Submitted by There is this interesting article about running different versions of OS/2 on VirtualBox. It offers tips for each different version, disk image conversion information and prebuilt images.
When I started looking into getting it working on a virtual machine, I had a hard time finding some crucial information and files, there were steps in the install process that were not explained in the few guides I could find, it wasn’t clear to me which versions could be installed, and some of the install files were in formats I couldn’t read.
Now that I’ve figured out all those problems I’ve created a guide with specific instructions on how to get all major versions working on VirtualBox, complete with sound, video and network in some cases, and you’ll find those guides below. I also created prebuilt virtual machines you can just download and press play on.
You owe it to yourself to play with OS/2. It’s an amazingly fascinating operating system with some great ideas and features.
I kinda miss the days when I cut my teeth using the C Set++ compiler on OS/2 v1.3 for ATMs. Oh how the OSs and dev suites have changed.
I just never connected with OS/2. I was a beta tester for Warp and while yes it was very stable compared to Windows, I didn’t like the fit and finish of Windows… for me YMMV. But my interest in operating systems is pretty pragmatic. I love learning about interesting architectures but at the end of the day I am using one to get work done, so I tend to prefer OS’s that let me work in the apps I need without virtualizing a different OS or dual booting. That was never OS/2 for me
The 2.1 screen shots always bring back memories on my P100 16MB RAM. Was great.
I’ve been trying out eCS 2.1 lately and can concur with the stability concerns. It’s hard to pinpoint though. I’d call it “fragile” more than unstable. After it locks up you often think “maybe I shouldn’t have done that”. eCS and it’s replacement (ArcN) are nearly semi relevant and usable today. I have it on modest hardware with Firefox, Thunderbird and Libreoffice but to get there is a drama. Patching old issues a drama. Finding basic guides and basic information futile. The community is micro compared to anything else these days. Can be very frustrating which is a shame because I think compared to Haiku (for example) it can be actually usable and can have a use case if software is ported or dragged along (updated that is) into the present.
This https://homepage.cs.uri.edu/~thenry/resources/unix_art/ch03s02.html is from 2003 and puts all major OSs in context. It’s only missing Android and iOS, So I guess a lot has changed …. :
Iapx432,
I think you meant to post this on the article about microsoft appropriating technology?
Interesting diagram, but it seems rather biased to me. Ataris, commadores, bbcs aren’t even listed. BSDs aren’t even on there. The author mentions clumping them in with linux, but that’s a monolithic stretch and doesn’t acknowledge the contributions to both windows and macos. Some of those lines ought to be bidirectional too. I think to some extent we need to acknowledge that software development doesn’t happen in isolation, we’re all building on each other’s work.
It’s a simplistic look at it.
Also, despite their great pioneering work in the hardware field, most 8-bit micro’s didn’t run any sort of significant operating system. Most 8 bit micros ran BASIC, which was both the primary programming language, and the OS. It wasn’t until the 16-bit era that microcomputer OSes became more than a shell for BASIC.
Thinks like AmigaOS, Atari TOS, and RiscOS didn’t really become a thing until the late 80’s and early 90’s, and much of their legacy is left dead in the water, with little relevance to modern day technologies. Sure, AmigaOS is a minor exception, given it is still in development, but most of these systems are largely irrelevant today, and didn’t really share their OS DNA outside of their respective brands.
Interesting is the inclusion of VMS, however it’s design similarities to Windows NT are well documented. However, VMS proper has largely been discontinued today, and now stands as more of a legacy relic of a bygone era (much like ArcaOS and OS/2) than a popular OS.
The123king,
Ok, I can give you that, but the absence of BSDs is not excusable by the same logic. To mix it with linux is misleading at best, but even if we allow that the author looses credibility by ignoring the DNA contributions from that lineage into both macos and windows. And I find it kind of unforgivable that one of the most significant sharing of DNS is between windows and OS/2 (beyond DOS), which doesn’t get represented at all.
