Linked by Michael Reed on Wed 22nd Nov 2006 18:23 UTC
OSNews, Generic OSes There are at this time, a number of what I would term 'OS re-creation projects' (OSRs) in active development. These are OSes that attempt, by varying degrees, to re-implement the features of another operating system. In this article, I'm going to explore some of issues surrounding projects of this type. In the second half of the article, I apply these observations and examine two example platforms (Amiga and OS/2) and the related re-creation OSes.
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RE: A little error...
by galvanash on Wed 22nd Nov 2006 20:27 UTC in reply to "A little error..."
galvanash
Member since:
2006-01-25

OS/2 almost never crashed as it features Protected Memory since the MS OS/2 1.X era.

Ran it for many years... Crashed? I can only remember once or twice. Lockups? All the f*%@ckin time until they fixed the SIQ, which didnt happen till Warp was a few years old. Is there a difference from the users perspective? Nope, sux either way. I did like the UI though - that and it ran 16-bit windows and DOS apps _really_ well.

Reply Parent Bookmark Score: 2

RE[2]: A little error...
by ronaldst on Wed 22nd Nov 2006 20:34 in reply to "RE: A little error..."
ronaldst Member since:
2005-06-29

Never had many lockups. Seen a few traps but never that many.

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RE[3]: A little error...
by galvanash on Thu 23rd Nov 2006 03:20 in reply to "RE[2]: A little error..."
galvanash Member since:
2006-01-25

Well to be fair the SIQ itself didn't cause lockups, buggy software did. My experience with lockups was more due to the software I was trying to run. In fact if you were a run-of-the-mill OS2 user back in the day, the odds are that the only OS2 native apps you ran were WPS and maybe a few utilities. Most people ran Windows and DOS apps to be honest. And if you didn't run native OS2 apps you would never run into the SIQ issue.

Anyway, if I remember correctly the 2 programs that caused the most trouble were Footprint Works (later IBM Works after IBM bought it for the release of Warp) and early versions of Lotus Smartsuite for OS2.

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RE[3]: A little error...
by rhyder on Thu 23rd Nov 2006 07:09 in reply to "RE[2]: A little error..."
rhyder Member since:
2005-09-28

There was something about Mozilla (circa 0.6) that seemed to make it trap for me. Also, there seemed to be a black art about finding exactly the right fixpack level for a stable machine.

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RE[2]: A little error...
by dylansmrjones on Wed 22nd Nov 2006 20:37 in reply to "RE: A little error..."
dylansmrjones Member since:
2005-10-02

I had some lockups with OS/2 2.1 - but that was probably due to my TSENG ET4000 graphic card (you know - the first serie generation - the one with the red screen bug).

It ran wonderfully smooth with only 4 MB of RAM. It could even "play" video (well... "fast" moving still-images ;)

I don't understand why he mentions drive letters. Windows uses drive letters too (and drive labels as well).

In regard to WPS I have to say that the template function and the general object oriented approach is something which should really be implemented in other OS'es. ASAP! (Gnome actually have some OS/2-like support for templates - it is just hidden away).

Edited 2006-11-22 20:39

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RE[3]: A little error...
by phoenix on Thu 23rd Nov 2006 04:26 in reply to "RE[2]: A little error..."
phoenix Member since:
2005-07-11

An even nicer feature of OS/2 was the "shadow copy" feature. Symlinks and shortcuts on steroids. You could make a shadow copy of an app, then move the original app, and the shadow would still point to it. Edit the shadow and you could change features of the original.

Something I've missed in every other OS I've tried since.

Reply Parent Bookmark Score: 2

RE[2]: A little error...
by lopisaur on Thu 23rd Nov 2006 06:39 in reply to "RE: A little error..."
lopisaur Member since:
2006-02-27

Yup, "a better DOS than DOS". I think it was John C. Dvorak who said that.
Warp was actually quite usable, Merlin (v4) kicked ass for it's time.
Anyone interested in it can go look for the eComstation LiveCD, that gives you an idea.

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