OS/2 TCPBEUI Name Resolution
os2museum.com
os2museum.com
I ended up taking a job with IBM supporting the TCP/IP stack on top of OS/2. It was a 24 year old me, and a grey beard 60 year old dude that literally supported the entire OS/2 Lan Server TCP/IP stack across the world during the time that corporate networks were just beginning to connect to the Internet. Everyone else on the OS/2 support team at IBM just punted to us anything that was TCP/IP related and thought we were wizards or something. What a wild time to be alive.
As a teenager I had a PS/2 with a token ring card and an additional serial ports card. OS/2 let us run a PPP server for Winsock clients. We used it for Quake and other lan games.
Oh, and Token Ring, where you could almost see the token crawling around the ring, like an arthritic snail.
I wonder if there is literally anyone else in the world who has this problem in 2024.
Jokes aside, I appreciate the detailed work that OS/2 Museum does. From a developer’s point of view it often feels like everything is a Unix nowadays, so it’s easy to forget that the PC revolution’s mainstream came from very different commercial origins and gradually blended with the more “academic” tech like TCP/IP.
[1] https://www.arcanoae.com/roadmaps/arcaos/ [2] https://www.arcanoae.com/blog/
Still, for something that I have only really used in one job for a year, I'm not going to try it out further without some sort of try-before-you-buy, even if it might be interesting.
They may not have a choice either. IBM still owns OS/2. ArcaOS, like eComStation before it, is a licensed distribution. Their FAQ entry on refunds indicates that they have to pay IBM for their part of every license and that portion is both nonrefundable and nontransferable so if they refund a license they've lost that amount. It also presumably sets a lower bound on how little they could charge without actually losing money on every copy distributed. It would not actually surprise me to find out that their "personal edition" license is as cheap as they can consider "worth it" to offer.
IBM clearly stopped caring about growing the OS/2 market decades ago and I don't think Arca Noae really has any ambition to either. It's not like there's any realistic scenario where it suddenly becomes appealing as a target platform for anyone not already heavily invested in it outside of occasional hobbyists. The lack of any concept of users and privilege levels makes it undesirable for most desktop and server use cases that don't basically come down to "appliance" and as an appliance it's hard to see what OS/2 via ArcaOS on modern x86 offers over more popular platforms, especially with the 32 bit 4GB ceiling forever overhead. Changing those things would require substantial compatibility breaks which is not really viable when your core business is supporting environments that don't want to change their software.
That said, my understanding (as a former OS/2 user 3 decades ago), is that a community edition cannot exist because IBM and MS still hold the copyright and intellectual property and the software cannot be distributed for free.
Actually, I installed it onto a virtualbox guest of an old mac that was using an old compact flash card on a usb -> ide adapter, and then I moved that to the computer...
Anyhow, it all "worked" ; I even got some old games working on it. Blast from the past...
Plain OS/2 did not receive any update for 20+ years, it's installer won't work on modern hardware/virtualization systems.
Broadcast name resolution couldn't work over his dial up internet connection, but you could still manually set up an LMHosts file on his home Win95 box.
NetBEUI (the original MS networking, running directly over Ethernet rather than TCP/IP), was using LLC-2 Ethernet frames, and as such it was a great way to test DLSw (data link switching) in a very simple lab (two windows 95 machines, separated by two routers, connected via IP link).
Why was that ever a thing? Because of
https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/zos-basic-skills?topic=llc2-how-...
And most of IBM networking used Token Ring rather than Ethernet, which was harder to get hold of and more expensive.
NetBEUI, which was originally part of a unified NETBIOS, before the latter became what remained after the API separated out due to the rise of routed networks was an IBM invention.
NetBEUI wasn't dependant on Ethernet, and in the late 80s ARCNET was quite popular because it was cheaper and more reliable than coax based Ethernet, especially with thinnet T adapters.
Tokenring is closer IBMs response to the DIX consortium getting the ISO to adopt Ethernet as a standard, trying to maintain the domonice they had with SNA.
By the time windows 95 was released, inexpensive twisted pair Ethernet was quite popular. But when that physical layer market was developing LAN segment communications were the main drivers.
Novell releasing low cost ne2000 cards had a lot to do with Ethernet winning out in systems that were small enough to not be forced into proprietary solutions.