The Hobbes OS/2 Archive logs off permanently in April Bad news for OS/2 fans: the Hobbes OS/2 software archive is to be shuttered once and for all in April. The Hobbes OS/2 Archive, run as a service by the Department of Information & Communication Technologies at the US New Mexico State University, has announced its impending demise. As of April 15, the site will no longer exist …
The archive.org stuff would still be, but it may not have everything unfortunately as I believe they don't routinely "mirror" full sites, especially ones with a lot of data due to the cost and complexity.
I'd hope they update to as complete a mirror as possible, or another organisation can get permission to run a full mirror.
‘SteveB went on the road to see the top weeklies, industry analysts and business press this week to give our systems strategy. The meetings included demos of Windows 3.1 (pen and multimedia included), Windows NT, OS/2 2.0 including a performance comparison to Windows and a “bad app” that corrupted other applications and crashed the system. It was a very valuable trip and needs to be repeated by other MS executives throughout the next month so we hit all the publications and analysts.’
‘The demos of OS/2 were excellent. Crashing the system had the intended effect – to FUD OS/2 2.0. People paid attention to this demo and were often surprised to our favor. Steve positioned it as -- OS/2 is not "bad" but that from a performance and "robustness" standpoint, it is NOT better than Windows’
"I have written a PM app that hangs the system (sometimes quite graphically)."
Still, OS/2 was doomed because of the same two reasons that Linux desktop never seems to make more than a small dent in market penetration: hardware driver and software compatibility. OS/2's Windows compatibility wasn't perfect and required OS/2-specific hardware drivers; unless you give an option to people that is markedly better than the status quo in all aspects, people's natural inertia against change, especially when that change will bring negatives as well as positives, will always kick in.
IBM wanted the most popular DOS apps of the 1980's—Wordperfect, Lotus 1-2-3 and dBase—to be ported to their own operating system first, and then MS Windows later.
But computer journalists and the buying public took a shine to Windows, as it was less resource-hungry than OS/2 and didn't replace the MS-DOS that they were all used to (and still needed for older apps).
So while Microsoft's biggest application software rivals were focused on porting their apps to an OS that people weren't buying, Bill Gates realised that it was now or never: bail-out of the OS/2 project, quickly port Word and Excel (and later FoxPro, which would become 'Access') to the Windows platform, and then promote Windows 3.0 and MS Office like there was no tomorrow.
By the time that Wordperfect and Lotus realised that they needed to pivot to Win 3.0, they'd already lost. (MS also allegedly kept some features of the Windows API to themselves, which didn't help.)
In 1994, OS/2 Warp 3 was released which was faster, more compatible and needed fewer system resources. But it was too little, too late. And a year later, Windows 95 was released.
Oh no, it was certainly somewhat 'open knowledge' at the time that Windows had 'undocumented' API calls (that, of course, weren't 'undocumented' to Microsoft). But as a privately-developed, closed-source system, really, they had that right, there is no legal requirement to share what could be considered 'inside information'. We may not like saying that but it's the flat truth.
> really, they had that right, there is no legal requirement to share what could be considered 'inside information'.
(Disclaimer; IANAL)
I certainly wouldn't want to rely on that assertion in court- at least, not for a company as large and dominant in their field as Microsoft where they were arguably abusing that "inside information" to reinforce an already-dominant/near-monopoly position. (The only question is whether MS would already have been considered to be such if it had ever come to court at that time.)
Though, of course, with MS, the modus operandi was always to drag out and stall such cases for years until they became almost irrelevant.
Oh, I'm sure it certainly helped Microsoft.
By enabling them (and sometimes other large development companies with pre-release agreements) to bring out applications based on pre-release versions of Windows.
As a result of anti-monopoly litigation, they were later forced to reveal the "private" API used by MS applications, and they are still doing so: if you want to look at the private API used by Word, or Excel, or any of scores of more recent applications, you can just download it: you don't have to register or anything.
Which enables you to see that there really is nothing to see: the private API just contains a pre-release variation of the published API, not containing any particular value.
