While IBM’s OS/2 technically did die, its development was picked up again much later, first through eComStation, and later, after money issues at its parent company Mensys, through ArcaOS. eComStation development stalled because of the money issues and has been dead for years; ArcaOS picked up where it left off and has been making steady progress since its first release in 2017. Regardless, the developers behind both projects develop OS/2 under license from IBM, but it’s unclear just how much they can change or alter, and what the terms of the agreement are.
Anyway, ArcaOS 5.1.2 has just been released, and it seems to be a rather minor release. It further refines ArcaOS’ support for UEFI and GPT-based disks, the tentpole feature of ArcaOS 5.1 which allows the operating system to be installed on a much more modern systems without having to fiddle with BIOS compatibility modes. Looking at the list of changes, there’s the usual list of updated components from both Arca Noae and the wider OS/2 community. You’ll find the latest versions of of the Panorama graphics drivers, ACPI, USB, and NVMe drivers, improved localisation, newer versions of the VNC server and viewer, and much more.
If you have an active Support & Maintenance subscription for ArcaOS 5.1, this update is free, and it’s also available at discounted prices as upgrades for earlier versions. A brand new copy of ArcaOS 5.1.x will set you back $139, which isn’t cheap, but considering this price is probably a consequence of what must be some onerous licensing terms and other agreements with IBM, I doubt there’s much Arca Noae can do about it.
It’s free from AI!
I’d rather pay 139 bucks every couple of years for a slop-ad-tracking free operating system from a developer/publisher that doesn’t treat the customers as guinea pigs for whatever functionality/UI/UX experiment they feel like doing.
I want my operating systems to be glorified program managers. Let me launch programs. Keep the firewall/antivirus running OK. Manage network/device connections. And GET OUT OF THE WAY. I don’t turn the computer on to use Windows or Linux. I turn the computer on to get something done.
How is Linux on the same boat as windows?
I DO NOT put Linux into the same sewage plant as Windows. Not even close. Though I don’t have any love for Linux either after trying out more than a dozen distros I never loved it or fell into heavy like.
OS/2 on the other hand, I fell in love with the day that I saw IBM demonstrate it when I was lucky enough to work for a bank that got an invite and I had enough time so I went and was I ever glad.
At the time DOS and Win 3.1 were the top dogs in OSs (and remained so unfortunately for most of the rest of the world). But other people like me fell in LOVE with the beta of OS/2 2.0. Yes I had the double the amount of RAM in my computer but HEY, it could run 20 programs at the same time, though maybe slower individually, overall they were faster because most of every second I was typing it was running things in the background, which it would NOT be doing with DOS or Win 3.1 because I couldn’t trust the latter to keep from crashing while OS/2 just kept running and running and … well running.
YES, you can crash OS/2. But there isn’t an OS in this world that with just a little tinkering I can crash too including, Windows, Linux, BSD, Haiku (do you have fifteen years to name them all? I don’t but you get the idea.) If you are INTELLIGENT you can learn what crashes OS/2 which is not very much and avoid those crashes. Did I EVER have to think about that or work my way around crashes? In the nine years that I ran OS/2 it crashed TWICE. I remember each time because I was so SHOCKED when it happened.
Keep in mind that, and this is ALL AT THE SAME TIME I would be compiling code while writing other code while I had a WordPerfect document printing while a Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet was recalculating while I had FOUR modems connecting to remote computers on other networks at the same time with batch files the ultimately would connect to all 13 remote locations (more about that later) ALL AT THE SAME TIME and the programs never felt labored when using them when doing all these things. And NEVER did the modem connections get dropped with OS/2.
I was a bulletin board (it was a thing before the internet) looking for something else on IBM’s bulletin board when I saw this folder saying something like, “Use more than three modems at a time with OS/2” and I laughed because I was already using four.
But I looked at the folder and then read the readme file and it said the person had started work on a modem driver that could do two things. Make multiple modems work as one and also be able to use more than three modems. Again I laughed because I was already using four modems with a computer with two serial ports built into the motherboard and an adapter card with two serial ports.
As I read more he said that it was POSSIBLE to use MORE than four modems and he talked about that in the readme file where he thought you could use as many modems as you had serial ports. And yes, serial ports use hardware interrupts but that didn’t stop him.
There were both HARDware interrupts and SOFTware interrupts. The latter where the software dictates when something on the computer is interrupted in order to get something done and he took advantage of that, well was starting to and documented in his file in how he was try to do that.
Then he noted that he had gotten it to where he could make multiple modems act as one.
At the time my band did not have leased lines (always on like the internet to connect to remote sites, for anyone that doesn’t know what leased lines are) but used regular analog phone lines and modems to dial up remote sites.
The bank I worked for was a mortgage bank. The way the bank made most of its money (it took time for them to make this into a serious money stream) was to make loans to customers and then sell those loans to customers and then charge the investors who bought the loans a fee every money. Then we used that money that we got from the investor to make more loans and kept repeating that until the bank was worth more than one billion dollars back in the late 80s. Yes, we were small but still, a BILLION dollars!
The problem we had was getting all the information from the 13 Home Loan Centers to downtown where our Escrow and Investment departments were and their updates back out to the Home Loan Centers.
It was easy when the bank moved from using a mainframe to PCs and PC networks because the number of loans that we were processing wasn’t all that big. But in the next ten years the volume EXPLODED because interest rates were in the mid to upper teens so investors could make a lot of money.
Why didn’t the bank keep the loans? 1) Because most of the loans were Adjustable Rate Mortgages and the interest rates could drop at any moment. But fees were not based on the loan amount or the interest rate. They were a constant and the more loans that we could connect fees for collecting the money for the more the bank made.