So IMHO the OS DNA flowchart is an interesting idea, but it needs to be executed better. I don’t know why the author didn’t use horizontal timelines, which is the normal convention with the length of boxes representing the full lifespan of those platforms. Oh well.
Oops…
s/DNS/DNA/
Android is Linux with custom userspace.
iOS is macOS (Mac OS X) with a fancy GUI.
They don’t really need to be added.
I did mean to post here to let people see OS2 in context and for the comments on what was innovative or less so in each OS. Comments on the process / thread creation overhead and central themes of different OSs are interesting as well. I always considered the original MacOS to be a mess under the hood, And of course it was, because it was a GUI focused OS. So it did that right and cared less about other aspects. .I respect it more now. Although I had a friend who worked in software test at Apple back in the day and he said that they had forgotten how some sections of the OS worked and so had to just treat those parts like a black box.
Agreed the article left out some classics, like Amiga. And agreed it may go too far on cleaning up the lines connecting the dev threads. I think histories always smooth the past.
OS/2 was difficult to emulate before x86 CPU had proper virtualisation support because it used all of x86 weird stuff like the 4 different protection levels.
You mean it took full advantage of the features x86 offered?
x86 has many protection rings, and they are well documented. However, in the fight for portability, and because many CPU’s don’t have the same granularity of protection rings, most “Portable” OSes on x86 actually don’t use the rings properly, and just use the most protective and least protective rings. Windows NT, Linux, and i’m pretty sure macOS are all designed to be “portable”, therefore were designed with the simple 2 ring protection system.
OS/2 was designed from the ground up to only work on x86. It’s no surprise to find it uses all the tricks you can on an x86 processor.
Is it any more secure? Probably not.
Does it perform better? Probably, but that mattered more in the 90’s than it does today
Is it a pain in the ass to rewrite for modern systems and other architectures? Yes. Big Yes. I bet the code is like spaghetti.
In fact, it used only three, not the four.
OS/2 was the first operating system that I LOVED. Note that I started with PCs in 1981 with an Atari 400 (4k of RAM – too little) and then an Atari 800 (8k of RAM – still too little).
Anyway, I worked in Seattle at the time and the bank I worked for had a check sorter that ran OS/2 2.1 for stats and maybe other things. I had never seen it before but I was the “PC Guy” for the bank and the guy from IBM was having problems with OS/2 2.1. Some suggested that he come and get me and see if I could help. I looked at what was happening and between the IBM guy and myself we figured it out and I got intrigued by the OS which was supposed to be the next big thing after DOS, which is why is was called OS/2. Too bad it didn’t catch on. It was all IBM’s fault.
I fell head over heals in love when I somehow ended up with an invite to see a demo of OS/2 2.0 beta. At the end of the demo I asked for a copy of the beta and they handed me a box with about 31 3.5″ “floppies” in it.
I went back to work and found a PC (regular intel CPU, not PPC) and installed OS/2 on it. It was really slow. Then I “borrowed” RAM from other computers and installed it and WHOLY S*** BATMAN, OS/2 came ALIVE.
This was before Windows ’95 which a low end clone as far as looks went with prettier colors. But Win ’95 was no OS/2 which I could configure each DOS, Win ’32 and OS/2 program’s memory and pretty much every setting you could think of.
I could bore people for weeks talking about all the things that I did in OS/2 that I never was able to replicate in any other OS. Including the fact that I was IBM’s bulletin board (those things we had before the internet) when I was digging around the edges of what IBM would let us see and I ran into a not fully functional serial port driver code that allowed you, if you were willing the time to debug and flesh out the code, to use multiple modems as if it were one.
It took me a couple of weeks to get three serial ports with three modems (they had to be exactly the same) to work as one as long as there was another computer on the “other side” running OS/2 with the same software with three serial ports and three modems.
Later I found an off brand 8 serial port card that you plugged into a PCI slot in the computer with the serial ports sticking out of the pc. It had to be one the last PCI slit or it would interfere with you plugging in cables for the other PCI cards like video and audio and so forth.