@david 12: “Which enables you to see that there really is nothing to see: the private API just contains a pre-release variation of the published API, not containing any particular value.”
“I have decided that we should not publish these [Windows 95 user interface] extensions. We should wait until we have a way to do a high level of integration that will be harder for likes of Notes, WordPerfect to achieve, and which will give Office a real advantage...”
“We can't compete with Lotus and WordPerfect/Novell without this.” ref”
Well, it should never be dismissed that IBM's OS/2 project would have stayed proprietary to IBM hardware; that is, OS/2 was only going to be available to IBM hardware buyers. MS's Windows did not have that limitation, and IBM's insistence on creating a new, closed propriety architecture certainly helped doom the entire PS/2-OS/2 project - by the time IBM changed their tune on OS/2's general availability, that ship had pretty much already sailed.
"as it was less resource-hungry than OS/2 and didn't replace the MS-DOS that they were all used to (and still needed for older apps)" – resource-hungry is correct, but OS/2 indeed did "replace MS-DOS", and that was an excellent thing. It ran DOS apps (including Windows 3.x apps) better than DOS (or Windows 3.x) itself, also replacing all those high-memory managers which were en vogue back then, and it ran several DOS and/or Windows sessions in parallel, too...
This is true, but by the time OS/2 released 2.0 it was too late.
Windows 3.0 was released in 1990, the two years it took IBM to release OS/2 were critical in shifting PC market applications away from DOS. OS/2 1.x had higher requirements and lacklustre DOS compatibility. The overhead of a protected mode operating system and the price of RAM really mattered at that time.
Even when I first started using OS/2 2.1 in 1993 it was expensive to buy a system with the required 8MB memory, and really whilst OS/2 ran OK, it ran a lot better in 16MB. At that stage much though at the time I thought OS/2 might win, it was already doomed.
"Even when I first started using OS/2 2.1 in 1993 it was expensive to buy a system with the required 8MB memory"
As a point of reference, my first PC was bought in the summer of 1992 for my first year at university: a Wang 386SX-20 with 2MB of memory and a 40MB HDD for £499 from Morgan Computers.
(I would have liked a Mac, but the base model was £799, which was ludicrous for a computer with an 8MHz CPU and a 9-inch screen.)
Windows 3.0 would (just about) run with 2MB of memory, but preferred 4MB. 1MB SIMMS were £35 each—but you had to buy them in pairs. And £70 was a lot of money at a time when a pint of beer cost £1.30.
Eventually, I found an affordable compromise: Morgan were selling 256kB SIMMS for £5 each, so I bought four of those, giving me an extra meg for 20 quid.
In 1993 I was using an Amiga 1200 (and various SUN workstations at university) and was wondering why on earth anyone was taking these so-called "PCs", with their mediocre graphics, sound, multitasking (or lack thereof), and correspondingly clunky GUIs, at all seriously… It was 'obvious' that surely Amiga and/or Apple were going to win in the end… «sigh» «sobs»
It's true. I just recollected the early stage of PC computing with another person, younger and not that deep into the tech, and he was surprised that [when I was invited to IBM to represent the entire school in the early stages of the PC rollout] the PC was already 2-years out of date, technology-wise, when it first come out. A 40-column B&W screen and the 5.25" floppies were optional? WTH was with that?! At the time, there was a computer already on the market with dual CPU's (Z80 & 68000) that could dual-boot into your choice of OS, full color, etc, and IBM was showing me...this. o_O
But the rest is history, ain't it? :( And now we're 'stuck' in an almost decades-long technology 'rut', where not much real innovation happens except cheaper / faster on the same base architectures. :sigh:
But Apple DID win in the end.
Your phone is either an iPhone or a bad attempt at a copy of an iPhone. It's NOT a Windoze Phone.
And after all these years, somebody who has been asleep since 1984 could sit down at a Mac today and it would just make sense. It even still comes with a 1-button mouse, like all computers should.
Yeah, I like Apple's touchpads, but if I want a mouse I generally plug in something made by Logitech.
