Submitted by Speaking of POWER – well, PowerPC – what about OS/2 Warp for PowerPC?
What was OS/2 Warp, PowerPC Edition like? An unfinished product, rough around the edges but simultaneously technically very interesting and advanced and showing promise. Even though the OS/2 PPC release wasn’t called beta, it is obvious that this is a beta level product (if even that in some respects). Many features are unfinished or completely missing (networking in the first place). The kernel level code doesn’t look much like production build and prints out quite a lot of debugging output on the serial console. The HPFS support was very unstable, and the stability of Win-OS/2 left a lot to be desired. There were too many clearly unfinished parts of the product (documentation, missing utilities etc.).
On the other hand a large portion of the system worked well. The user interface and graphics subsystem in general didn’t exhibit any anomalies. Multitasking was reliable and all things considered, responsiveness quite good for a 100MHz CPU and code that was not likely to have been performance tuned. The multimedia subsystem worked much better than I expected. Many things were much improved compared to Intel OS/2 — internationalization, graphics subsystem, updated console API and so on. The system seemed to have enough raw power, even if it wasn’t harnessed too well. Boot time was rather long but once up and running, the system was snappy (with some exceptions, notably the CD-ROM driver). To reach true production quality, the OS would have needed at least additional six months of intense development, probably more.
I’m a tad bit jealous some people manage to find the right hardware to run OS/2 for PowerPC, since it’s incredibly high on my list. At least I have this great article to read through every now and then, until the day I manage to get lucky myself.
I’m going to try to improve the RS/6k 40p fork of QEMU to the point where it runs all available OSes, including OS/2, which should hopefully fix the problem of hardware that runs it being rare and expensive. I’ll be closely documenting my work with YouTube videos and blog posts. However, I’m planning to work on getting Atari Unix to run under Hatari first (it should be a more straightforward fix; this isn’t my first time fixing emulator bugs that prevented an OS from booting, although last time was quite a while ago).
Can’t way to see your progress 🙂
This is the first I’ve heard of Atari Unix. So cool!
I worked for IBM for many years and worked for part of that in our compute centre. I was doing network and systems management for all sorts of stuff. We were looking after numerous Unix systems or various flavours AIX. SunOS, HP/UX etc also Windows servers, OS/2 Servers, MVS/zOS mainframes all sorts. One of the Network management platforms we ran was NetView and in particular the AIX version. Linux had not really been accepted at this point internally so we used either OS/2 or AIX desktops. I had both. The systems I used for AIX were from memory (this is 30 years ago!) PowerPC 860 desktops and we had a PowerPC laptops as well. We had access to all the beta software at the time like Win NT 4 PowerPC version and OS/2 PowerPC as well. It was fun to try these but the great failing was that there was no software to run on these platforms. I think a beta of Personal Comms for OS/2 did come out although I am a bit memory fogged there. The WinNT version seemed ready to go but in the end didn’t. AIX was great anyway and we needed X for the NetView interface so AIX it was.
The PowerPC laptops (cannot remember the number) were interesting but ultimately a waste of money as IBM stopped supporting them pretty quickly with AIX updates. These laptops looked like they were almost prototypes and not really ready for general use. The battery life was terrible and the performance was only ok. OS/2 the intel version on a Thinkpad was the best option (and I wish it had continued). Anyway those were fun times.
I have a vague recollection of having a crack at getting OS/2 running on a Power Mac G4 Quicksilver(7450 – 867) many years ago, for whatever reason that 867 sticks in the brain. I recall it needed a special hardware configuration for both Graphics and IDE/SCSI to boot and I was lucky enough to be given the cards to give it a crack, but I recall it being pretty flaky.