The role of OS/2 in the NYC subway system is more of a conduit. It helps connect the various parts that people use with the parts they don’t. Waldhauer notes, “There are no user-facing applications for OS/2 anywhere in the system. OS/2 is mainly used as the interface between a sophisticated mainframe database and the simple computers used in subway and bus equipment for everyday use. As such, the OS/2 computers are just about everywhere in the system.”
At this point, we’re talking about an OS designed in the late 80s, released in the early 90s, as part of a difficult relationship between two tech giants. The MTA had to ignore most of this because it had already made its decision and changing course would cost a lot of money.
It’s sad that OS/2 – in its current form available as ArcaOS 5.0 – has a relatively steep entry price, because it’s an incredibly fun and unique operating system to play around with. I’d love to set up a VM just for fun and playing around, but at $129, I really can’t justify that.
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Indeed, it would be fun to play with but for for that price.
$129 for personal use? That’s about the same as a Windows license. I was expecting complaints of it being expensive to be followed by some outrageous $500-1000 price tag as they know their clients can’t easily switch to something else, but this seems like a reasonable price. Even the business license isn’t unreasonable at $229. Sure, for playing around it’s too much; but they’ve got to get money to keep an ancient OS going.
I still have the same complaint about ArcaOS as I did about eCommstation before it – they don’t have the source code and I don’t really see the point. I won’t deny there is some value if your a business that needs OS/2 for whatever reason to have a company that offers support for it and at least makes efforts to keep it running on modern hardware with new drivers or whatever, but beyond that? They are not releasing anything significant, its just a new driver here and there, a better installer, some minimal binary edits, etc.. There is only so much that can be done without having the source code to work with…
Its dead unfortunately, no one has made a meaningful modification to the base OS in over 20 years… It is kind of sad really when you think about it, no one has hit the build button on the project since 2001…
I used OS/2 for around 3 years before Windows 2000 came along, I simply could not use a 16 bit OS like Mac OS, Windows 95, 98 or ME. Though even than, I used Windows 2000 for about a year before I moved on to Unix, SGI and Sun. I thankfully worked for the military and than later firms that used workstations with these wonderful OS. I even personally had an Octane, Fire and Tezron, which I still use today, though it doesn’t contain any of the original parts as it was gutted and than the case was re-used as a modern Workstation. Nothing to special, an Intel 9080XE, Asus W MB with 8 PCIe slots, 128GB 4000 RAM, 3x Samsung 970 Pro 1TB M.2 (Raid 0), 2x Seagate 12TB SATA, 1x Titan Z CEO, and 4x Nvidia 2080TI. This system also doubles as a render farm using RenderMan, hence the 5 GPU’s Okay, it’s something special, though I bought a lot of it from eBay and a bank auction, total cost was a little under $10,000, cheaper than a iMac Pro and much faster than the new Mac Pro up to the Xeon 20 Core.
I never understood OS/2. I came from a DOS+Windows 3.11 background on a 286 and when I bought my first “fast” computer it was Pentium 60 that came with OS/2 (Warp 3.0 if I remember correctly). Nothing felt fast about it and I couldn’t understand how to add drivers or tweak/optimize anything about it like I had done with DOS (memmaker/quemm, doublespace/drivespace/stacker, config.sys and autoexec.bat, smartdrv, defrag, etc)
Within a month Windows 95 became available which ran faster, looked better, had a graphical device manager and allowed all the hardware, software, games and tweaking/optimizing that I loved to run.
I never had any similar issues understanding other OS’s like Linux/MacOS so I don’t really understand why I couldn’t grasp OS/2.
As far as I am concerned OS/2 was never meant for consumers and didn’t do much for companies either. The few companies that went for OS/2 instead of NT soon regretted it or created some of the legacy-monsters that we sometimes hear about. Interesting fact: Because of these legacy-needs we now have Parallels virtialization! (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS/2#Virtualization)