I was desperate for a copy of OS/2 Warp back in the day, because there was some sort of virtual modem driver you could get for it that made it very simple to make a DOS BBS system available via telnet. Sadly, it was unpopular enough that I wasn’t able to lay hands on a copy until long after a DOS BBS system would be irrelevant.
I am slightly nostalgic for the NT 3.5/Warp days. The terrible PC hardware, the weird software environments. I sort of wish I had gotten my hands on a copy of Desqview/X, too.
I’m not nostalgic for the times in general, but it was the last gasp of some very neat, highly-optimised, task-specific OSes that ran on PC kit.
Novell Netware was amazing in its time. All the classic era versions:
Netware 2, which was able to cold-boot itself from a hard disk, and able to run non-dedicated, usefully;
Netware 3, a small miracle of efficient design and blistering performance;
Netware 4, the beginning of the end, but NDS was amazing and in hindsight vastly better than NT domains; Netware 4 and NDS integration into an NT 4 network was just astoundingly good, and it spoke TCP/IP natively for the first time.
But not just Netware. The PC demo of QNX was amazing. Psion’s EPOC32 was a miracle of compact OS design, and it ran on the PC too, which Psion barely mentioned – it was just a tool for developers.
DESQview/X is out there. I’ve run it on VMs, and it’s great. Sadly QEMM386 won’t start on any 21st century PC I’ve tried. :-(
I’ve found a QNX iso on torrent, loaded it in vm, and was flabbergasted by the responsiveness of it, and how quickly it boots, while still bringing relatively modern background desktop/multimedia services.
I think it was v6, but I couldn’t find v7 nor any license keys to either.
To my knowledge, Netware is the only OS ever to use rings 1 and 2 on x86. This made it very exciting to run in Paravirtualised mode on Xen, which wanted to run everything in the guest in ring 3.
I found EPOC16 more impressive. It ran on a 3.84 MHz 8086 with 256 KiB of RAM (and no storage other than the RAM Ddisk). within that, it was able to run a multitasking graphical environment and was so stable that you could rely on the RAM disk for persistent storage. EPOC32 felt bloated in comparison (though EKA2 remains my favourite kernel architecture and the Symbian internals book is the one that I insist as required reading for any student who considers writing a new OS).
Apparently the Symbian code makes use of a lot of Arm compiler extensions that don’t work elsewhere, so it’s quite challenging to make it work well in another context. I’d love to see EKA2 on new hardware though.
My team is writing a compartmentalised RTOS for a CHERI RISC-V microcontroller that is about an order of magnitude faster than the CPU in the Series 3 (in FPGA. ASIC versions can be a lot faster depending on your power budget). Once we open source, I expect that my hobby project will be to try to connect up a frame buffer and see if we can build something like a reimagined EPOC16. You won’t be able to fit a browser on that platform, but it has about as much RAM as the Xerox Alto, so should be able to run a blue book Smalltalk-80 interpreter or similar.
Yes, I’ve read something similar to that. For now, the code it needs is still out there and can still be installed and run on versions of Windows that still run on existing hardware. But for how much longer?
a compartmentalised RTOS for a CHERI RISC-V microcontroller
Coo. Sounds interesting. I have written about CHERI fairly recently:
The network admin at the time insisted on running NT 3.51 for years and we all thought he was strange, but he never had any crashes (we in the programmers’ nest were on Windows 98).
Still, Windows 2000 was the peak for me. Reliable, fairly speedy, didn’t look like @$$.
On our LAN it was a near-bulletproof server OS. NT 4 was just UI changes, really, and didn’t do anything more. Nothing that mattered on a server.
As a workstation, it was one of the smallest, fastest, but stablest client OSes I’ve ever seen. The ideal combination of resilient modern design and modest hardware requirements… just a relatively poor UI. But you could ignore that. I had all my apps bound to hotkeys in Program Manager. Boot up, log in, then press Ctrl+Alt+(letter) to open (or to switch to)…
W: Word
M: MS Mail
E: MS Excel
D: DOS prompt
F: File manager
… etc. etc. I barely ever even saw ProgMan.
This took manual customisation but it worked and the speed of it baffled my hunt-and-click colleagues.
I agree re W2K.
A comment to me on the Reg told me that there’s a small community of people still using W2K today. I knew of a hack that added some kernel/GDI calls that were added in XP, which used to allow you to run Windows Defender (MS’ free-as-in-beer antivirus for XP) on 2K, with free updates indefinitely.
