said Felix Miata: | I've been running "OS/2" for 9 years on this motherboard: | https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16813135022 | and this CPU: | https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/27249/intel-core-2- |duo-processor-e6400-2m-cache-2-13-ghz-1066-mhz-fsb.html | | Virtually 24/7 it's what I'm running, but occasionally I boot it to | openSUSE/TDE: # inxi -pa | grep hpfs [much deletia] | Technically what I have is called eComStation, which since has morphed | into ArcaOS. https://www.arcanoae.com/arcaos/ [tl;dr unless you have an interest in OS/2, which you probably don't] I still have an OS/2 install on a pretty nice ThinkPad 750C, though I don't use it much. Though I have friends who went the eComStation route, when the IBM guys at Personal Software Products told me in an interview that IBM wasn't pushing OS/2 anymore and that the company was instead promoting Java because it ran so wonderfully everyplace, I got a $50 book with a Caldera 1.1 CD in the back. (It used a closed-source desktop called Open Look, or Open Glass, or Glass Look, or something, which resembled Windows 3.x.) Was sad. I'd been involved in OS/2 not as long as Mike, who would have been working with 1.2 EE and such, because I don't think it had a TCP/IP stack before then; I started out in the early 2.0 pre-beta ("Limited Availability" in IBMspeak), where the official channel was -- really -- Prodigy! (Which was headquartered two blocks from my apartment, above the Sears store and which was embarrassingly a joint venture between Sears and IBM.) Eager to upgrade to 2.0 GA ("General Availability"), I tried to find it the day it was released. None of the software stores, of which there were many, had it. This in Westchester County, where friggin' IBM is headquartered! I phoned around and finally found some guy in the office who had a box of OS/2 that he agreed to sell me if I would drive there and pay full retail, which I did. We actually had an OS/2 birthday party at a hotel in White Plains on I think the second anniversary of GA. We had a user group and Lee Reiswig, the legendary Blue Ninja, would attend. "If you don't have a CD drive, get one," he said a few weeks before the release of OS/2 3.0 "Warp." I covered the rollout at a theater in NYC and still have the Black canvas Land End-style briefcase they gave to each reporter, full of literature and statements from software and hardware vendors who would support OS/2 Real Soon Now, none of which actually came to pass, and of course OS/2 3.0 itself. (I carried that bag with me to Linux World Expo in 2000; my Linux Planet colleague Michael Hall called it "dep's bag of broken dreams.") OS/2 2.x's real major actual software score was Corel Draw! for OS/2, which was a half-version behind the product for Windows and never caught up. (And I still have it on floppy someplace.) Though by far the best word processor ever, well ahead of its time, was DeScribe for OS/2, published by a lunatic named James P. Lennane (who ran for president of the United States for a short time). There were some other native applications, though most of them were written using the horrible and unstable "Mirrors" translation layer. My girlfriend lived in Raleigh, which was fortuitous because that's where Indelible Blue, the only OS/2-only software shop was. Otherwise it was mostly whatever you could find at the Walnut Creek CD, available at computer stores. A big problem was that OS/2 ran Windoxs 3.x applications through an adaption of the Windows code, called WinOS/2, to which IBM still had rights. So why develop for one when you could develop for both? Further problem was that IBM hadn't actually developed "seamless" WinOS/2, which meant that winapps couldn't run under the OS/2 Workplace Shell desktop -- instead, you had to launch WinOS/2, which then took over the place. I'm not sure that that problem ever got worked out satisfactorily, and WinOS/2 was unbelievably less stable than Windows itself and could run only its own Solitaire reliably. WinOS/2 was also insanely slow. If it froze or crashed or you didn't perform a graceful shutdown (and a lot of shareware prevented graceful shutdowns), the only way back was to boot from floppy and do a chkdsk -f on the hard drive. In fact, come to think of it, chkdsk was located on the second of the install floppies, so you had to boot from floppy, then when prompted insert the second floppy, then at the appropriate point bail out to a command prompt, and *then* run chkdsk -f. When that didn't work, and it often didn't, it was time for the dreaded rf-ri -- reformat and reinstall. This led many of us to purchase tape backup drives and invent innovative partitioning schemes. It would have been a hit if IBM had had a clue, which it didn't and mostly doesn't. They were pushing it to business which, except for embedded installs in automatic teller machines at banks, didn't work. They never pushed it as an operating system that real people could use. It's the inverse of the all-but-late BlackBerry company, whose phones were excellent business tools but who went off the rails looking to sell to kids who wanted games and stickers. If Blackberry's marketers had been selling OS/2 and IBM's marketers had been selling Blackberrys, they's both be with us today. The only thing remotely from that era that I ever run much today is Word 5.5 for DOS, which is available for free (!) from Microsoft. http://download.microsoft.com/download/word97win/Wd55_be/97/WIN98/EN-US/Wd55_ben.exe It's text-based, of course, but is a great word prcessor for writers. It runs perfectly in DOSemu and is actually more satisfying to use than a GUI word processor. I've run it in a full-screen console session, which is a joy, but usually run it in a console window, which is less so. Just remember to save your files in .rtf, because the .doc files it produces are read now by nothing remotely modern. (Something cool about it was that it was "family mode," meaning that if you installed it under OS/2 it was an OS/2-native app, and if you installed it under DOS or Windows it wasn't. I don't know if the version Microsoft is giving away is family mode, though.) As to the need for computer speed, I'm beginning to realize that, well, actually, my computer is a lot faster than I am . . . -- dep Pictures: http://www.ipernity.com/doc/depscribe/album Column: https://ofb.biz/author/dep/ ____________________________________________________ tde-users mailing list -- users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to users-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Web mail archive available at https://mail.trinitydesktop.org/mailman3/hyperkitty/list/users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
