While browsing some OS/2 news websites, I stumbled upon the usage tutorial included in OS/2 2.1 at GUIdebook (an invaluable website for (G)UI fanatics such as myself). To set the mood: “This tutorial describes how you work with the objects (small pictures) on your screen. Some objects are folders, which contain other objects. Your screen is called your desktop (pictured on the right), which is a folder itself.” Have fun, boys and girls, in 1993-style.
Thom, can you post a download link to the installable disk image?
This revolutionary breakthrough in computing is a must see.
Hej – nice one.
Perhaps we one day will see another OS with a true OO desktop.
Wow, how cute! =^_^=
OS/2, even in it’s older version 2.1, contains very good concepts that even “up to date” OSes / GUIs are missing. As it has been mentioned before, the true OO desktop.
You might want to have a look at other interesting OS/2 (even 1.0) screenshots at the GUI gallery:
http://toastytech.com/guis/indexos2.html
Edited 2007-03-11 23:37
Isn’t “OS/2 news” an oxymoron?
FWIW, I wish it weren’t.
There was that Warp thing…
I know I repeat myself a lot repeat myself a lot, but if some folks aren’t aware and want to check it out:
http://www.os2bbs.com/os2news/
http://www.os2world.com/
OS/2 is dying. May its actual death be successfully prolonged for another 20 years.
You might also be interested in looking at the OS/2 section of OS History it has a number of other relivent links.
http://www.oshistory.net/metadot/index.pl?id=2262
Very few OSes truely die they tend to live as this timeline shows.
http://www.oshistory.net/metadot/index.pl?id=2165
Thanks
I miss the good ol’ days now
OS/2 2.1 was probably the best desktop OS I’ve ever tried. I was so pissed when my older brother replaced it with WfW 3.11
One can change fonts by pure drag’n’drop – change colors through drag’n’drop. You can do pretty much everything that way – even when it doesn’t make sense
Try dragging a font (or a color) to the titlebar – and each window can have an independent look. Not bad. – and add to that the use of PostScript fonts. One couldn’t be happier.
My first true love
I consulted on OS/2 related stuff when windows was in 3.1 :p
I tried installing 2.1 on VPC, but no go
“I tried installing 2.1 on VPC, but no go
”
It’s been a few years but I remember getting it to work fine in Connectix Virtual PC 5. Can’t remember if there were any workarounds but I think I just booted from my floppy disk and installed it.
At work the HMC (Hardware Management Consoles) are running OS/2 for the Z Series Mainframe IBM. That is the only interaction I ever have with it and I think a freind of mine gave me a new box set it would not install because the hardware was to new.
It would have been interesting to think what might have been if OS/2 would have been the ‘desktop os’ and MS would have not got the strangle on the market…
No, they’re not. They run linux with a GUI application made to resemble the old OS/2 HMC.
I still have the boot disk and CD-ROM install somewhere… I ran warp for a while, but it was too heavy for requirements on my PC… well, WARP anyway. 2.1 was cool, but just to be a “better windows” just wasn’t enough.
Couple that with the fact that MS purposely delayed the release in order to put out Windows; and the fact that IBM in their stupidity allowed them to dual market the tech, and add in a splash of “worst marketing ever”..
OS/2 could even come back, if it was open sourced. Imagine an x86 compliant system that could use win32 apis? Merge OS/2 and ReactOS? Cool.
( quote )
OS/2 could even come back, if it was open sourced. Imagine an x86 compliant system that could use win32 apis? Merge OS/2 and ReactOS? Cool.
( end quote )
Mmm… the open-sourcing of OS/2 is unlikely though (given that MS were involved in producing it). They’d never give the go-ahead in a million years…
The best bet for an open-source OS/2 clone is probably
“Voyager” by NetLabs. Still in its early days, but looks promising, and seems to have good “momentum”…
Very cool. Thanks for the info. Since you didn’t provide the links, here’s for others that didn’t even know that Voyager existed.
http://wiki.netlabs.org/index.php/Voyager_FAQ
http://www.netlabs.org/en/site/index.xml
Ah, a trip down memory lane… Used 2.1 before ever using Windows. I was so disappointed when trying WfW 3.11 afterwards, not to mention thoroughly confused the first time I maximized a MDI child window…
The multitasking was awesome, and still is compared to the OS’es of today.
