What most don't realize is that OS/2 bears a large amount of credit for the internet as we know it. If you recall, Bill Gates downplayed the internet and took the position that the future was in private networks like CompuServe, Prodigy, and AOL. This is why MS created MSN, to compete with those companies. Originally, the follow-on to Win 3.1 was to be Windows 93. But then a funny thing happened - IBM started releasing beta versions of OS/2 with build in TCP/IP and a web browser. The beta testers loved it and Microsoft took notice. They had to push out the release of the new Windows while they developed a TCP/IP stack and a browser. With each new beta release, IBM added new stuff and MS was playing catch-up. Once IBM had finalized OS/2 Warp, Windows 93 was now Windows 95. Without OS/2, the online world wold be very different.

It's probably worth pointing out that ArcaOS isn't a new operating system that enables you to run OS/2 applications, it *is* OS/2 (based on Warp 4.52), licensed from IBM, with additional software, drivers and a massively improved installer piled on to limp it along on modern hardware. You could think of it as an OS/2 distro. The multi-core support is the original Symmetrical Multiprocessing pack introduced with OS/2 2.11. Most of the interface is either straight OS/2, or add-on software that has been bundled, lightly skinned with a theme that isn't *quite* as 1990's. The reason the "Start" button says "X Button" when you hover over it is because it's part of an open source WPS enhancer called XWorkplace.

Back in the day I ran my multi user (2 via phone line and one local) BBS on OS/2. It was incredibly stable and had amazing multi-tasking. Still have the floppy backups of my BBS.

I remember using OS/2 back in 1993 - it was ahead of its time, and it did run DOS games very well - I remember spending hours with the Icon Editor (it doesn't appear to have changed much) making custom icons for all the games we had. One of the reasons we had to get rid of it was perhaps the fact that it ran DOS games too well as one of my brothers (aged about 2 at the time) figured out how to run a dozen games at once, bringing the mighty 486 to its knees. I would also imagine that him dropping files into the Shredder didn't help much either.

Some will say it's the Workplace Shell but IMO the most important advancement of OS/2 was its MVDM (Multiple Virtual Dos Machine). No other OS, modern or not, has anything quite like it. I took it for granted earlier when OS/2 was my main OS.

Fun fact, OS/2 was also a popular OS for ATMs in the 90s because it was more reliable than DOS or Windows, and IBM already had major contracts with banks and early payment networks for their mainframes so it made a lot of sense to use the same vendor and operating systems that had a lot of synergy. That and IBM had close ties to NCR and Diebold, the main manufacturers of ATMs and POS machines, another market IBM software dominated at the time. Sometimes you still spot one with a failed boot screen in the wild, but they've probably mostly all been replaced, unlike the IBM cash registers that it seems like every big box/department store retailer still uses to this day...

I supported OS/2 for IBM in its heyday. One bug that was difficult to nail down was Thinkpads crashing on boot. Disabling the sound driver was a work around. Eventually a casual comment about having left a music CD in the player was the needed clue. The bootstrap assumed that ***any*** CD was a an OS and tried to boot from it! Ah, the good old days...

I love to see coverage of anything related to OS/2. I was a beta tester of OS/2 Warp back in the day, even then the writing was on the wall that its days were numbered.

Man, OS/2 was so good. I never installed Windows 95 and jumped from DOS to OS/2 for its multi-tasking capabilities. It was literally the ONLY consumer operating system that could run a good number of games AND maintain a solid connection to either a BBS or the internet in the background with active downloads and not drop. It was only until Windows 98 SE that I switched over to Windows and I would say OS/2 was still overall the superior OS. Not until Windows 2000 would I consider Windows the superior product.

Too many memories. OS/2 should've become the defacto os in the world.

I worked for IBM Endicott in the late 90's and used Warp at work. I purchased a copy from a company sale and used it for a time on my personal machine. It was pretty cool when Warp 4 came out with OpenGL support, and we had that on some of our machines, but then we actually got other machines with Windows 98 IIRC.

I used OS/2 Warp in high school. My father was a huge proponent of it. I loved it. I still played all of my DOS games with it. I loved it.

