It’s 1995 and I’ve been nearly two years in the professional workspace. OS/2 is the dominant workstation product, Netware servers rule the world, and the year of the Linux desktop is going to happen any moment now. If you weren’t running OS/2, you were probably running Windows 3.1, only very few people were using that Linux thing. What would have been the prefect OS at the time would have been NT with a competent POSIX subsystem, but since we were denied that, enter Hiroshi Oota with BSD on Windows.
↫ neozeed at Virtually Fun
This is absolutely wild.
The most frustrating thing about BOW is that I can’t find any information or support forums. It’s like this thing had a 1.0 & 1.5 release that basically utterly failed to make any impact on the world. Which I find hard to believe as it’s so incredibly powerful. Just as I can’t find anything about the author.
I legit wish I knew about BOW when it was new and current, It’s the ‘having your cake & eating it’ type of software that really should have gone further. It would have been so nice to have all the unix network admin tools + full windows apps, the inverse of wine would have been so much better.
If anyone knows what Hiroshi Oota is up to these days?
Tried asking around on vogons?
Huh. I never heard of this either. Imma try it out on my 386 as soon as I get it rolling again.
It works on my PS/2 model 80!
http://virtuallyfun.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/IMG_9741-scaled.jpg
as far as asking vogons I didnt think they were all that into Japanese Software… I think I have a lead on github, a h2oota that is into 64bit emacs on windows, so it’s a maybe.
Vogon’s isn’t specifically into Japanese software, but its not like they are “racist” against it… in fact a lot of hardware mods come from Japan because it had a very active computer scene in the 80 and 90s.
This is an excellent find Thom.
Windows used to be more interesting back in the day. Especially when it was more open to hacks like these. Today, I find the Windows 11 UI functional, but pretty boring in comparison.
(Though having Linux run on it is still exciting though. If you asked me in early 2010s, I would have never believed that).
Maybe (emphasis) interesting in < 1993. But, I was using full on real Linux workstations in 1994. Before that, there was djgpp, which might have been even "better" than what is described here in many ways.
If there was a "window" for this tech, it was very very very very tiny.
Tech for those against tech IMHO.
chriscox,
+1 for djgpp (and rhide).
I was blown away by the quality of these tools next to microsoft equivalents!
Yeah, I think the programmers who wanted BSD would have opted for a real BSD.
There has been high demand for *nix tools on Windows for a long time. Interix which morphed into SUA which turned into WSL1 before WSL2 gave up and went virtual, and NT had a POSIX subsystem at one point.
Then there is the long running Cygwin project.
Interix and SUA are kind of the spiritual successors to this since they used quite a bit of code from OpenBSD.
Flatland_Spider,
And let’s not forget mingw, too.
I can even add Microsoft’s on experimental Unixisms, like Powershell, or “winget”
Alfman,
RHIDE has been a great deal of fresh air after Turbo Pascal / Turbo C++ became obsolete, and we moved onto Linux systems.
Wish that was still being worked on today, though.
I thought mingw was part of cygwin, or a related project?
Flatland_Spider,
They had some commonalities, but the approached were very different.
MinGW was for compiling native Windows applications using GCC.
Cygwin was for providing a Unix subsystem for Windows.
So, you could use Windows, Linux, or other systems to use mingw/gcc to build Windows applications using libc. You could also use Cygwin as the host as well.
The final application will not require a runtime (at least not something as heavy as Cygwin).
For example, the current hosts for mingw-64:
https://www.mingw-w64.org/downloads/