One caveat about right-clicking on the Magic Mouse -- it often has both buttons set to "primary" by default, making it seem like a 1-button mouse. You can fix it in System Preferences.
Apple haven't won, but they are certainly a noble second, although a second with a significantly smaller share of the market.
Apple Silicon certainly has the potential to take increasing market share, if only Macs weren't so damned expensive (my bank account still hurts) and, in many use cases, if only the software that some people would need to use were actually available for Macs. But for many people, the cost, and the non-availability of certain software, sadly make them not an option.
When it comes to phones, both iOS and Android owe an awful lot to Symbian (and perhaps also to Palm). Apple didn't really contribute very much other than polishing up existing phone interfaces a bit, removing the physical keyboard (I'd still prefer something like the Nokia E7, which had the best of both worlds), and creating a central app store. Oh, and an awful lot of marketing, to highlight that the product exists and to make it desirable. Unfortunately, Nokia, Ericsson, etc, more seemed to leave their smartphones just to sell themselves on their technical merits - being good isn't enough, you do also have to actively encourage people to want to buy your product. Marketing may be evil, but it is to some extent a necessary one; word of mouth alone often isn't enough.
And, although iPhones may be particularly popular in the USA (which, although it is also the choice I made, genuinely surprises me, as in most other countries many people are much more price-conscious, or simply less well-off), worldwide they only have around a 25% - 30% market share, again, sadly second.
> as in most other countries many people are much more price-conscious, or simply less well-off
Quite some American prejudice here! So we Germans are less well-off? And all other EU countries as well? And the rest of the world as well?
Let me twist it back on the same level of offensiveness:
Americans are pushed by their ultra-consumer way of living to MUST have the newest bling-bling phone, where style matters more than function, no matter whether they can afford it or not. And it must be expensive since only America has the nation wide culture of bragging and showing off how much whatever costs.
(and later FoxPro, which would become 'Access')
"Access" was the end point of a very long-running series of projects in Microsoft, long predating their acquisition of FoxPro.
Access Version 3 benefited from the inclusion of query-optimisation algorithms adopted from FoxPro.
Now that both Gates and Ballmer are long since departed from MS, it'd be interesting to hear their reasons for ditching the OS/2 partnership. Get it straight from some of the people involved in making the decisions instead of all this rumor, supposition, and hearsay. At this point, it's not like the tech world will really think much less of them if they claim that they did it for some kind of asshole reason. Gates was associated with Epstein and Ballmer will probably never live down his donkey kong impression of throwing chairs.
"Get it straight from some of the people involved in making the decisions"
Bob Cringely pretty much did exactly that back in the 1990s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cMtZFwqPHc&t=2213s
"Get it straight from some of the people involved in making the decisions"
There's a couple of pretty good Register articles about it:
https://www.theregister.com/2012/11/27/the_os_wars_os2_25years_old/
https://www.theregister.com/2012/11/23/why_os2_failed_part_one/
No need for Arca Noe to host The Hobbes archive (though physically we could, and we have the bandwidth). There are other plans already in the works to maintain Hobbes elsewhere, with full upload/download functionality, as everyone would expect.
Thanks for the mention of ArcaOS!
I assume they would be willing too, but it would take up precious resources better spent elsewhere.
Judging from the comments here, and on other media, there will be complete copies of the HOBBES archives for years to come.
I have been using HOBBES as one of my distribution channels for the OS/2 community for decades, for my multi-platform DFSee disk utility program (www.dfsee.com).
And even after retirement, not using OS/2 (or actually ArcaOS) on a daily basis, I am glad the people at Arca Noae are quite serious about keeping it alive,
and especially, running on more modern hardware. With the 5.1 release of ArcaOS I was finally able to install on my latest laptop, a Lenovo X1, that has UEFI and GPT which made it impossible to install any other older version of OS/2 on to it.