I remember getting a copy of OS/2 Warp 3 from my wife's command in the Navy, and I loved it enough to buy version 4 later on. It ran my BBS better than it ran in DOS, and it was really smooth compared to anything else at the time. I don't know if ArcaOS is $100+ nice, but if there was ever a sub $50 version I'd be compelled to check it out.

I was an actual system installer and user of OS2 in the beginning. I used REX often as it was also the development language for IBM VM/CMS. Inside every IBM Mainframe computer was a PC running OS2 which was used to configure VM and MVS partitions as it booted up all these "virtual machines". I retired from administering some of these around 2001 and I know it was still working this way.

This was a very good video and it was an interesting look at this unique OS. I'd also really like to see a video like this one for AROS as well, and actually, I'm rather surprised there hasn't already been one yet.

REXX was a scripting language common to all IBM products, not just OS/2; it existed on mainframes, AIX UNIX boxes, AS/400 etc. Probably another reason OS/2 was popular on ATMs, since you had a common scripting language across the ATM and the back-end mainframe. I was a keen OS/2 user for a few years; I used it as a development environment for Windows 16-bit applications, which it was brilliant at. Whenever I messed up and crashed Windows (which was frequently) it was much faster to re-start Windows within OS/2 than it would have been to restart the entire machine booted into Windows natively. OS/2 deserved wider use. The press killed it, partially; every review of OS/2 I saw said basically the same thing: "This is great, but don't buy it - wait to see what Microsoft come out with" and they played that game for about 18 months while we all waited for Chicago (which then became Windows 95) to come out. IBM also shot themselves in the foot in other ways; as I said I was a hobbyist developer of Windows software at the time and I wanted to move to OS/2. Development tools for Windows were quite inexpensive generally; Borland Turbo C was about £30, and even a full MSDN subscription to Microsoft was only a couple of hundred quid. IBM wanted over £800 for the C compiler for OS/2, and there was no way I (and presumably most other hobbyist developers) would pay that.

Usually when I watch a video like this the install is seamless. Which it never is for me. So it was refreshing and encouraging to see you discuss the hurdles you had to overcome to install the OS. Thanks!

As someone who had an Amiga 500 and Amiga 3000 back in the day, and used OS/2 Warp as well, I can ABSOLUTELY see the Amiga tech in OS/2. The interface always reminded me of the Amiga OS, and that was one of the things that attracted me to OS/2 in the first place. Also, at the time of OS/2 Warp's release, a columnist in either PC World or PC Magazine (Jim Seymour, iirc) mentioned how using Warp reminded him of using an Amiga.

The biggest issue I have sometimes with reviewing 'alternative' operating systems is that they are inevitably compared with Windows and usually along the lines of 'this is how Windows does it - anything else is weird or unusual'. Especially with legacy operating systems or operating systems which have a lot of heritage. If the point was to attract Windows users, maybe that would make sense, but things like ArcaOS have to pay homage to their history because that's their target audience. Dan is right, a lot has to do with muscle memory but one has to be careful not to confuse that with poor or illogical design versus what we expect to be 'normal' now. Clearly ArcaOS is unlikely to attract many people who aren't aware of it's OS/2 legacy but that's not their demographic.

Very interesting. I still have a new uninstalled copy of OS/2 Warp which is going to a computer museum if they want it. Another retro system is HP NewWave: it ran on Windows 3.11 and gave it an OS/2 / Mac feel - a true Object Orientated System with a proper data catalogue for all data objects that kept track of data; apps that could run other embedded apps with links to a single data source even across a network (e.g. a spreadsheet within a word document); and a high level scripting language. There were native 3rd party apps including a brilliant data analytics tool called Forest & Trees. Rumour had it MS saw it as a threat and persuade HP to drop it so MS could concentrate on writing HP drivers for new printers etc. When Win 95 came out HP said it would not run, so withdrew it. It ran it OK on Win 98 and XP and now I run it in VBox / XP under Win 7 for some legacy apps as Win 7 does not run 16bit apps.

