• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

Any OS/2 users or exusers here?

Somewhat fuzzy picture of my P5-133 XL with OS/2 Warp booted up. The desktop color scheme is much nicer in actuality (looks bluish in the picture, but it's actually more purplish).

IMAG0194a.jpg


EDIT: Used a smaller version of the picture, for bandwidth sake...
 
Last edited:
Cool. v3 and OS/2 For Dummies has just come up for sale. I'm of 2 minds to get them though. The "new" 486 hasn't turned up yet but I've just acquired a PII 300 for $1 which has NT4 on it which I may swap out the v4 hdd with.

Edit-Photo of OS/2 on the 300. I will try and get a clearer sceenshot sorted.
 

Attachments

  • IMAG0076.jpg
    IMAG0076.jpg
    84.8 KB · Views: 1
  • OS2_MARK.jpg
    OS2_MARK.jpg
    92.9 KB · Views: 1
Last edited:
OS/2 will absolutely smoke on a 300 MHz P2. I had it running on a 266 MHz P2 for a while and it was very nice. I could have easily done my word processing and work like that on it. Web browsing was a bigger problem, but that kind of depends on the sites you're visiting and what you're trying to do.
 
Dave Farquhar said:
OS/2 will absolutely smoke on a 300 MHz P2. I had it running on a 266 MHz P2 for a while and it was very nice. I could have easily done my word processing and work like that on it. Web browsing was a bigger problem, but that kind of depends on the sites you're visiting and what you're trying to do.
Click to expand...

Yea, general OS performance will be more than enough on any Pentium system... Web browsing is a pain because most browsers available for OS/2 are ancient in what they supporrt (e.g. no Flash, etc), and many sites will have errors or not work at all. Even Google searches can be a bit of a pain at times.
 
As for web browsing try Mozilla Firefox. There is a version for OS/2 Version 3 (With FP40 I think) and of course Warp V4, MCP 4.52 and ECommstation actually ships with it.
 
Last edited:
Chromedome45 said:
As for web browsing try Mozilla. There is a version for OS/2 Version 3 (With FP40 I think) and of course Warp V4, MCP 4.52 and ECommstation actually ships with it.
Click to expand...

This reminds me, I was wondering if there's anyplace with free downloads of OS/2 fixpacks? When IBM ended support I believe they took away downloads for them unless you had a service contract of some kind. Obviously they are not issuing new ones, but I might need some of the old fixpacks to get Warp working on some slightly newer hardware.
 
Last edited:
Looking at my November, 1987 copy of "PC Tech Journal", the initial reviews of OS/2 were very mixed. Performance for single tasks was lower than on DOS (duh!), but the multitasking wasn't very good either, stretching the time to do CPU-intensive tasks out by severalfold.

Of course, the issue was that the test programs were all DOS real-mode with no scheduler calls in them, but this didn't do the project any favors.
 
Caluser2000 said:
Stumbled on this nice little reveiw of v2.1 ;) http://classic-computers.org.nz/blog/2009-10-3-first-impressions-of-OS2.htm
Click to expand...

I think the File Shredder was different from the Trash Can and Recycle Bin in one important way: It really deleted files, not just moved them to a special directory. (You could unshred files like you could undelete in DOS, assuming the actual file contents had not been overwritten). Seems like this was a point of pride with many OS/2 users, who felt that the competition babied users too much!
 
mark66j said:
I think the File Shredder was different from the Trash Can and Recycle Bin in one important way: It really deleted files, not just moved them to a special directory. (You could unshred files like you could undelete in DOS, assuming the actual file contents had not been overwritten). Seems like this was a point of pride with many OS/2 users, who felt that the competition babied users too much!
Click to expand...

In keeping with its naming convention, they should have made it generate random fragments of the file and store them, in no particular order, in a holding folder. If you ever wanted to "undelete", you would have to manually splice them together. :-D
 
EddieDX4 said:
In keeping with its naming convention, they should have made it generate random fragments of the file and store them, in no particular order, in a holding folder. If you ever wanted to "undelete", you would have to manually splice them together. :-D
Click to expand...

That sounds like something Gentoo Linux would do -:)
 
One the biggest bugbears I think was the use of a single input que. Lots a remarks on old usenets posts about it. Wasn't sorted till quite a lot later on.
 
Caluser2000 said:
One the biggest bugbears I think was the use of a single input que. Lots a remarks on old usenets posts about it. Wasn't sorted till quite a lot later on.
Click to expand...

Yes, as a user that's the problem that bothered me the most. I don't know of any modern OS that has completely solved the problem of GUI shell lockups, but at least it is fairly easy to kill the offending shell (Finder, Explorer, etc.). This may have been harder in OS/2 because it had an object-oriented GUI (Workplace Shell) that was fairly tightly integrated into the OS (although you could run without it and just have a command line).

There were some third-party utils that would automatically try to kill the shell if it didn't respond in a certain amount of time, or if you hit a certain key combination.

Seems like Microsoft claimed this was one of the reasons they bailed out on the OS/2 project.

(Side note: Every now and then my wife's Mac locks up playing Farmville, and I have to SSH into it and kill Firefox. Having networking and multiple computers does solve a few problems).
 
mark66j said:
Yes, as a user that's the problem that bothered me the most. I don't know of any modern OS that has completely solved the problem of GUI shell lockups, but at least it is fairly easy to kill the offending shell (Finder, Explorer, etc.). This may have been harder in OS/2 because it had an object-oriented GUI (Workplace Shell) that was fairly tightly integrated into the OS (although you could run without it and just have a command line).
Click to expand...

IBM used the Watchdog timer on Microchannel to help break out of GUI lockups. When IBM stopped the PS/2 line, other methods were needed to fix the problems.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top