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Any OS/2 users or exusers here?

Caluser2000

Caluser2000

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Jan 3, 2010
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New Zealand
Just curious as to your experiances. Have used v3 and V4 in the past. It's interesting that it is still alive in the form of eComstation ,which after a long delay, version 2 has reach general release.
 
I've never really used OS/2. I think the main thing was that I couldn't get any video drivers for my old Aptiva to work under OS/2, but this was a problem on every OS I ran on that machine.
I should have a ThinkPad 760 soon so maybe I'll put OS/2 3 on it and mess with it more.
 
I had Warp ver. 3 for a while until I was essentially forced to switch to Winblows due to compatibility issues.

Really liked OS/2. Much smoother than Windows and loved the multiple desktops!

ecomstation? Haven't heard of it. Please elaborate.
 
I never used 1.x; but somehow managed to get signed up for the beta of 2.0. I remember going through ridiculous measures to get it installed on what was officially a below-spec machine. I had an IBM PS/2 model 30-286, with some funky custom 386 upgrade, the maximum 4 MB of RAM, and a 40 MB hard drive. Basically, this was a machine that was below the minimum specs, yet I managed to get it installed anyway. I used it on that machine solely to test, not to use as my day-to-day OS. When OS/2 2.1 came out, I got it and installed it on my main machine, a 486. That was my main OS up until Windows 95. I had a friend who stuck with OS/2 up until it's demise as a consumer OS, though.

In more recent years, I got a PS/2 Model 77, and presently have OS/2 2.0, 2.1, and Warp 4 all installed on different partitions.
 
Yes, I used it extensively in the late 80's early 90's. There weren't that many native apps written for it though. Since it ran Windows v3 applications better than windows(fewer system crashes, most people used a combination of both Windows,DOS and OS/2 apps. I worked in an analytical lab that used a HP 1000 A series data acquisition system. I used WRQ Reflections terminal emulation software (for Windows) to connect to it. Also used IBM's C Set and VisualAge OS/2 compilers which I really liked. For a Word Processor I also used DeScribe for OS/2.

I usually set up OS/2 on the IBM PS/2's I have that are capable of running it.

There was a Hobbes OS/2 cd put out at one time with a lot of OS/2 stuff on it.

Note: There was an OS/2 version of CorelDraw! that was a total flop. Horrible piece of s**t. The windows version worked far better.
 
I recently installed Warp 3 Connect on my ThinkPad 755CD. The OS runs fine, but I was unable to get networking configured with my PCMCIA ethernet card - it causes the system to crash on startup. Would love to get it working so I can shoot a YouTube video of it in action.
 
I used to use OS/2 (Warp 3, Warp 4, Warp Server for e-Business) as my primary OS during the second half of the 90's. I was bored with pure DOS, I loathed Windows 3.x/9x, Windows NT was horribly slow and very picky about hardware, and Linux was still pretty immature.

So I found OS/2 to be the best OS of that era: moderate hardware requirements, pretty good availability of device drivers, pretty good stability, pretty good DOS/Windows compatibility, pretty good Internet connectivity, and pretty good portability of Unix software (EMX+GCC, later also XFree86/OS2). I can say OS/2 was The Best Of Both Worlds: the power of Unix without the need to abandon DOS.

Unfortunately, sometime around 2000 IBM ceased to develop OS/2, support for new hardware was getting poorer and poorer, I totally went into networking so Linux became a must for me, and even for a desktop the rapidly-developing Linux became better than the hardly-maintained OS/2. Yes, I know about eComStation, but it's still a 32-bit OS, ie. pretty much obsolete by now.
 
I was an OS/2 developer starting with 1.1 and kept up right through the first version of Warp. By that time, my only real customers were a couple of ATM service organizations and IBM PSD. I still have MASM and MSC in their OS/2 versions.

I recall that the development kit for 2.0 came in a box that would give a UPS delivery driver a hernia. The development documentation was nonpareil. If the docs said something worked a certain way, you could count on it. Very unlike Windows' SDK and DDK.

Recently, I stumbled over this article. It sounds far-fetched to me, but maybe the PM interface on Linux might make some sense, rather than the bloated ones we now are gifted with.

I think I still have Warp installed on a partition somewhere and I do have a LiveCD of it somewhere. But I don't use it for anything anymore.
 
I was a rabid, rabid OS/2 user. A good friend bought 3.0 the week it came out, showed it to me, and I immediately went out and bought it. Windows 3.1 was a huge step down from Amiga multitasking, but with OS/2 running on my PC, I didn't miss my Amiga as much. The user interfaces were different, but at least the capabilities were similar. When I tried to use Windows 3.1 the way I used my Amiga, I'd crash the system hard very frequently--maybe not once a day, but several times a week. With OS/2, I had maybe three hard crashes that required a reboot. It was nearly as stable as Windows XP SP2 was, but in 1994.