I used to adore OS/2 version 3 and Warp.
I had a read through that page, and although I did get that nice feeling of nostalgia, I was not perved up and turned on by it……
em, alright…
I was
OK, eComStation (successor of IBM OS/2) supports Core 2 Duo, AMD X2 processors, any SATA controllers. Check your hardware before migrating to eComStation — http://en.ecomstation.ru/hardware.php
I’ve still got the floppy disk version of OS/2 2 packed away somewhere. I got it for free from someone who bought it at a computer show thinking it was a new version of Windows, then didn’t even bother to install it on their PC.
At the time it was probably the best all round OS on the PC. Unlike contemporary versions of Windows it had a highly usable UI and decent stability/multitasking. It didn’t even require particularly high end hardware to run well.
I used it for a couple of years, and upgraded to Warp when it was available, but to be honest it quickly went out of use after I installed Windows NT4. Not because it was a huge upgrade from OS/2, but because there were too many Windows applications I needed to run.
Looking back at the operating systems that were around over 10 years ago, it’s a bit depressing how little real progress has been made. When you consider how much hardware has developed in the same period of time, with even bottom of the range modern CPUs many times faster than the top of the line back then, it’s clear that software has progressed much more slowly.
The extra eye candy and new features offered by Vista and Mac OS X are nice I suppose, but I could still quite happily get my work done on OS/2 (or other early 90s OSes like NeXTSTEP and RISC OS) if they ran the software I need. In a lot of ways they were more consistent, reliable and elegant than many modern operating systems. Going back to early 90s hardware, like a 486 with 16Mb RAM, would be a different story.
That was a very good version of the OS. 2.0 was very buggy and caused a lot of TRAP D errors. 2.1 was much improved. Warp came out later and integrated networking and file sharing features.
My favorite desktop feature was the workarea folders. Anything you opened from within this folder would all get minimized or closed at the same time if you closed the workarea folder they were from. Very nice idea.
Also, you could bypass the whole GUI and replace it with 4 command prompts (or any other program) as the desktop “shell”. Very customizable.
Nice job guys, we are now stuck in a lame windows world.
Were working on one project at my university that time. Was a pleasure to switch to watcom compiler and have all that flat memory available to crunch numbers. Windows was such a joke!
Edited 2007-03-12 14:18
There was a time when OS/2 and PowerPC were poised to rule the world. I was approached by an IBM manager at a trade show in the early 90’s. I was an ISV at the time and they wanted me to port to OS/2 from Windows.
PowerPC was a new platform that was going to bury MIPS, Intel, and Alpha. IBM was working on a micro-kernel compatibility layer that would allow OS/2, MACOS, and AIX to all run on the same box. This was really big news in 1994.
Needless to say that things worked out a little differently than IBM planned: Apple did not let MACOS run on common hardware architecture. OS delays killed the multi-OS concept and that division got restructured. The first gen of PowerPC did not live up to the hype, although it was decent. And of course Microsoft threw a wrench into the Microsoft/IBM joint OS/2 effort. It was VHS vs Beta all over again when Microsoft released Windows 95 and there were no desktop applications for OS/2. And it was not easy chore to port from Windows to OS/2.
If OS/2 2.1, Warp 3.0 or Merlin 4.0 were still here, we’d be screaming at the PResentation Manager… when it hang up and the OS was still working.
I loved it. I was working at IBM back in 1995/6 when Warp (later Merlin) came out. I was Call Taker Level 1, then 2 then “Specialist”. We had great customers in the Latin America Region.
OS/2 Was lovely. We ran the IBM BBS under that thing
Also Lan Manager was nice. AT home I had a LANTASTIC for OS/2
Those timeeess..!
but there weren’t any decent consumer-level apps for 2.1. Mainly 2.1 was useful for multitasking DOS apps without the frustrations and incompatibilities of DOS-based systems like Desqview. It was sort of like a primitive hypervisor in that way.
Warp (OS/2 3 and 4) was different though. There was LOTS of good innovative software written for it, as 3.0 had a brief period of success preceding the release of Win95 (at one point, even entering the top ten non-game software sales list) and thus spawned quite a bit of software.