ArcaOS: Using Modern OS/2 - Install and Review

What most don't realize is that OS/2 bears a large amount of credit for the internet as we know it. If you recall, Bill Gates downplayed the internet and took the position that the future was in private networks like CompuServe, Prodigy, and AOL. This is why MS created MSN, to compete with those companies. Originally, the follow-on to Win 3.1 was to be Windows 93. But then a funny thing happened - IBM started releasing beta versions of OS/2 with build in TCP/IP and a web browser. The beta testers loved it and Microsoft took notice. They had to push out the release of the new Windows while they developed a TCP/IP stack and a browser. With each new beta release, IBM added new stuff and MS was playing catch-up. Once IBM had finalized OS/2 Warp, Windows 93 was now Windows 95. Without OS/2, the online world wold be very different.

Back in the day I ran my multi user (2 via phone line and one local) BBS on OS/2. It was incredibly stable and had amazing multi-tasking. Still have the floppy backups of my BBS.

It's probably worth pointing out that ArcaOS isn't a new operating system that enables you to run OS/2 applications, it is OS/2 (based on Warp 4.52), licensed from IBM, with additional software, drivers and a massively improved installer piled on to limp it along on modern hardware. You could think of it as an OS/2 distro. The multi-core support is the original Symmetrical Multiprocessing pack introduced with OS/2 2.11. Most of the interface is either straight OS/2, or add-on software that has been bundled, lightly skinned with a theme that isn't quite as 1990's. The reason the "Start" button says "X Button" when you hover over it is because it's part of an open source WPS enhancer called XWorkplace.

I remember using OS/2 back in 1993 - it was ahead of its time, and it did run DOS games very well - I remember spending hours with the Icon Editor (it doesn't appear to have changed much) making custom icons for all the games we had. One of the reasons we had to get rid of it was perhaps the fact that it ran DOS games too well as one of my brothers (aged about 2 at the time) figured out how to run a dozen games at once, bringing the mighty 486 to its knees. I would also imagine that him dropping files into the Shredder didn't help much either.

Fun fact, OS/2 was also a popular OS for ATMs in the 90s because it was more reliable than DOS or Windows, and IBM already had major contracts with banks and early payment networks for their mainframes so it made a lot of sense to use the same vendor and operating systems that had a lot of synergy. That and IBM had close ties to NCR and Diebold, the main manufacturers of ATMs and POS machines, another market IBM software dominated at the time. Sometimes you still spot one with a failed boot screen in the wild, but they've probably mostly all been replaced, unlike the IBM cash registers that it seems like every big box/department store retailer still uses to this day...

Some will say it's the Workplace Shell but IMO the most important advancement of OS/2 was its MVDM (Multiple Virtual Dos Machine). No other OS, modern or not, has anything quite like it. I took it for granted earlier when OS/2 was my main OS.

I supported OS/2 for IBM in its heyday. One bug that was difficult to nail down was Thinkpads crashing on boot. Disabling the sound driver was a work around. Eventually a casual comment about having left a music CD in the player was the needed clue. The bootstrap assumed that **any** CD was a an OS and tried to boot from it! Ah, the good old days...

Too many memories. OS/2 should've become the defacto os in the world.

I love to see coverage of anything related to OS/2. I was a beta tester of OS/2 Warp back in the day, even then the writing was on the wall that its days were numbered.

Man, OS/2 was so good. I never installed Windows 95 and jumped from DOS to OS/2 for its multi-tasking capabilities. It was literally the ONLY consumer operating system that could run a good number of games AND maintain a solid connection to either a BBS or the internet in the background with active downloads and not drop. It was only until Windows 98 SE that I switched over to Windows and I would say OS/2 was still overall the superior OS. Not until Windows 2000 would I consider Windows the superior product.

I used OS/2 Warp in high school. My father was a huge proponent of it. I loved it. I still played all of my DOS games with it. I loved it.

I was an actual system installer and user of OS2 in the beginning. I used REX often as it was also the development language for IBM VM/CMS. Inside every IBM Mainframe computer was a PC running OS2 which was used to configure VM and MVS partitions as it booted up all these "virtual machines". I retired from administering some of these around 2001 and I know it was still working this way.

