Posts by desmodronic

How the OS/2 flop went on to shape modern software

In this context I meant HW that was known and had optimised drivers. i.e. the video card with an S3 805 chip was well supported, the Creative Labs sound card and cd drive was supported out of the box. The DFI motherboard was of higher quality unit for its time and even having a good quality ALPs floppy drive worked while parsing through the numerous floppy disks. OS/2 demanded good quality hardware, no name cheap crap would probably run but if it was outside of specified standards then it would probably fail.

Seem to remember MS resorting to a hell of a lot of FUD which the Media ate up and also some anti competitive practises which they got fined for many years later? Significant part of the story too.

OS/2 was a better OS than both Win 95 and Win NT 3.1/3.51 for a time - it ran faster and smoother than both if you knew which hardware it liked - I built a machine from the ground up in 92/93 (DFI MB, Intel 486, 16MB Ram - £400 alone, S3 805, 80MB HDD and a Creative Labs Soundblaster / CD Rom combo) and was it rock solid (this was Ver2.1/.11) - Win 95 came out - a lot of fanfare for sure, Warp 3 soon after (Sept v Aug) and it had Internet support - I seem to remember a browser was an optional extra on Win 95 - NT 3.1 was a resource hog, not fixed till 3.51, 8 months after Win 95.

The biggest loss from OS/2 was the incredible Object Orientated Workplace shell which you could use to build whole systems with before any coding needed. Win95 was prettier but my goodness, what a loss in form over function.

ArcaOS 5.1 gives vintage OS/2 a UEFI facelift for the 21st century

Don't touch Gparted - listed as being incompatible with LVM. If it were me, I'd perform a secure erase, boot from USB, get to partitioning stage, it should recognise the empty drive and allow you to tag as MBR or GPT, select GPT - then into the manage volumes and install the EFI partition (256MB), save that, then install the boot loader thingy, save that, then create a new volume (D Drive) and it will reboot. Back in again and format the D: as JFS and it will select the EFI volume automatically.

Installed it (Arca Noae 5.1) this afternoon on a Asus WS-Pro X570 Ace with a Hynix NVMe drive. GPT, UEFI, CSM disabled and Secure boot set to Non Windows OS. It does not like having an Intel Optane 905P active in the system though (PCIe or SATA modes)

I built my second PC to OS/2 2.1 supported device specs in 92/93 and it was rock solid, it was just faster, better and more capable than anything MS had. Warp 3 (95?) brought the Internet, 4 brought Voice recognition and a reasonable suite of apps and later on you got the server kernels through service packs. UI wise? Stomped all over Win 3.1, 3.11, Win 95, NT 3.5, NT 4.0 - you can't compare a windows desktop *.lnk icon with a Workplace Shell object, well you can but you would be a very wrong. PM Chess still works :)