I never expected to get all eight modems working but I wanted to see how many I could get to work. I took me maybe a year, due to me working twelve hour days without spending time to code for the serial card, to write and debug the code.
Then one night on a Saturday night when I was at work upgrading servers, I got all eight serial ports with 8 modems to work connecting them to eight phone lines on each end.
I would watch the traffic increase or decrease as I enabled and disabled different serial ports and therefore modems, code which I put it for debugging but it worked great for testing too.
I was jumping up and down and screaming with joy at finally getting it working. It was absolutely amazing! The only downside that I had nobody there with me that year to work on this with and share in my joy.
The bank I worked for had branches without leased phone lines and the more business we had at the branches the harder it had become to write software to compress data to transfer it between, to and from, the main office and the branches. Being able to put OS/2 computers on both sides and run batch files to push and pull files with eight modems would simnifically speed up our transfer of data and get us done a lot earlier in the night which helped a lot with my stress.
Before OS/2 we had seven DOS computers that ran all night calling up each brand and pushing and pulling data between them and headquarters. Seven because that is about double what it took to send and receive between all the branches and because just in case a DOS computer crashed, which was too often, we needed other computers to check if other branches completed the transfer and if not, if it showed that the transfer had stopped or not.
Each computer was responsible for multiple branches on their own, connecting one at a time to different branches. When any DOS computer finished all of its “normal” duties it then was responsible for checking to make sure that all its “sister” branches had all their data pushed and pulled. We had code to verify each “chunk” of data and we could very quickly check to see if a branch “stalled” and if it did, one of the sister DOS computer’s job was to take over and finish.
I started setting up duplicate OS/2 computers at each branch with eight modems attached to each OS/2 computer with one of those 8 port expansion cards. Not only was OS/2 FAR, FAR, ***F***A***R*** more reliable than DOS, well these OS/2 2.0 (and later) computers never crashed on me. Not once. And if I somehow had a phone line disconnect during the middle of the push and pull of data I was able to dial the modem back up and have it join in again on the data transfer.
I had it setup for on over half of the smaller branches that didn’t have leased phone lines which still added up to a lot of data and money if it didn’t get done.
Instead of seven DOS machines I had two OS/2 machines at headquarters and I was able to transfer all the data 78% faster with those two calling up those branches than it took for those seven DOS machines. The OS/2 machines had double the RAM but otherwise were the exact same models of computers.
I also ran OS/2 at home where I was able to play Links golf for DOS at higher resolution and faster frame rates than DOS computers while running the game in DOS boxes on OS/2. I played with the DOS settings, especially memory but other settings too, until Links just flew on that computer. I was so pissed at Links for selling out to Microsoft that I stopped buying anymore courses from them. I still have all the versions of OS/2 and Links for DOS with arms reach and I reach out and stroke both OS/2 and Links boxes and CDs.
I also found that I could run Lotus 1-2-3 for DOS or Win 3.1 up to 600+ faster in OS/2 in a DOS or Win 3.1 box than what it ran on DOS or Win 3.1 native box. Plus it was wasn’t just rock solid, it was as solid as a solid block of steel. So I started installing OS/2 on DOS and Win 3.1 boxes after doubling the RAM and putting a Win 3.1 shell on top of OS/2 and telling people it was a special version of Win 3.1. They liked it so much because it just worked that they started asking where they could buy it. I told them it was for commercial use only because I didn’t want to start a business supporting OS/2 at this point because there were rumblings that IBM was going to s***can OS/2.
There have been only two OSs that I’ve ever “loved” and the first one was OS/2 and the second was BeOS. I’m super excited about the future of Haiku. And if I can get OS/2 and BeOS running on Mac OS X (which I like, but don’t love but it is the best option for me – Windows sucks big time as it can’t stay up and running for at least a year without have to reboot – how pathetic). Anyway, if I can get them running on top of Mac OS X, I mean MacOS, it will be the best day of my life.
I just wish that I could have a box with those eight port serial expansion cards to run OS/2 in still as well as all the muscle memory of how I made everything work great in OS/2….