14 Aug
2021
14 Aug
'21
1:37 a.m.
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/Wd5…
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/