Apparently this has been enhanced and now also offers some marginally more modern XP browsers, such as Opera and Seamonkey, and some other XP-specific apps.
I installed XP onto a Sony Vaio P last week, for a laugh. I used TinyXP from the Internet Archive.
It is so much faster and more responsive than Windows 7 Thin PC, it’s hard to believe. It makes this tiny, sluggish dual-core 32-bit Atom sub-netbook actually somewhat usable. It’s much smaller and faster than even the lightest 32-bit Linux distros I have found.
On our LAN it was a near-bulletproof server OS. NT 4 was just UI changes, really, and didn’t do anything more. Nothing that mattered on a server.
NT 4 significantly changed the internal architecture, moving large chunks of the OS into the kernel for better performance (which turned out to be a very, very bad thing for security later on).
It also turned out to be a bad thing for performance later on, though that was much flatter. Modern GPUs are designed for kernel bypass. You can set up the shared memory contexts in the kernel and the userspace process can initiate DMA from its own address space and submit commands directly into the GPU’s command ring. This means that you can have a userspace process set up to render to a texture in GPU memory, and another userspace process (the compositing manager) render window decorations and composite those textures into the frame buffer, without the kernel being involved at all. On NT, all of those system calls into win32k just add overhead.
Indeed – that’s what I meant by “nothing that mattered on a server”.
It wasn’t even noticeably faster as a desktop.
The magazine I worked for at the time commissioned a review. It was glowing, laudatory. So they commissioned a response. It too was glowing, and laudatory. So I wrote a response as well, pointing out all the bad ideas, the failure to deliver the promised new “Cairo” UI and much more besides.
The chaps who wrote the main piece and the response were not happy with me.
In college, I ran OS/2 2.1 and OS/2 Warp 3 (and Warp 4 in grad school). One of my hallmates in college ran Desqview/X, and really liked it.
I was running OS/2 on a 386SX that initially came with 3(!)MB of RAM, but I had upgraded it to 5(!). It ran okay, though I could get it to thrash pretty easily. The thing that OS/2 2.1 did that Windows 3.1 definitely did not do was to let you run a ZModem download in the background while you did literally anything else. When NT 3.5 came out, it wasn’t on my radar at all because Wired said it needed 16MB.
One minor inaccuracy: OS/2 could give each Windows 3 app it’s own resource heap, at the cost of running a complete independent Windows session for it. Maybe NT could do it with less memory.
In general, though, the competition for OS/2 2.x (etc) wasn’t Windows NT; it was Windows 95, and OS/2 was substantially better than Win95/98/ME in more or less every way. Once home and office PCs got beefy enough to run WinNT (basically around the Windows 2000 era), there was no argument for OS/2 anymore, though. Other than the nicer GUI and lower RAM requirements, OS/2 didn’t have anything over NT, and by then, substantial disadvantages (single-user, couldn’t run Win32-only apps, which were starting to be common by then). By that time, I had already switched to Linux, and wouldn’t actively use Windows again until required to for a job in 2006.
One minor inaccuracy: OS/2 could give each Windows 3 app it’s own resource heap, at the cost of running a complete independent Windows session for it.
OK, fair point.
Yes, on NT there was a ticky-box to run apps in their own memory space or in a shared one, and with little RAM – meaning only 16MB or so – shared was better, but it meant if one crashed you could lose data in the others.
But this was more efficient than the OS/2 approach, of multiple entire copies of Windows.
I have yet to try this on my shiny new (15YO laptop, 2-day-old install of eCS 2.1) OS/2 box with 2GB of RAM. :-)
Secondly, OS/2 2 really wanted a 386DX and 4MB of RAM, and a quality PC with quality name-brand parts.
I ran OS/2 2.11 on our no-name 386SX-25 and it ran completely fine. For Warp we did need more memory. The main issue we had is that, for someone in a small town and not a large budget, it was nearly impossible to get native OS/2 applications. With the built-in Windows support, it was a better Windows, but why would somebody develop or buy OS/2 applications if DOS and Windows applications worked on both platforms.
Completely agree with the observations of Windows NT. It was so much better and more stable than OS/2, it’s not a surprise that OS/2 didn’t survive in business environments.
I bought DeScribe (word processor) and whatever the popular native paint program on OS/2 was (can’t remember the name now). But most of what I ran on OS/2 was free/shareware. That’s probably also what made my subsequent transition to Linux so painless.