When I worked selling computers at retail, I actually managed to sell OS/2 to a few customers. Especially after IBM let us install OS/2 on one of the in-store Aptivas. I'd just open 16 DOS windows and do a DIR /S C:\ in each of them, then do the same thing on a Windows 3.1 machine. People could watch how badly the 3.1 box crawled, while the OS/2 machine just casually and smoothly juggled all 16 disk-intensive tasks.

I ran OS/2 as my main operating system on my home PCs until well into 1998, and I multi-booted for a long time even after that. I ran 3.0, and upgraded to 4.0 after 4.0 came out. I ran it on several different machines over the years, including a 40 MHz 386, a 486SX2/66 (yes, SX), a Pentium-75, and a Cyrix 6x86MX. The college I attended ran OS/2 on its servers and most of its workstations, and my first non-food, non-retail job was installing network cards, memory, and OS/2 on IBM PC 330s and 350s. My first real, full-time job with benefits was running that network. They'd been running OS/2 since version 0.9. But, sadly, software requirements eventually forced them to migrate to NT. I built the school's first Windows NT 4.0 servers. I don't recall whose job it was to finally shut down the last OS/2 server standing. I argued in favor of running the print servers on OS/2 even after the migration, since its hardware requirements were lower than NT 4 and, frankly, I think the later versions of OS/2 were more stable than NT4 was. But the professor who was in charge of our shop at the time had a bit of an anti-IBM chip on his shoulder so he didn't allow that.

A few years ago, I dug out a 266 MHz P2, loaded it up with a bunch of RAM, and loaded OS/2 4.0 on it. It absolutely screamed. The machine didn't have enough power to run even NT4 decently anymore, but OS/2 turned it into a dream machine. I think I had difficulty tracking down reasonably current builds of Firefox and Openoffice for it, otherwise I probably would have kept it around.

A lot of people badmouth OS/2, but those who actually used it, and who actually ran more than one program at a time with it, liked it. The reason was simple: Nothing else available at the time did what OS/2 did. It provided cheap PCs with real pre-emptive multitasking like an Amiga or a Unix workstation, but you could run your Windows 3.1 applications and your DOS games on it. For that matter, some of the DOS games I liked to play ran faster and smoother under OS/2 than they did under DOS. Windows NT 3.1 and 3.51 could run your Windows 3.1 apps with pre-emptive multitasking, but they didn't have nearly the hardware support OS/2 did, and NT didn't even begin to have OS/2's DOS compatibility. People talked a lot about Windows NT in 1994 and 1995, and used it as an excuse to not use OS/2, but I only ever ran into two people who actually ran NT prior to version 4. A couple of cutting-edge people running NT came and asked me for help when I worked retail when they couldn't get certain pieces of hardware working in NT, but I wasn't able to help them. Funny thing was, in most cases whatever it was they wanted DID work in OS/2, at least to some extent.

OS/2 didn't have nearly the hardware support that Windows 3.1 or Windows 95 had, but if you wanted a true, fully 32-bit OS, it wasn't until version 4 that NT started to pull ahead of OS/2.

If you haven't figured it out yet, I really miss OS/2.
 
I used it up till OS/2 Warp 3. My issue was with DOS extender based games like DOOM. They simply wouldn't run no matter what I did. I loved it to death as it made my 386DX40 run beautifully despite only having 8MB RAM.

I recently tried eComStation and I will say it's extremely fast. However, hardware support is virtually non-existent.
 
I got into running OS/2 when Warp was coming out. I ran the beta of it and ended up being a gamma tester for it. (Dealing with IBM was amusing in those days, one of the people I worked with could not received external email so I had to fax them a lot of stuff). IBM actually got its act together for OS/2 around that time, but it was too late in the game really in many ways. I've never really been thrilled with Windows since then and run OS X and Linux most of the time. It has always been rumored that IBM had support for 32-bit Windows applications working in the lab, which might have kept the desktop version alive longer.

In retrospect, however, IBM wouldn't have stayed in the game much longer because they have been steadily moving away from having anything to do with desktop computing, as opposed to servers, and I think they sensed that Linux would gain much more traction there.

I have not tried to run it in a long time, partly because patching it to support more recent hardware is a pain. If eCommStation were free I would definitely try it.
 
I upgraded a phone response system that used OS/2 1.0 which also involved DBase import routines for data brought in on 9-track. Isn't it great, one of my best programming efforts and I can't use it on a resume because it involves 3 mostly dead technologies.

I continued using OS/2 through version 4. IBM sent me a copy of the Extended Edition which got me through many SQL projects since the DB/2 documentation was superior to the Sybase and MS SQL manuals at that time.
 
Chuck(G) said:
The LiveCD is free.
Click to expand...