Ahh takes me back to one of my 1st jobs where the company was a big IBM customer and our desktops were PS/2 Model 77's with OS/2 2.1. Such a stable platform, do your work in Lotus Smartsuite and then play dos games on it without it killing the whole system if it crashed. Just a pity the system was basically the price of a decent car at the time otherwise IBM could maybe have weathered the MS storm.

When I started in Greenland's national shipping company back in 1994, they were actually running on OS/2 and later Warp I think, but not for many years. I thought it looked so much better than Windows 3.11 (which I got the next year for my first PC).

I ran a multiline BBS in the early 90s and at the time os/2 was the best os for that.

Nice that someone does a review and talk about its past. There are just one tiny issue. It was first created with the goal of replacing Dos and not Windows. It was that 640k barrier that they wanted to eliminate as the primaery thing. The GUI came later on in its lifespan. Competition against Windows was only after MS jumped ship.

Finally a review! Thanks for this one. I've got a dedicated Warp machine and was wondering if it would be worth upgrading to ArcaOS. Now I know.

Love these whacky OS's! Great vid as always 😊

REXX was originally developed by IBM for their mainframe products such as VMS.

32-bit PCs had started with Compaq in late 86, and getting to the start of the 90's the 486 was starting to establish itself. Yet... PC software was 16-bit with memory management kludges, and not keeping up with the full capability of the evolving PC hardware. OS2 2.0 (when it was released in 92) was historically important as the first mainstream option that had DOS and Windows compatibility that was proper 32-bit.

I had OS/2 preinstalled on my Escom PC I bought in 1995. Was slightly before Windows 95 was released and already had a copy of Windows 3.11. Back in the day Escom were a high street PC store, and went bust after some Microsoft licencing lawsuits... Seeing the preinstalled Mahjong game has brought back the memories, played that a lot!

You even have Odin on your system. With Odin it is possible to run 32 bits windows 95 programs. Odin is like Wine in Linux. Have been running OS/2 for a long time but it was getting difficult to run OS/2 on "modern" hardware. Now I am running Linux, but OS/2 was always my favorite.

Very nice. I ran an OS/2 box with a 3270 adapter connected to a small mainframe running VM and had Rexx running on both sides trading files between the mainframe and the unix machines on the network the OS/2 box was also wired into. Great times.

Rexx was first on the mainframes. I worked for I BM on contract to support OS/2 and set some precedence in getting the installations completed and identifying the hardware. I found many of the bugs that were serious back in the day that have since been fixed.

if that arcaOS had Sound Blaster emulation mode for dos terminal just like windows 9x had originally then it could be a killer retro machine with a capacity to deliver more horse power into it than any dosbox is capable of doing so today.

What a rush of memories! Thanks.

Great topic. Nice one, Dan!

It's not a bug but a great feature that click and drag works that way. If you ever had a user call you with an ID10t error saying they were copying files and lost them... because the mouse bumped and they unclicked somewhere random and had NO IDEA where they dropped them.

We had a Citrix remote access server that run OS/2. This was around the early to mid 90's. The server had several modem lines, where users could dial in and run remote Windows sessions. That operating system was rock solid and hardly ever crashed.

I was working at IBM when the PS/2 and OS/2 were announced and starting using OS/2 with V1.0 (this was before the Presentation Manager which provided the GUI was released). Initially we used it as a replacement for the 3270 mainframe terminals. Wen I left IBM I went to work for a start-up developing a network monitoring application on OS/2. The system we were developing also use OS/2 Server. The system was rock solid. After a few years there, I went to MCI where I was part of a team that produced and maintained a OS/2-based transaction server as part of their Internet/frame relay provisioning system. The only times we had problems were when code allocated memory and failed to release it when done. It was a good, solid OS that was unfortunately killed by Microsoft's questionable marketing practices and Steve Job's hared of IBM.

Windows NT was partly based on OS/2. There were 3 branches of the OS/2 codebase: * OS/2 1.x - at IBM’s insistence, for the 80286. The mistake that doomed OS/2 and IBM’s presence in the PC industry, the industry it had created. * OS/2 2.x - IBM went it alone with the 80386-specific version. * OS/2 3.x - Portable OS/2, planned to be ported to multiple different CPUs.

