
OS/2 resurrected: Blue Lion becomes ArcaOS, details emerge for upcoming release - protomyth
http://www.techrepublic.com/article/os2-resurrected-blue-lion-becomes-arcaos-details-emerge-for-upcoming-release/
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nickpsecurity
For those interested, here's a nice article on history, decline, usage, and
fan clubs surrounding OS/2:

[http://techland.time.com/2012/04/02/25-years-of-ibms-
os2-the...](http://techland.time.com/2012/04/02/25-years-of-ibms-os2-the-
birth-death-and-afterlife-of-a-legendary-operating-system/)

I tried it once a few years ago to see what fuss was about. It reminded me of
a slightly-better Windows 3.1. Maybe one of those zealots in the article could
show me in a live demo why it was great then or if it is now in any way. Not
sure. The claimed reliability of it would be a lasting benefit if that was
common vs what was achieved with a primitive, predictable application. High-
security methods at code or compiler level might also be applied to it if it's
relatively small.

Could be some potential but I think it's probably one of history's dead ends.

~~~
dcminter
As a developer using OS/2 in its heydey and the early part of its decline I
would say your assessment was spot on. Before NT the pre-emptive multi-tasking
and ability to run Windows executables as well as OS/2 ones was a significant
merit. Once NT came along it so clearly didn't have a future.

By the by "IBM VisualAge for C++ for OS/2" has to be a contender for world's
least snappy product name.

~~~
mwfunk
As a former IBMer in '90s, I would like to nominate VisualAge for Java as
another example of awkward naming choices. The team I was on used VAJ (as it
was always referred to in electronic communications) extensively. In speech,
people would often pronounce the acronym rather than say "VisualAge" or
"VisualAge for Java". Of course, they pronounced it "vadge", because how else
would you pronounce VAJ? Sometimes it was said by someone being mischievous,
but much more often it was said by people who had no idea that it was slang
for something much more exciting.

~~~
hackbinary
Brilliant. Thanks for this! I loved OS/2 when I used it briefly, but my
computer wasn't powerful enough to run the OS let alone making any dev
environment run. IBM should have shipped their Dev environment with OS/2, and
then it might have caught on as it then would have had a very low barrier to
entry.

------
patrickg_zill
So OS/2 had some advantages:

1\. Desktop was far advanced to what Windows 3.1 had; full drag and drop that
worked, apps/services could extend the desktop, etc.

2\. Ability to run crashy Win16 and later Win32s programs separately from each
other, each in their own protected memory space.

3\. All this ran in 16-32 RAM. That is _MB_ of RAM. 128MB for OS/2, which
gives you a command line Linux environment or possibly a very constrained GUI,
would be huge for an OS/2 install (at that time).

2 things IBM did not fix:

1\. Cursor could be locked up for a while in certain cases (like the spinning
rainbow on earlier OSX) - NT never had it because mouse ran in a seperate
thread.

2\. Microsoft ran rings around them PR-wise.

~~~
abecedarius
Re: Linux. 16MB could run a reasonable X environment in the early 90s. I
sometimes ran it in 8, but that was kind of marginal. Maybe you'd call it very
constrained in not including Gnome or KDE, but it didn't feel that way.

~~~
Zardoz84
* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MuLinux](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MuLinux) -> 4 MiB with X11 on a 386 and 20MiB or diskless with 16 MiB of RAM

* On 1998 I ran SuSE 5.3 with KDE and GNOME (even Gnome 1 over KDE 1.x !!) on a machine with 16 or 32 MiB of RAM and a AMD 486DX5 at 133Mhz . And was working fine.

------
graycat
I used OS/2 for some years in the 1980s and 1990s. I really liked KEdit, Rexx,
and PL/I, although PL/I did need collection classes as a data structure
supported by the language.

I was always frustrated at IBM's lack of vision for, and work on, OS/2\. When
finally I couldn't get an OS/2 device driver for an Ethernet card, I changed
over to Windows 2000, Windows ..., etc. and have never looked back at OS/2.

I still use KEdit and Rexx, love both, except now use them on Windows.

I still remember the remark by an IBM CEO, likely Gerstner, that "I'm not
going to drop $1 billion in another desktop operating system for an Intel
processor.". Okay, Lou. You just gave away all the billions of dollars
Microsoft has made with Windows since your remark.

When you said that, Lou, OS/2 and nearly all of the rest of IBM were ahead. On
OS/2, you had the Mach kernel, SMP, DB/2, SNA, token ring, TCP/IP, TCP/IP on a
chip, were making the chips for both Cisco and Juniper, were able to make X86
chips, had the lead in fabs, etc. You had it all. You had V/Net, an early
example of what networking could do in a company, indeed, the world, but were
too dumb to sell it. You stayed with SNA long after it was clear that end to
end TCP/IP was much better.

Then you threw it away. Threw it all away. Turned your back on the future of
computing and walked away. Gee, you had Prodigy -- it could have been
Facebook. You had a Web browser -- it could have been the dominant Web browser
and had special integration with IBM Web servers, which you didn't really do.
You could have had Windows Server and all of the Linux server business. You
could have had all the relational database business.

At one point, you actually ran ALL of the Internet, the whole thing. You gave
it up. How big of a mistake was that? You could have had all of SAP -- you
were way ahead in some of the crucial work.

I know; I know: You were eager to respond to your major customers, give them
what they insisted they wanted. They were all welcome to call except just
don't call on a Wednesday because it ruined two weekends.

IBM after WinTel: Biggest determined extraction of miserable defeat from the
jaws of magnificent victory in the history of, what, the universe?

Don't worry, Lou: Your record is safe. No one will ever make such a big
mistake again!

From at least the Intel 386 chip, there has been a big need for a really good
operating system for X86. From all I can see from Microsoft, there is still a
big need/opportunity.

------
walterbell
Please support running in a Xen/AWS VM. The virtual machine interface will be
more stable than real hardware and it will be easier for users to try OS/2.

