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It's yet another year, it's already April, and I haven't written |
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anything here for a long time. Sorry for that. Life kept my busy, but |
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that's a lame excuse I guess. |
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Lately, I've been playing with OS/2 again. Last time I used OS/2 was |
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back in the 90s, when I had installed it as my only operating system on |
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my PC. I think this was around 1995, and I was using OS2 Warp 3 |
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then. Some friends of mine were running a computer shop, and a single |
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boxed version of OS/2 was collecting dust on the top shelf behind the |
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counter. I could not resist, so I gave it a try. |
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I can't recall a lot of the software I used, besides the gopher client |
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and a web browser (I'm pretty sure it was the IBM Web Explorer at that |
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time). I also remember spending quite some time trying to find a driver |
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for my graphics card. OS/2 performed so much better on my PC than |
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Windows. And also, it provided both Win 3.11 and DOS at the same time. I |
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really loved that system. |
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A year later, in late 1996, I switched operating system to Linux, and I |
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never looked back since then. So I never saw or used Warp 4.52, IBMs |
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last release of OS/2. My bank was still using OS/2 everywhere, but that |
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must have been one of my last thoughts about OS/2. |
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I surely never heard about eComStation (The successor of OS/2 Warp |
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4.52). And neither about ArcaOS, which is the latest version of the OS/2 |
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based system, with its latest release published just before christmas in |
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2021. |
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Fast forward to now. Unfortunately, I don't have my original CD-ROMs |
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anymore, but I was able to find a copy of OS/2 Warp 4, which I installed |
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in a virtual machine. Netscape Communicator 4.61. You name it. I was not |
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able to browse a lot of sites with it because it is not happy with |
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todays SSL encryption. http-sites work perfectly well, total CSS |
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screw-ups aside. I enjoyed to play around with OS/2 after so long time. |
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It would be great to give ArcaOS a try. Also, I have a ThinkPad X250 |
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(actually I am writing this on my ThinkPad), and it seems to be |
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supported just fine [1]. However, there is a downside. The Personal |
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edition of ArcaOS i 129$ and that's a bit too much for just trying it |
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out. In addition, most of the software that runs on ArcaOS these days is |
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ported open source software, which I perfectly fine can run on FreeBSD |
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as well. Maybe you can give me some reason to try out ArcaOS. Until |
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then, I'll be playing more with OS/2 Warp 4 on virtualbox! |
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[1] http://www.blondeguy.com/computer/elbopeep.html |
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[2] https://www.os2world.com/wiki/index.php/Category:Software |
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Back |
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Gophered by Gophernicus/3.0.1 on FreeBSD/arm64 14.2 |