At the end, I was running the OS/2 port of XFree86 with WindowMaker and writing papers in LaTeX, so when I managed to corrupt my filesystem by trying to get DMA working with the VLB IDE driver, it was just as easy to switch to Linux, which seemed to have a future, than to reconstruct my OS/2 setup, which didn’t.
Later on, when my 486DX laptop died, I did put OS/2 2.something onto 2 freebie 386SX laptops I got from work, after Librex (AKA Nippon Steel) pulled out of making laptops.
I’ve been playing with it again too. I scored a copy of Warp 4 on eBay, expecting it to work better than older releases under virtualization but it’s still a PITA. Don’t get me started about floppy based fixpaks.
That said, it wasn’t clear to me that OS/2 was toast for much longer. I used OS/2 2.1 “for Windows”, which was released around the same time as NT 3.1 (see the timeline at https://www.os2museum.com/wp/os2-history/os2-timeline/ ). It used an existing Windows install, and even left it functional under DOS, so you could dual boot between DOS and OS/2 keeping the same Windows installation. That was usable on 8Mb RAM, and NT 3.1 really wasn’t (I tried.) I agree about the lack of CD standardization, but it really affected both - sure, if NT didn’t have CD drivers you could install from a hard drive via DOS with CD support … but the resulting install still can’t use your CD drive, where DOS could.
After Windows 95, OS/2 was done, mainly because of application compatibility, but also closing the gap on the “fancy front end.” Going from OS/2 to NT 3.x always seemed surreal to me - you need twice the hardware but in terms of UX it’s a huge step backwards. Win95 gave the fancy front end without needing to launch a whole instance of 3.1 to run 16 bit software.
Fascinating. I was fairly sure that “OS/2 for Windows” – the name reminds me of “Windows Subsystem for Linux” – was only introduced with Warp 3.
I did experiment with it at one point, I think, but the “Blue Spine” editions were less work.
I don’t recall if it was possible to partition up your hard disk, and have a FAT (FAT16, obvs) partition with DOS and Windows, plus an extended partition with OS/2fW on HPFS, and still have it pick up the Windows install and use it. That would have been ideal.
The killer misfeature in OS/2’s Windows support on HPFS, for me, is something Microsoft picked up on and address.
If Windows NT 3.5 or later, or any version of Win9x, is on a filesystem that allows long filenames, it generates short filenames for DOS apps. So, my favourite nickname for Microsoft is MICROS~1 – the short name for “Microsoft Office” if you installed Office 97. C:\PROGRA~1\MICROS~1.
OS/2 on HPFS just… didn’t bother. So the WinOS2 subsystem and all its apps simply couldn’t see any filename that was not 8.3 letters. I created a folder called C:\DOCUMENTS or something and to my astonishment a Win16 app just couldn’t see it. It was invisible.
Which meant that if you wanted your files to be accessible to 16-bit apps, you needed your whole directory tree to be 8.3 compliant.
It was a massive oversight, IMHO, and made me think that this company wasn’t eating its own dogfood and didn’t take the market it was trying to “embrace and extend” seriously.
As for your point about a DOS-compatible CD drive being invisible – well, yes, you’re right about that, but in practice for me it didn’t prove a big deal. I deployed a few networks where we just didn’t bother. I described one here:
In business, CD-ROM drives were mainly for software installation. Ordinary user accounts couldn’t do that anyway, so it was for the sysadmin only. As long as the server had a working CD drive, clients could attach to that if need be. Or if the server was capacious enough, copy the install CDs to a network share and install from there, as I describe in the blog post.
Fascinating. I was fairly sure that “OS/2 for Windows” – the name reminds me of “Windows Subsystem for Linux” – was only introduced with Warp 3.
It was after the main 2.1 release, but before Warp 3. Warp 3 continued the same marketing program, with different boxes for Windows included/bring-your-own.
I was fairly sure that “OS/2 for Windows” – the name reminds me of “Windows Subsystem for Linux” – was only introduced with Warp 3.
The version I’m referring to was branded as 2.1. At the time CD distribution hadn’t taken off yet, so reducing the number of disks by removing Windows was appreciated, and using an existing install lowered disk space needed at a time when it mattered.
I don’t recall if it was possible to partition up your hard disk, and have a FAT (FAT16, obvs) partition with DOS and Windows, plus an extended partition with OS/2fW on HPFS, and still have it pick up the Windows install and use it. That would have been ideal.