And the more we made the more loans we processed which meant the more data we were sending to and from the HLCs (Home Loan Centers) and my boss and I, the only two programmers for the mortgage bank, were learning everything we could and then applying what we learned to Encrypt and Compress the data going in both directions so we were constantly looking for the fastest modems we could find and install and the fastest way to get that data transferred in both directions.
Are you starting to understand why I was so excited about OS/2 AND about what that guy was writing about in that readme file?
Over the following weeks I saw no updates to the readme file or the source code or the compiled modem driver on that bulletin board which had me disappointed.
However, the more times I read that readme file the more I didn’t care that I was already working fourteen hour days. I could spend another half hour one night seeing what I could do with his modem driver and his source code.
1) First I setup another OS/2 computer and took four modems and all the cables and everything I needed physically went to one of the HLCs and setup three more modems and then went back to my desk and back to my desk where I already had four modems connected to my OS/2 computer. I then went in on a weekend to test the part of his software where you could use four modems as one and I found that I lost about 10% speed from each modem for overhead but then he hadn’t optimized the code any … at least not the version he had put on the IBM bulletin board. The difference in overall time that it took to send all of the files to and from one location dropped to about half which meant that we could do close to twice the volume of loans and be able to get all the data sent and received …
I didn’t tell you WHEN we had to send and receive the data. It couldn’t START until after midnight after our backups to tape were done and we had to be done by 6:00 am when the first of the loan officers would sometimes go into work early. So we had about 5 ½ hours to send and receive ALL of the data to ALL thirteen locations.
Oh, and we couldn’t just send and receive it. Once the data was sent in both directions it had to be uploaded into the databases at each location with a batch file waiting for a file to be created basically saying the transfer was complete before the import of the updated data could start.
ALL of that had to be done by 6:00 am.
Which is why compressing the data and using as many modems as possible with an operating system that didn’t lose connections …
I didn’t talk about that.
Before OS/2 DOS was the most reliable OS for modem connections (Win 3.1 was a JOKE as it lost modem connections 8 TIMES the amount that DOS did, and DOS lost modem connections AT LEAST three times to each location. And when the loop in the batch file came around to restart to connection it had to figure out the last GOOD record that it transferred and then start up from there, appending to the file at the remote location. So OS/2 saved us a BUNCH of time just by not losing connections even it if didn’t help us in any other way.
Long story less long, I was able to take his source code AND TWO expansion/add-in cards each with three serial ports on them. Along with the two on the motherboard made EIGHT. YES, EIGHT! And I was able to use his notes and lots of trial and error to do multiple things.
1) Make EIGHT modems work with time slices on the computer to all work “at the same time”.
2) Make eight modems work as one.
3) Make pairs of modems act as one so four pairs of modems, each pair connecting to one remote site.
1) and 3) were the most important as that it what saved us between when I figured that out and when the bank FINALLY bought leased lines (okay, leased leased lines – confusing maybe?) so we didn’t have to use dial-up anymore.
Even with all the encrypting and compression and OS/2 using multiple modems I came close to having to set up a second OS/2 computer to connect to the 13 remote sites but I managed to make that one computer (which obviously got updated or replaced over ten years so it wasn’t ONE computer but you know what I mean) to do everything I would have had to use THIRTEEN DOS computers to do everything that ONE OS/2 computer did.
I did mention that I used modems during the day and I said we were transferring all that data at night. So let me clarify.
I didn’t want to drive all around the Pacific Northwest around the Puget Sound from close to Everett, WA to Silverdale, WA send program updates to sites. So during the day I would sent updates for our mortgage software, programs like WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3 and anything else that we had updates for along with batch files. And every day when people logged off, they DID log off every night, right? Not always. But when they did the log off process would cause as many programs to be updated as I had updates for and then the computers would reboot and when they logged in the next day they had no idea, unless something was obvious, that their computers had updated overnight. Except when someone hadn’t logged off and everyone else got something cool they hadn’t gotten. THEN they noticed and they made sure they logged off right then and waited for the update to finish and the computer to reboot, or they did when they were done for the night.
All of those updates were sent to all the HLCs during the day while I was coding, compiling, writing in WordPerfect, updating/recalculating spreadsheets, updating other things, and printing, with the things I wasn’t doing right in front of me would happen behind the scenes on my computer.
And NO, your Windows computer STILL can’t do everything at the same time that OS/2 could BACK IN THE 1980s and 1990s. Your computer is faster but if you still use Windows, you still have all the legacy “stuff” that stops you from doing “as much” as OS/2 can do.
And yes, your computer can do things mine can’t. But if you gave me a million dollars to use Windows and I HAD to use Windows instead of OS/2 (or Mac, or Linux, or Haiku, or BSD, or … to infinity, I wouldn’t take the million dollars to use Windows. And I programmed for and supported MS operating systems from 1983 until 2023 as my job for 40 years to make money to pay my mortgage and buy food and earn my retirement and everything else. But I didn’t enjoy even one second of it.
But I also programmed for the OSs that I listed PLUS MORE, part as part of my job (OS/2, Mac, Linux) for those and other OSs for the PURE ENJOYMENT of it that made my heart sing. But nothing like it sang for OS/2 and it still sings for OS/2 using IBM’s the eComStations and now Arca Noae’s “versions of OS/2”.
You think that Windows is fast. I’m laughing so hard right now that I’m almost choking. Because when it comes to speed, Windows is a beagle and OS/2 is Godzilla. But when Haiku is yet another major leap in speed compared to OS/2 it doesn’t have all the things that I NEED it to have.
And while you say that OS/2 doesn’t have everything you NEED? Are you truly happy in life? Does your OS/2 make you GIGGLE with glee once in a while at how fast it is? No? Maybe you are using the wrong OS. I know I’m not. At least not for me.