I do actually have that CD and have ran it a bit in a Paralells VM (I believe it starts up OK there but crashes after a while). Maybe I've been reluctant to try it more out of fear I'd like it and then end up having to buy it! The interesting thing to me is how popular OS/2 was in Europe, particularly Germany, compared to the U.S. I think the same is true of the Amiga and almost any other alternative to Windows.
 
I actually have a original boxed set of OS/2 v 2.10 or something (Can't remember the version number now) here at home, but if I recall one of the setup disks are faulty, so I haven't been able to test it out, which is a bummer. Would like to see how it runs and fiddle a bit with it.

Chuck - I will be checking out that link you posted though, thanks :)
 
OS/2 was popular in a number of niche markets, such as bank ATMs. It was also deployed as part of many AS400 installations (the AS400 ran OS400, the remote stations ran OS/2). I suspect that there's still quite a population of systems running OS/2 out there somewhere.
 
Sweet. Thanks for the link, haven't seen the free livecd before. For Curtis (though certainly has googled it by now) EcomStation was what became of OS/2 v5. I'm honestly not sure about the whole story behind it (whether a contract company was developing it for IBM or if IBM dropped the product and someone else ran with it). Surprisingly IBM *did* keep patching OS/2 Warp 4 for quite a while after they stopped selling it so there are a bunch of fixes you can apply for things like hard drive size, etc. I had a horrible time getting mine on the network, ended up finding a great group of folks (os2ecs group) on irc and later as a promoter for both os/2 and ecomstation who helped me diagnose that my nic was actually to blame.

I only ran it for fun for a little while but knew several BBS/SysOps here in Austin who ran VBBS and Maximus on OS/2. The Maximus was quite a large BBS board with multiple lines and at one point was the largest BBS in central texas. He of course when push came to shove went to linux and then the internet boom followed which the board was eventually taken offline :-( The other system went to Windows but was never quite as stable as it's os/2 predecessor. Still that's what I'd prefer to get back up was the board running under os/2 with telnet but I've had huge performance issues when I was trying syncronet. I thought it wasn't working but later realized it was taking over 60 seconds before I got a login prompt.. yuck.

I tried the same with ecomstation on a faster system but still had the huge connection delays. I wish it was cheap and had better driver support or similar wine support. If I could just do the same tasks I do already under Windows I'd be happy to move to another OS but that includes play videos, host files to windows systems, and a few directx games.

Honestly though I've never heard anyone badmouth it. Maybe I only talk to computer enthusiast types heh
 
Back in the day I purchased 2.11 and returned it when I found out my IIt VLB card was not supported. I purchased Warp 3 when it came out and barely used it, went back to Windows. In the last few years I have been snagging all the OS/2 versions and apps I can get to run on my PS/2 systems (version 1.1EE to Warp 4 plus a bunch of apps).

The original versions were good DOS multitaskers but had limited support (unless you had a PS/2 system which is why I bothered to try it again).
 
At some point during the 90s, IBM mailed out a freebie CD called "The OS/2 Developer's Connection". I have no idea where IBM obtained their mailing list, but I have the CD. It was Warp 3 on it as well as documentation and a pile of tools. One nasty inconvenience was that, to load it, you had to create two 1.44MB boot floppies ("Kicker 1" and "Kicker 2"). Once done, the thing would install Warp very smoothly, but the organization of things on the CD was a little haphazard.
 
mark66j said:
The interesting thing to me is how popular OS/2 was in Europe, particularly Germany, compared to the U.S. I think the same is true of the Amiga and almost any other alternative to Windows.
Click to expand...

Pretty much. Amiga, definitely. For that matter, DR-DOS did better in Europe than it did here too. Less Microsoft influence abroad in the 1990s than there was here, perhaps?

Chuck(G) said:
OS/2 was popular in a number of niche markets, such as bank ATMs. It was also deployed as part of many AS400 installations (the AS400 ran OS400, the remote stations ran OS/2). I suspect that there's still quite a population of systems running OS/2 out there somewhere.
Click to expand...

Most likely in banking. In 1998, a banker wanted to talk to me about a job when he learned I knew OS/2. I probably should have let him talk, in retrospect, although the path my career took looked right at the time.

I don't see as many ATMs with the telltale signs of running text-mode OS/2 anymore as I used to. Could be the hardware is finally wearing out.

barythrin said:
I only ran it for fun for a little while but knew several BBS/SysOps here in Austin who ran VBBS and Maximus on OS/2.
Click to expand...

Starting with version 2.0, OS/2 became really popular with the local sysops for BBSs. Sometimes the motivation was to get a 386 or 486 and use it both for personal use and for running the BBS on. Seems to me I saw that as often as I saw someone running multi-line setups. Prior to OS/2 2.0, you'd see sysops with a 286 or 386sx for personal use, and a low-end 286 or a turbo XT for the BBS. But a big, popular BBS could tax an XT's abilities.
 
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