Running it natively on that hardware feels a lot nicer (and faster) than running it in a virtual machine :-)
I started using OS/2 with the very first version (1.0), working on OS/2 1.2 extended edition for IBM, back in the late eighties when Microsoft was still part of it too, and have worked with about every version until now. For daily computer use I tend to use macOS on a macBook, and Windows 11 on my Thinkpad X1, but that is mainly because I do a lot of photo and video editing, which works better on those.
Regards, JvW
I doubt it costs much to preserve a small stash of old software. Perhaps NMSU's library could take over hosting it, instead of the Department of Information & Communication Technologies. Libraries now need to become mediatheques. They could start with this.
Both IBM and MS spent time and money removing documentation for software from two major versions and above ago from their websites. We're in the future where documentation seems to be a crowdsourced moving target hosted on official forums but employees never actually reply to problems. Isn't it exciting?
People hoarding junk like garbage raking racoons! Ha ha!!
This is just a dead O/S that's had it's day, I know as I coded lots of REXX back in the day and I enjoyed using OS2 a lot but you have to move on, let things go. 18 months ago I literally recycled 700 DVDs and 150 VHS casettes. Yes it was painful for a few weeks but junking old crap is a very cathartic exercise. It's like when a HD blows out and you had no backup, you can sit and cry or just let it go, console yourself with the fact that if it was important you would have backed it up so it could never have been that important.
The older I get the more often I raid the spare room, bin the junk and always feel so much better once the skip is collected and removes my worries. Keep the important stuff of course, but most of the crap we buy and hoard is worthless.
Learn to let go and move on.
If it isn't taking up much room or head space, it's not much of a hardship. I've three OS/2 systems here including an ArcaOS one, but they're not switched on very often.
It's different from when I used OS/2 professionally and personally - now it's booted up occasionally to tinker a little and play a little Galactic Civilisations.
Anyone trying to use OS/2 as a daily driver is in denial, but it's no more a waste of time as a hobby than many other things.
Hmmm... As a guy who uses ArcaOS as his daily driver, I might take exception to your comment about being in denial... ;-)
Instead, I use Linux when I have to (web conferencing) and stick to an OS with no telemetry and a stable, consistent desktop experience.
It all depends upon what one needs to do, I guess.
I mean, if you're not minded to use ArcaOS as a daily driver, who would be? :)
I'm not ungrateful for the work the Arca Noae team has carried out on ArcaOS - I do have two licences (an old 5.0 one out of support, and a different one upgraded to 5.1), and I suppose that some of what I do on this FreeBSD web browsing/basic productivity/ssh box could be achieved on OS/2 with a little more effort (probably not the Wine stuff though, as far as I'm aware Odin is long unmaintained). The Dooble browser has been recently updated I see, so I could give that a go, and I know there's a bought for Libreoffice release for OS/2.
However, web browsers are memory hungry beasts and i'd have to restrict my number of open tabs to fit in the constraints of any 32 bit operating system, never mind OS/2's per process memory limit that's low by modern standards. It'd prevent me from exploring things such as 3D or video acceleration that OS/2 was never really architected to do back in the day.
I think the kindest thing I can say is that the state of OS/2 now is in some ways an improvement over when I moved away from OS/2 in 1999 for personal use (I carried on using it professionally for longer). The community had dwindled, new technologies such as Python had no ports[1], and support for commonly used applications was poor. Now compilers are up to date, there's a lot of ported Unix libraries, a boot manager that's vastly better than OS/2's old one, and a number of updated drivers.
[1] Looking at Hobbes, it appears there was a Python port back in June 1999, either I didn't look very hard or more probably I made the decision to move before then. I was getting tired of dual booting for games, etc, so I moved to NT4 with Object Desktop/NT on it. The following year Windows 2000 came out and meant NT was finally a completely viable gaming platform, and USB worked too.
Indeed, browsing is a personal thing. On ArcaOS, I typically run SeaMonkey with about 30 tabs open, but only a couple very active.
OpenOffice 4.11 is available for OS/2 for a very modest sponsoring fee (not from Arca Noae, but from our friends at Bitwise). I find it quite capable for general purposes.