I don’t remember that either. I might try this to see if it works. Unfortunately I don’t think I have the 2.1 version anymore, just red spine Warp 3.
OS/2 on HPFS just… didn’t bother.
That’s true, but note the comparison - on FAT16 it stored long file names in extended attributes, so it provided similar capabilities to Win95 on FAT (long names for enlightened applications, short names for older programs.)
Somewhat offtopic, but speaking as somebody who worked on NTFS for years, I can’t convey just how painful it was to support these links. It’s akin to every file having two hardlinks, which are both updated in response to things like rename, both deleted at once, etc. It confuses people when *.htm includes anything ending in *.html because it matches the hidden short links. And the craziest thing Win95 did was a beast called the tunnel cache where a file can be completely deleted, then if the short name is created again, the long name springs back to life and is attached to it. This allowed 16 bit Office to open files with long names via double click and saving the document preserved the long name - but as a driver developer, oh, the humanity.
I’ve been playing with it again too. I scored a copy of Warp 4 on eBay, expecting it to work better than older releases under virtualization but it’s still a PITA.
I still haven’t gotten Warp 4 to run in QEMU/KVM in anything other than 640x480x16. And even that is working from a disk image; I’ve never successfully installed OS/2 in a VM, because I’ve never gotten the CD-ROM drivers working. It’s a tremendous pain in the ass to virtualize. That seems to be the main selling point of ArcaOS, to be honest - OS/2 4.5.1 plus installer and driver for modern VMs.
I still haven’t gotten Warp 4 to run in QEMU/KVM in anything other than 640x480x16.
I was using VirtualBox and got a little further. For some reason it could completely hang the VM on my main machine, requiring the host to be rebooted. I moved to an older machine with an older VirtualBox, installed with GENGRADD, installed the fixpak, and raised the resolution successfully. Michal suggested GRADD on pre-fixpak 5 is buggy to the point of being unusable, so I didn’t try to go further without the fixpak.
As far as I know the CD-ROM drivers were buggy in the initial Warp 3 release and older (fixed in Warp 3 Connect.) That said, VirtualBox seems to work with them fine…
I was desperate for a copy of OS/2 Warp back in the day, because there was some sort of virtual modem driver you could get for it that made it very simple to make a DOS BBS system available via telnet. Sadly, it was unpopular enough that I wasn’t able to lay hands on a copy until long after a DOS BBS system would be irrelevant.
I am slightly nostalgic for the NT 3.5/Warp days. The terrible PC hardware, the weird software environments. I sort of wish I had gotten my hands on a copy of Desqview/X, too.
I’m not nostalgic for the times in general, but it was the last gasp of some very neat, highly-optimised, task-specific OSes that ran on PC kit.
Novell Netware was amazing in its time. All the classic era versions:
Netware 2, which was able to cold-boot itself from a hard disk, and able to run non-dedicated, usefully;
Netware 3, a small miracle of efficient design and blistering performance;
Netware 4, the beginning of the end, but NDS was amazing and in hindsight vastly better than NT domains; Netware 4 and NDS integration into an NT 4 network was just astoundingly good, and it spoke TCP/IP natively for the first time.
But not just Netware. The PC demo of QNX was amazing. Psion’s EPOC32 was a miracle of compact OS design, and it ran on the PC too, which Psion barely mentioned – it was just a tool for developers.
DESQview/X is out there. I’ve run it on VMs, and it’s great. Sadly QEMM386 won’t start on any 21st century PC I’ve tried. :-(
I’ve found a QNX iso on torrent, loaded it in vm, and was flabbergasted by the responsiveness of it, and how quickly it boots, while still bringing relatively modern background desktop/multimedia services.
I think it was v6, but I couldn’t find v7 nor any license keys to either.
Yes indeed.
Did you see the QNX Demo Disk?
http://toastytech.com/guis/qnxdemo.html
http://qnx.puslapiai.lt/qnxdemo/qnx_demo_disk.htm
https://winworldpc.com/product/qnx/144mb-demo
A full desktop xNix, with GUI, and web browser, and web SERVER, all on a single 1.4MB floppy.
Absolutely astounding, even in the 1990s.
To my knowledge, Netware is the only OS ever to use rings 1 and 2 on x86. This made it very exciting to run in Paravirtualised mode on Xen, which wanted to run everything in the guest in ring 3.
