Thinking of putting OS2 Warp 4 on my Model 70

Greetings All:

I am thinking of putting OS2 Warp 4 on my Model 70, I am sure it will not be a problem from the standpoint of running it on that machine for the OS itself. I will need to find a SCSI CD-ROM to use external to hook to my SCSI card... have not started on that quest yet. But I am sure that it will be fairly easy to come by a unit (still welcome a PM if someone has an extra one lying around).

The question is as follows, I would want to put WP 6 on the machine and I have ProComm Plus 2 for Windows, IIRC this did run fine on Windows 3.11 and so I would think it would be fine under OS/2 but would like to know if there are any issues that I might look for.

The main use of the PS/2 for my purposes is to do serial comms and some DOS type stuff...though as I remember, OS/2 basically runs DOS stuff fine too.

Anyhow, advice welcome.

"OS/2 2.0 was touted by IBM as "a better DOS than DOS and a better Windows than Windows".[SUP][20][/SUP] For the first time, OS/2 was able to run more than one DOS application at a time. This was so effective that it allowed OS/2 to actually run a modified copy of Windows 3.0, itself a DOS extender, including Windows 3.0 applications."

I have to agree with this statement. I used OS/2 at work and it was much better at running DOS and Windows 3.0.

WordPerfect 6 (DOS or Windows) should work as well as they do under DOS or Windows 3.1 respectively. I used Procomm Plus (DOS) under OS/2 for a lot of my communication activity. Procomm Plus for Windows worked fine under OS/2. I don't recall using Procomm Plus 2 for Windows under OS/2 and I can't remember if it needed any vxds for its TCP/IP support.

Serial comms: YES. Takes a little work to get the right settings though.
DOS apps: Very few won't run, mostly ones using early DOS extenders
Windows apps: A lot more won't work. Ones that rely of vxds or Win32 fail. Whole bunches of strange applications that did clever window reclassing tricks to modify other windows or simulate cascading menus often face problems with OS/2.

The 1996 edition of Warp 4 was the perfect platform to run the software of 1994.

What exactly will there be over running Warp 4 instead of Warp 3 on a 386? Pardon me for being dense here but Warp 4 is a pretty late OS unless it was more efficient than say windows 95.

Warp 4 on a model 70 will be painfully slow. It is a pretty large OS. Better to run Warp 3 as Next mentioned. Or OS/2 2.10. Unless you have a Memory card and an "A" series 70 your max onboard RAM would be 6 MB. "A" series onboard is good to 8 MB.

Chromedome45 said:

Warp 4 on a model 70 will be painfully slow. It is a pretty large OS. Better to run Warp 3 as Next mentioned.

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If your Model 70 has a 386 processor, then Warp 3 would be the choice. Warp 4's minimum requirement is a 486 33Mhz.

How many pins on the SCSI on the backside? Might be able to locate an external SCSI drive locally.

I have OS/2 2.1 running on my PS/2 56SX which is a 386. It is painfully slow - as in I actually get bored waiting for it.
Putting OS/2 Warp on a 386 or 486 sounds horrifying - my Pentium 75 when it was new in early 95 ran OS/2 Warp 3 and that was no speed daemon.

Yes and that is running on a 386sx. Which is a little slower than a 386 DX. But still going to be slow unless you try to get it onto a mid grade Pentium. 133-200 Range.

Chromedome45 said:

Yes and that is running on a 386sx. Which is a little slower than a 386 DX. But still going to be slow unless you try to get it onto a mid grade Pentium. 133-200 Range.

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Yeah and that is only version 2, I can't even imagine Warp 3 or 4 on similar hardware.

SpidersWeb said:

I have OS/2 2.1 running on my PS/2 56SX which is a 386. It is painfully slow - as in I actually get bored waiting for it.
Putting OS/2 Warp on a 386 or 486 sounds horrifying - my Pentium 75 when it was new in early 95 ran OS/2 Warp 3 and that was no speed daemon.

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It's not too traumatic on higher end 486s with decent cache and ram. I've mentioned before one of my 486DX2/66 with 16 megs of ram runs v3 Connect. To put things in some perspective it's no slower than starting up XP on this P4 box (the 486 has a slow hdd) and once the desktop is up it's generally not much slower than win/wfw 3.x doing the pointy and clicky thing. Certainly a lot quicker the Xwindows on similar spec machine with 64 megs of ram-don't ask It'll interesting to see how the 486 box with Windows 95 I won on TM compares.



irishmike I'd just be sticking with dos and wfw. This combo runs fine on my generic 386DX25 clone. It'll eliminate the extra overhead required to run OS/2. In saying that you wont know until you've given it a shot. Tezza installed Os/2 v2.1 on his Model 70 http://www.classic-computers.org.nz/blog/2009-09-27-restoring-a-ps2-70.htm