~~~
nickpsecurity
That's a _great_ idea. I'll add VMware, Virtualbox, Xen, and KVM. Maybe
HyperV. That baseline will cover about anyone that might try it in Windows and
Linux camps where real experimentation will happen.

~~~
wolfgke
OS/2 has (had?) difficulties running in VMware - that's why Parallels was
founded; source: [http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/11/half-an-operating-
sy...](http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/11/half-an-operating-system-the-
triumph-and-tragedy-of-os2/5/).

~~~
nickpsecurity
Oh my goodness. I'd have never imagined Parallels started so a bank could run
legacy OS/2 apps. Unreal lol.

~~~
wolfgke
I'm actually not surprised, since I know a (quite successful) software company
that was founded for the reason so that corporate consulting companies could
create Powerpoint presentations on an even faster rate.

~~~
nickpsecurity
What company is that?

~~~
wolfgke
think-cell: [https://www.think-cell.com/en/](https://www.think-cell.com/en/)

If you've never heard of them, don't worry.

~~~
nickpsecurity
Oh my. The Learn More page was the laugh I needed today. I'm going to change
industries if I ever find a need to use this product.

~~~
Matthias247
It's actually a quite nice tool if you have the need for some advanced
visualizations in MS Office. There are also lots of corporate users, for which
Office is their main working tool.

~~~
wolfgke
> It's actually a quite nice tool if you have the need for some advanced
> visualizations in MS Office.

I don't know details about their software, but I'm pretty sure that if the
software weren't useful for their customers, they wouldn't make a lot of
money.

> There are also lots of corporate users, for which Office is their main
> working tool.

That's exactly what I think, too. I wish it were different (i.e. open source
software and file formats that are easy to parse everywhere), but the reality
is unluckily different. And if there are customers (say, banks or corporate
consulting companies) which for some reason have to use MS Office but are
willing to spend large amounts of money to ease some pain points or increase
productivity, I consider it as a perfectly valid business opportunity.

This is orthogonal to the question whether you (as a hacker) consider the
product to be "sexy" (especially if you live in an anti-Microsoft bubble).

~~~
passiveincomelg
They not only make a lot of money, they also give a decent chunk of it to
their programmers:

"We pay very competitive salaries, and offer our developers EUR 120,000
annually following one year of employment. If necessary, we will go out of our
way to help you relocate to Berlin, and will do what we can to help you
acquire a work permit."

[https://www.think-
cell.com/en/career/jobs/development.shtml](https://www.think-
cell.com/en/career/jobs/development.shtml)

~~~
nickpsecurity
Ohhhh shiiit! I think I might put in an application! Just have this surge of
interest in improving PowerPoints suddenly. Haha.

~~~
eru
You joke, but Microsoft managed to get some of the brightest minds in
programming language design to take a look at Excel, too.

"Improving the world's most popular functional language: user-defined
functions in Excel" ([http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/um/people/simonpj/Papers...](http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/um/people/simonpj/Papers/excel/))

------
bogomipz
If you buy a metrocard for the New York City subway you are using OS/2\. It
runs the kiosks. Not resurrected there, just never went away.

~~~
gcr
Wow! That's awesome.

Where did you learn this? I'd love to read more about MTA details like that.

------
rodgerd
I'm torn, because on the one hand it's great if OS/2 junkies can get a fix,
but on the other hand you want me, in the year 2016, to pay for an OS with: no
USB 3 support, no wireless networking, and a 32-bit kernel with no support for
> 4GB memory (and who knows what other shortcomings).

~~~
jpalomaki
I guess the target market is those who have some existings systems built on
top of OS/2.

------
madengr
I still remember being able to download at 28k in the background while playing
wolfenstein. Very cool. Windows 3.1 could never do that.

------
dobs_bob
Why?

~~~
mwfunk
Why not?

~~~
ams6110
Well, as a commercial endeavor, I would really have to wonder if there's
enough of a market to sustain a business. I'm sure there's the odd OS/2 system
still running here and there but nobody today is interested in expanding that
footprint. At best you'll sell upgrades to people who are still using it -- a
customer base that will only shrink over time.

If it were an open-source project, yeah "why not" is a fine answer.

~~~
Zardoz84
ATMs of Santander bank keeps running on OS/2

If you saw my face when I saw the OS/2 bootup screen on a ATM that just
rebooted when I was in front of it...

~~~
sixothree
You should have seen my face when my bank booted into Windows XP.

~~~
ams6110
Honestly for an ATM, DOS would be fine.