The biggest issue I have sometimes with reviewing 'alternative' operating systems is that they are inevitably compared with Windows and usually along the lines of 'this is how Windows does it - anything else is weird or unusual'. Especially with legacy operating systems or operating systems which have a lot of heritage. If the point was to attract Windows users, maybe that would make sense, but things like ArcaOS have to pay homage to their history because that's their target audience. Dan is right, a lot has to do with muscle memory but one has to be careful not to confuse that with poor or illogical design versus what we expect to be 'normal' now. Clearly ArcaOS is unlikely to attract many people who aren't aware of it's OS/2 legacy but that's not their demographic.

I remember getting a copy of OS/2 Warp 3 from my wife's command in the Navy, and I loved it enough to buy version 4 later on. It ran my BBS better than it ran in DOS, and it was really smooth compared to anything else at the time. I don't know if ArcaOS is $100+ nice, but if there was ever a sub $50 version I'd be compelled to check it out.

This was a very good video and it was an interesting look at this unique OS. I'd also really like to see a video like this one for AROS as well, and actually, I'm rather surprised there hasn't already been one yet.

I worked for IBM Endicott in the late 90's and used Warp at work. I purchased a copy from a company sale and used it for a time on my personal machine. It was pretty cool when Warp 4 came out with OpenGL support, and we had that on some of our machines, but then we actually got other machines with Windows 98 IIRC.

REXX was a scripting language common to all IBM products, not just OS/2; it existed on mainframes, AIX UNIX boxes, AS/400 etc. Probably another reason OS/2 was popular on ATMs, since you had a common scripting language across the ATM and the back-end mainframe. I was a keen OS/2 user for a few years; I used it as a development environment for Windows 16-bit applications, which it was brilliant at. Whenever I messed up and crashed Windows (which was frequently) it was much faster to re-start Windows within OS/2 than it would have been to restart the entire machine booted into Windows natively. OS/2 deserved wider use. The press killed it, partially; every review of OS/2 I saw said basically the same thing: "This is great, but don't buy it - wait to see what Microsoft come out with" and they played that game for about 18 months while we all waited for Chicago (which then became Windows 95) to come out. IBM also shot themselves in the foot in other ways; as I said I was a hobbyist developer of Windows software at the time and I wanted to move to OS/2. Development tools for Windows were quite inexpensive generally; Borland Turbo C was about £30, and even a full MSDN subscription to Microsoft was only a couple of hundred quid. IBM wanted over £800 for the C compiler for OS/2, and there was no way I (and presumably most other hobbyist developers) would pay that.

As someone who had an Amiga 500 and Amiga 3000 back in the day, and used OS/2 Warp as well, I can ABSOLUTELY see the Amiga tech in OS/2. The interface always reminded me of the Amiga OS, and that was one of the things that attracted me to OS/2 in the first place. Also, at the time of OS/2 Warp's release, a columnist in either PC World or PC Magazine (Jim Seymour, iirc) mentioned how using Warp reminded him of using an Amiga.

Very interesting. I still have a new uninstalled copy of OS/2 Warp which is going to a computer museum if they want it. Another retro system is HP NewWave: it ran on Windows 3.11 and gave it an OS/2 / Mac feel - a true Object Orientated System with a proper data catalogue for all data objects that kept track of data; apps that could run other embedded apps with links to a single data source even across a network (e.g. a spreadsheet within a word document); and a high level scripting language. There were native 3rd party apps including a brilliant data analytics tool called Forest & Trees. Rumour had it MS saw it as a threat and persuade HP to drop it so MS could concentrate on writing HP drivers for new printers etc. When Win 95 came out HP said it would not run, so withdrew it. It ran it OK on Win 98 and XP and now I run it in VBox / XP under Win 7 for some legacy apps as Win 7 does not run 16bit apps.

Nice that someone does a review and talk about its past. There are just one tiny issue. It was first created with the goal of replacing Dos and not Windows. It was that 640k barrier that they wanted to eliminate as the primaery thing. The GUI came later on in its lifespan. Competition against Windows was only after MS jumped ship.