I found EPOC16 more impressive. It ran on a 3.84 MHz 8086 with 256 KiB of RAM (and no storage other than the RAM Ddisk). within that, it was able to run a multitasking graphical environment and was so stable that you could rely on the RAM disk for persistent storage. EPOC32 felt bloated in comparison (though EKA2 remains my favourite kernel architecture and the Symbian internals book is the one that I insist as required reading for any student who considers writing a new OS).
So very much this.
I wonder if it would be possible to crowdsource a revival of Symbian to get it running on the RasPi?
Once it runs, then modernization to a recent C++ compiler would be more appealing. TBH there’s little reason to try to keep binary compatibility.
Apparently the Symbian code makes use of a lot of Arm compiler extensions that don’t work elsewhere, so it’s quite challenging to make it work well in another context. I’d love to see EKA2 on new hardware though.
My team is writing a compartmentalised RTOS for a CHERI RISC-V microcontroller that is about an order of magnitude faster than the CPU in the Series 3 (in FPGA. ASIC versions can be a lot faster depending on your power budget). Once we open source, I expect that my hobby project will be to try to connect up a frame buffer and see if we can build something like a reimagined EPOC16. You won’t be able to fit a browser on that platform, but it has about as much RAM as the Xerox Alto, so should be able to run a blue book Smalltalk-80 interpreter or similar.
Yes, I’ve read something similar to that. For now, the code it needs is still out there and can still be installed and run on versions of Windows that still run on existing hardware. But for how much longer?
Coo. Sounds interesting. I have written about CHERI fairly recently:
https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/26/cheri_computer_runs_kde/
That sounds intriguing…
The network admin at the time insisted on running NT 3.51 for years and we all thought he was strange, but he never had any crashes (we in the programmers’ nest were on Windows 98).
Still, Windows 2000 was the peak for me. Reliable, fairly speedy, didn’t look like @$$.
I ran NT 3.51 at work well into the NT 4 era.
On our LAN it was a near-bulletproof server OS. NT 4 was just UI changes, really, and didn’t do anything more. Nothing that mattered on a server.
As a workstation, it was one of the smallest, fastest, but stablest client OSes I’ve ever seen. The ideal combination of resilient modern design and modest hardware requirements… just a relatively poor UI. But you could ignore that. I had all my apps bound to hotkeys in Program Manager. Boot up, log in, then press Ctrl+Alt+(letter) to open (or to switch to)…
… etc. etc. I barely ever even saw ProgMan.
This took manual customisation but it worked and the speed of it baffled my hunt-and-click colleagues.
I agree re W2K.
A comment to me on the Reg told me that there’s a small community of people still using W2K today. I knew of a hack that added some kernel/GDI calls that were added in XP, which used to allow you to run Windows Defender (MS’ free-as-in-beer antivirus for XP) on 2K, with free updates indefinitely.
Apparently this has been enhanced and now also offers some marginally more modern XP browsers, such as Opera and Seamonkey, and some other XP-specific apps.
I installed XP onto a Sony Vaio P last week, for a laugh. I used TinyXP from the Internet Archive.
It is so much faster and more responsive than Windows 7 Thin PC, it’s hard to believe. It makes this tiny, sluggish dual-core 32-bit Atom sub-netbook actually somewhat usable. It’s much smaller and faster than even the lightest 32-bit Linux distros I have found.
NT 4 significantly changed the internal architecture, moving large chunks of the OS into the kernel for better performance (which turned out to be a very, very bad thing for security later on).
It also turned out to be a bad thing for performance later on, though that was much flatter. Modern GPUs are designed for kernel bypass. You can set up the shared memory contexts in the kernel and the userspace process can initiate DMA from its own address space and submit commands directly into the GPU’s command ring. This means that you can have a userspace process set up to render to a texture in GPU memory, and another userspace process (the compositing manager) render window decorations and composite those textures into the frame buffer, without the kernel being involved at all. On NT, all of those system calls into win32k just add overhead.
Indeed – that’s what I meant by “nothing that mattered on a server”.
It wasn’t even noticeably faster as a desktop.
The magazine I worked for at the time commissioned a review. It was glowing, laudatory. So they commissioned a response. It too was glowing, and laudatory. So I wrote a response as well, pointing out all the bad ideas, the failure to deliver the promised new “Cairo” UI and much more besides.
The chaps who wrote the main piece and the response were not happy with me.