Thanks for your kind words about our continuing development efforts. We take the work very seriously, and take particular pride in ArcaOS.
Ahhh you "recycled" all those VHS and CDs.
You know some of those "junk" VHS tapes can be worth over £80 each and the recordings are NOT the same as streaming or dvd / Blue ray? Quick example, ET the VHS has a scene cut from every other version. Or horror films that were never released again.
Then CDs, the things a company can't just decide to remove from your device, or you find your streaming service has some random crap US version, or some dog awful remix.
Those CDs maybe 30 years old, but good chance they'll be still around. Unlike the hard drive you ripped them to or the streaming service that no longer exists.
I just spent two nights in a row trying to write an MSX ROM, working until 00:30am on a work night. The project is utterly useless but enormous fun anyhow; better than watching drivel on YouTube. All of a sudden I have access to all the assemblers and system documentation I could not even have dreamed about in 1985. But I had forgotten what a limited POS the Z80 processor is, and the available documentation is woefully inadequate or poorly written, which is why one sits until the small hours of the morning trying to debug the stuff.
When OS/2 2.x was released Windows was already a sprawling ecosystem of vendors and sites.
With OS/2 there was one site[1] : Hobbes. It was a more personal community, and easier to know where to go and contribute. Everyone knew where to upload to, and in general how to navigate.
There were the resellers : Indelible Blue, Greymatter and vendor sites such as Stardock (but almost all product was sold through resellers as individual companies did not have distribution in place, and electronic software stores did not exist on a large scale).
Many hours lost fiddling with OS/2 software from Hobbes, tweaking drivers, trying new software, and using development tools. I'll be sorry to see if go, even if I use it pretty rarely these days.
[1] Technically two. The one thing Hobbes lacked was all the IBM fixpacks, so the IBM Boulder (PS/Products) site was the second site everyone knew about in the days before easy patching. OS/2's remote fixpack install still uses this, and it's a lot easier than the alternatives, if you can't/won't spring for ArcaOS for some reason
If someone else wants to mirror more than just my wget posting:
ftp://ftpmirror1.infania.net/pub/Hobbes
Anonymous ftp. There are quite some differences / missing files which don't seem to be available via the web frontend of the original hobbes site, or whatever the reason for the difference is that wget seemed to miss some files. I will have to dupemperge later...
It should be industry-standard that when you want to turn off a major archive like this, that you post a torrent of the full content for at least a month first.
If the community considers it important, they'll keep it seeded even after you go offline, and your bandwidth won't be hit one half as bad and 10,000 people all trying to archive the entire site simultaneously.
I'm just assuming this archive can't be that big. You simply didn't have much multi-GB sized software back then. As others have said you used to be able to order a physical copy on CDs, and it seems like (other than a time lile now when people are archiving the whole site) the traffic levels would not be all that high.
> I'm just assuming this archive can't be that big.
Knowing is better: After dupemerge 34784289188 Bytes. Or 34 GBytes. Largest file: Frinika_0-5-0.zip, 458617059 bytes. Without dupemerge is pointless since I have two sources combined, one of them having more in "incoming unsorted todo" than the other. And even without there are a lot of dupes, the mentioned Frinika*.zip exists four times.
I live in New Mexico. In Albuquerque specifically. While I'm not sure what the exact reason is I can guess they're anticipating funding cuts from less money being made from the Permian Basin's oil and gas extraction which is affecting education across the State.
Don't make education funding dependent on something variable like fossil fuel extraction, folks, it's a pretty bad idea.
State may also anticipate losing a lawsuit over a murder one of their Basketball players committed in Albuquerque (State is in Las Cruces) at UNM in December 2022 that may result in a little penny pinching.
Are you referring to the situation where four UNM students carried out an attack in the Lobo Village on a visiting NMSU athlete that resulted in the unfortunate death of one of the UNM student attackers that shot at the NMSU athlete with a stolen gun? And that has already resulted in criminal charges or guilty pleas and sentences for the three surviving former UNM students, and no charges against the NMSU athlete?
Facts are important.
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