless since there is basically zero new development happening.

I must applaud the webmaster though for providing such a convenient way of downloading the entire archive in a single file. :) If only every disappearance off the surface of the web was handled this gracefully with a warning several months ahead in time...

I was too young to experience OS/2.

Looking at the screenshots, I am amazed at how much Windows 3/3.1/3.11 ripped off OS/2.

It wasn't ripped off, just reused. The OS/2 1.x PM was co-developed by Microsoft, and I think they had more of a say in it, since the IBM OS/2 2.x PM had a different look.

I believe it was the other way round, e.g. OS 2 v1.1 was the first version to have a GUI and was released in 1988 six months after Windows 2.0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS/2

> The promised user interface, Presentation Manager, was introduced with OS/2 1.1 in October 1988.[15] It had a similar user interface to Windows 2.1, which was released in May of that year. (The interface was replaced in versions 1.2 and 1.3 by a look closer in appearance to Windows 3.0.)

To quote the relevant section of parent’s link.

Microsoft and IBM were very close in those days. In fact, Microsoft wrote (some? most? all?) of the first version of OS/2 under contract for IBM. It was in fact a disagreement between IBM and Microsoft over Windows 3.x that ultimately severed that partnership supposedly. It’s been many years since I read this, but if memory serves it was Ballmer’s handling of IBM that led to the term BOGUS having a special meaning at Microsoft in the late 80s / early 90s. Wish I could remember which book that was in because I’m finding it difficult to discover a reference today searching.

Edit:

It’s not the original reference I’m remembering as this was published in 2022, but did find a mention of the term in this book: https://www.google.com/books/edition/Thank_You_Ibm_Next_Edit...

Oh? I thought you may have been thinking of the 1993 book by Paul Carroll, Big Blues: The Unmaking of IBM which is where I know it from. It gets mentioned on page 103.

It was a 90s era book I was originally remembering, so very possibly could’ve been that book. The one I linked above was definitely not the book, but also had a reference to the term.

It also might’ve been Gates: How Microsoft’s Mogul Reinvented an Industry

Visit Dave's Garage on YouTube for some computer history of a unique time

Just watch out for when he tells lies, like "Linux is proprietary too!"

https://i.imgur.com/qUNkpi0.png

Given Dave's wicked sense of humor sharp enough to cut through blocks of steel, that reply feels like he was simply returning the disingenuous attitude back.

Remember, this is the guy who wrote Task Manager among many other things we now take for granted in Windows.

I think part of this is wrong (the part that only Linus knows about), but doesn’t the kernel ship with binary blobs for some of the drivers/firmware? I thought that was the whole impetus of the Linux Libre project [1].

I am willing to give benefits of doubt that Dave heard about the binary blobs and mistakenly assumed that they were proprietary to Linus himself.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux-libre

OS/2 started out as a joint venture between MS and IBM. So MS was not stealing from OS/2 but rather provided a lot of technology from the start in the late eighties.

I used OS/2 Warp 3 daily on my private machine back from 1995-1996. It was a nice OS with some innovative features:

- It came with HPFS (high performance file system) that worked nicely with large hard disks (I personally used it on a 540 MB drive I could afford back then.) and, more importantly, support long file names and extended file attributes which you could use to store sophisticated meta information inside. However, it was not doing any kind of journalling so would still be prone to file corruptions similar to ext2.

- It used preemptive multitasking that worked rather well even back on my DX4/100 MHz. You could play videos in the background and work on a text document without problems. You could even run multiple virtualized DOS games in little windoes next to each other on a single core CPU -- they would work but would, of course, drop some frames. However, there was this infamous design flaw of using a "Synchronous Input Queue" inside the "presentation manager" sending UI events to programs that (when they stopped servicing those) could still bring down all of the UI.

- It came with the "enhanced text editor" leveraging 32-bits to support editing large files and was extensible to a point you could use for software developing. Although, back then, I did not do much of that as a teenager. I rather ran Visual Basic 3.0 on OS/2 to did simple GUI programs.

- It came with WINOS2 being a full native windows 3.1 runtime so you could run windows apps seamlessly on your OS/2 desktop. If you had enough memory you could run a separate Windows core for each application and, this way, get a much more stable execution environment for Windows programs. IBM had full rights to use, ship and modify 16-bit Windows to keep it compatible with OS/2. That, of course, would not fly starting with WIN95.

- It used 386's "virtual real mode" to run full DOS environments for DOS programs. It had nice GUI support for allowing you to tweak DOS settings for each program separately to get as much conventional memory as you wanted for it. Even DOOM ran nice inside of OS/2 (but did not support Sound Blaster sound).

- The desktop supported the notion of "templates" you could create documents from. So, basically, you would not need to open an application to create documents but just dragged a new file from a template icon enabling "document centric" work flows. Or you could drag a file directly to the printer icon.

- IBM even provided a web browser for free on OS/2's bonus disk -- "Web Explorer". That worked actually quite well in the beginning. Later I switched to Netscape Navigator in its OS/2 version.

- OS/2 Warp 4 shipped with a speech recognition system for controlling the shell and even dictate text. That was seriously cool back then!

Microsoft built both of them. Were they ripping off themselves?

The OS/2 and Win95 days were a wild ride. I remember being paid by Microsoft to hand out copies of CDs entitled "Arrive in Chicago earlier than expected" to students at the University of Waterloo back in Sept 1993 (I was a student there at the time) - it held a mashup of OS/2 and Win95 that was bizarre to say the least.

It was presumably IBM paying you, as that was a slogan they used on some betas of OS/2 Warp 3, eg. https://betawiki.net/wiki/OS/2_Warp_3_build_8.152 .

Did they co-ordinate with archive.org to take over this treasure of human history?

TFA says

>Archivists such as Jason Scott of the Internet Archive have stepped up to say that the files hosted on Hobbes are safe and already mirrored elsewhere. "Nobody should worry about Hobbes, I've got Hobbes handled," wrote Scott on Mastodon in early January. OS/2 World.com also published a statement about making a mirror.

We didn't coordinate directly, but when people were telling me that the site was going down and I saw that it was less than 20 GB, I would rate my personal panic at a two out of a scale of 1 to 50. I figured some of the copies we already had would have almost all of it, and then they went ahead and made an easily downloadable version as well. This was hardly a four alarm fire. Happy to hold multiple copies of it going forward.

I never get used to the idea of how important and yet how transient digital assets like this are. Now, we rely on a third party (Internet Archive) to preserve this because of their good will.

And the goodwill of the thousands of us who donate to the Internet Archive every month (or year).

There are lots of people who believe in Internet history, and try to do something about it..

But yes, if everyone thinks "someone else has got this", then we will lose our history slowly but surely.

On that note, and speaking as another one of those monthly donors, everyone should consider adding IA to their donation list. It is one of the most valuable archives ever made, and it is under perpetual threat of shutdown.

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