In college, I ran OS/2 2.1 and OS/2 Warp 3 (and Warp 4 in grad school). One of my hallmates in college ran Desqview/X, and really liked it.
I was running OS/2 on a 386SX that initially came with 3(!)MB of RAM, but I had upgraded it to 5(!). It ran okay, though I could get it to thrash pretty easily. The thing that OS/2 2.1 did that Windows 3.1 definitely did not do was to let you run a ZModem download in the background while you did literally anything else. When NT 3.5 came out, it wasn’t on my radar at all because Wired said it needed 16MB.
One minor inaccuracy: OS/2 could give each Windows 3 app it’s own resource heap, at the cost of running a complete independent Windows session for it. Maybe NT could do it with less memory.
In general, though, the competition for OS/2 2.x (etc) wasn’t Windows NT; it was Windows 95, and OS/2 was substantially better than Win95/98/ME in more or less every way. Once home and office PCs got beefy enough to run WinNT (basically around the Windows 2000 era), there was no argument for OS/2 anymore, though. Other than the nicer GUI and lower RAM requirements, OS/2 didn’t have anything over NT, and by then, substantial disadvantages (single-user, couldn’t run Win32-only apps, which were starting to be common by then). By that time, I had already switched to Linux, and wouldn’t actively use Windows again until required to for a job in 2006.
OK, fair point.
Yes, on NT there was a ticky-box to run apps in their own memory space or in a shared one, and with little RAM – meaning only 16MB or so – shared was better, but it meant if one crashed you could lose data in the others.
But this was more efficient than the OS/2 approach, of multiple entire copies of Windows.
I have yet to try this on my shiny new (15YO laptop, 2-day-old install of eCS 2.1) OS/2 box with 2GB of RAM. :-)
Secondly, OS/2 2 really wanted a 386DX and 4MB of RAM, and a quality PC with quality name-brand parts.
I ran OS/2 2.11 on our no-name 386SX-25 and it ran completely fine. For Warp we did need more memory. The main issue we had is that, for someone in a small town and not a large budget, it was nearly impossible to get native OS/2 applications. With the built-in Windows support, it was a better Windows, but why would somebody develop or buy OS/2 applications if DOS and Windows applications worked on both platforms.
Completely agree with the observations of Windows NT. It was so much better and more stable than OS/2, it’s not a surprise that OS/2 didn’t survive in business environments.
I bought DeScribe (word processor) and whatever the popular native paint program on OS/2 was (can’t remember the name now). But most of what I ran on OS/2 was free/shareware. That’s probably also what made my subsequent transition to Linux so painless.
There was some really great free/shareware, like Virtual Pascal which did a really good job of providing a Turbo Pascal look-alike.
At the end, I was running the OS/2 port of XFree86 with WindowMaker and writing papers in LaTeX, so when I managed to corrupt my filesystem by trying to get DMA working with the VLB IDE driver, it was just as easy to switch to Linux, which seemed to have a future, than to reconstruct my OS/2 setup, which didn’t.
OK, fair point.
Later on, when my 486DX laptop died, I did put OS/2 2.something onto 2 freebie 386SX laptops I got from work, after Librex (AKA Nippon Steel) pulled out of making laptops.
One of these was one, I think: https://www.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/comments/n7dwkr/librex_nsc320snt_386_sx_laptop/
I think, but am not sure, that 2.1x was a little bit quicker and more responsive than 2.0 was.
I’ve been playing with it again too. I scored a copy of Warp 4 on eBay, expecting it to work better than older releases under virtualization but it’s still a PITA. Don’t get me started about floppy based fixpaks.
That said, it wasn’t clear to me that OS/2 was toast for much longer. I used OS/2 2.1 “for Windows”, which was released around the same time as NT 3.1 (see the timeline at https://www.os2museum.com/wp/os2-history/os2-timeline/ ). It used an existing Windows install, and even left it functional under DOS, so you could dual boot between DOS and OS/2 keeping the same Windows installation. That was usable on 8Mb RAM, and NT 3.1 really wasn’t (I tried.) I agree about the lack of CD standardization, but it really affected both - sure, if NT didn’t have CD drivers you could install from a hard drive via DOS with CD support … but the resulting install still can’t use your CD drive, where DOS could.
After Windows 95, OS/2 was done, mainly because of application compatibility, but also closing the gap on the “fancy front end.” Going from OS/2 to NT 3.x always seemed surreal to me - you need twice the hardware but in terms of UX it’s a huge step backwards. Win95 gave the fancy front end without needing to launch a whole instance of 3.1 to run 16 bit software.
Fascinating. I was fairly sure that “OS/2 for Windows” – the name reminds me of “Windows Subsystem for Linux” – was only introduced with Warp 3.
I did experiment with it at one point, I think, but the “Blue Spine” editions were less work.
I don’t recall if it was possible to partition up your hard disk, and have a FAT (FAT16, obvs) partition with DOS and Windows, plus an extended partition with OS/2fW on HPFS, and still have it pick up the Windows install and use it. That would have been ideal.
The killer misfeature in OS/2’s Windows support on HPFS, for me, is something Microsoft picked up on and address.
If Windows NT 3.5 or later, or any version of Win9x, is on a filesystem that allows long filenames, it generates short filenames for DOS apps. So, my favourite nickname for Microsoft is MICROS~1 – the short name for “Microsoft Office” if you installed Office 97. C:\PROGRA~1\MICROS~1.
OS/2 on HPFS just… didn’t bother. So the WinOS2 subsystem and all its apps simply couldn’t see any filename that was not 8.3 letters. I created a folder called C:\DOCUMENTS or something and to my astonishment a Win16 app just couldn’t see it. It was invisible.
Which meant that if you wanted your files to be accessible to 16-bit apps, you needed your whole directory tree to be 8.3 compliant.
It was a massive oversight, IMHO, and made me think that this company wasn’t eating its own dogfood and didn’t take the market it was trying to “embrace and extend” seriously.
As for your point about a DOS-compatible CD drive being invisible – well, yes, you’re right about that, but in practice for me it didn’t prove a big deal. I deployed a few networks where we just didn’t bother. I described one here:
https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/72659.html
In business, CD-ROM drives were mainly for software installation. Ordinary user accounts couldn’t do that anyway, so it was for the sysadmin only. As long as the server had a working CD drive, clients could attach to that if need be. Or if the server was capacious enough, copy the install CDs to a network share and install from there, as I describe in the blog post.
It was after the main 2.1 release, but before Warp 3. Warp 3 continued the same marketing program, with different boxes for Windows included/bring-your-own.
The version I’m referring to was branded as 2.1. At the time CD distribution hadn’t taken off yet, so reducing the number of disks by removing Windows was appreciated, and using an existing install lowered disk space needed at a time when it mattered.
I don’t remember that either. I might try this to see if it works. Unfortunately I don’t think I have the 2.1 version anymore, just red spine Warp 3.
That’s true, but note the comparison - on FAT16 it stored long file names in extended attributes, so it provided similar capabilities to Win95 on FAT (long names for enlightened applications, short names for older programs.)
Somewhat offtopic, but speaking as somebody who worked on NTFS for years, I can’t convey just how painful it was to support these links. It’s akin to every file having two hardlinks, which are both updated in response to things like rename, both deleted at once, etc. It confuses people when *.htm includes anything ending in *.html because it matches the hidden short links. And the craziest thing Win95 did was a beast called the tunnel cache where a file can be completely deleted, then if the short name is created again, the long name springs back to life and is attached to it. This allowed 16 bit Office to open files with long names via double click and saving the document preserved the long name - but as a driver developer, oh, the humanity.
Oh my word. That does sound hard…
But yes, the reward in convenience was massive. Thanks for your work!
I still haven’t gotten Warp 4 to run in QEMU/KVM in anything other than 640x480x16. And even that is working from a disk image; I’ve never successfully installed OS/2 in a VM, because I’ve never gotten the CD-ROM drivers working. It’s a tremendous pain in the ass to virtualize. That seems to be the main selling point of ArcaOS, to be honest - OS/2 4.5.1 plus installer and driver for modern VMs.
I was using VirtualBox and got a little further. For some reason it could completely hang the VM on my main machine, requiring the host to be rebooted. I moved to an older machine with an older VirtualBox, installed with GENGRADD, installed the fixpak, and raised the resolution successfully. Michal suggested GRADD on pre-fixpak 5 is buggy to the point of being unusable, so I didn’t try to go further without the fixpak.
As far as I know the CD-ROM drivers were buggy in the initial Warp 3 release and older (fixed in Warp 3 Connect.) That said, VirtualBox seems to work with them fine…
Try eComStation? It has the SciTech drivers built in.
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