Drag and drop works much better in OS/2 than in other OSes. You can drag and drop files onto devices and folders and pretty much anyplace you want. You just have to hold down the second mouse button to drag and drop. You also have much more control in configuring things the way you want, including desktop sound effects.

I can see this coming popular among retrogamers who don't want the hassle of digging up old hardware and just want a way of using old DOS and Windows software on modern hardware without the need to use emulators or multiple virtual platforms.

There’s a tool out there that will convert Windows NT binaries to run in an OS/2 environment: Odin.

Brings back memories of me using Netscape 4.5 on OS/2 Warp 3. I had downloaded it for hours using a 28.8kbit modem and IBM Web Explorer - IBM‘s answer to MS and Netscape applications …

I was an IBM OS/2 4 Warp beta tester. Something great about it was the OS had voice recognition/voice control built in. It was a great OS, we beta testers had a lot of issues with the network part, but when I was beta test for Windows it too had network issues. Once networking was figured out it ran great. At the time I had 2 or 3 Redhat Linux, 1 Windows and 2 OS/2 machines networked. Internet, not dial up, was always an issue. I would call the cable company and end up helping troubleshooting internet issues, the techs liked talking with me as OS/2 4 had great network tools built in. Just as when Redhat left consumers for commercial, a tear was shed when IBM and MS divorced and OS/2 went commercial. I may try this OS in a few months.

I've watched a good few of your Amiga videos but never really knew just how much time and knowledge you have for other OS's. Without being unfair to your contemporaries, there are a lot of 8bit and 16bit guys out there who just stick within that sandbox (not a bad thing). But it's interesting to see how comfortable you are around pretty much any operating system from 8bit up to 64bit.

other than an occasional minor wart this was a really smooth and rather well polished OS release - no doubt the developers are on a financial shoe string in respect to funding any development, so kudos to them for a good job. For a retro person it offers what looks to be pleasant access to pretty much any PC OS stack of the 90s and prior back to original IBM PC. No offense to Amiga fans but this GUI desktop looks nicer than anything ever offered on the Amiga.

I installed OS/2 Warp Blue (the one with windows support) back in the day over a 486 DX with 4Mb of RAM and maybe 200mbish disk drive.... best OS I had in that moment, I enjoyed it a lot.

I ran OS/2 2.0 for a few months in college more than half a lifetime ago. It was amazing for the time and I had no problem simultaneous floppy access, modem download, DOS gaming and using OS/2 apps on a mere 386 with 8MB of memory. In the end, my 200MB hard drive wasn't enough for both OS/2 and Windows 3.1 plus apps and data. I also couldn't justify rebuying or finding new alternatives to the productivity programs I used on a regular basis so I ended up sticking with Windows. I wonder what could've been if IBM had more of a consumer focus, better marketing and incentivized migrating to OS/2.

The WPS was a certainly a bit clunky in it's file handling. IIRC, right click then drag was the way to drag files around. Either alt or control (or both maybe, I can't remember) were the way to toggle between moving and copying.

A number of mistakes on this. The last version of Microsoft/IBM of OS/2 was 1.2. The 1st version done solely by IBM was 1.3, the 1st version that was rock solid, btw. Windows 3.1 didn't come out until AFTER OS/2 2.0. The workplace shell was revolutionary in April of 1992. I used to keep each application I was using in a full screen & would just tab between them. It was glorious, and I still miss it. The greatest thing about OS/2 was that I could cut and paste between OS/2, Windows, and DOS programs - and it did not matter that the programs themselves did not know how to cut & paste. I could also have 736K memory available in the lower 640K. If you weren't around back then, you have no idea how revolutionary that was.

About 1994 I saved up some money to build a 486 computer system. The last thing I needed was the OS. I debated if I wanted Warp 3 or Win95 and I settled on Warp 3. Huge mistake, the install failed and I could never get it going. I gave up and I just used Windows 3.11. It served me well and I was still using it 1997-98 when I got my internet. OS/2 looks cool, but knowing what I know now I should have just gone with 95.

Yes gonna do that again!

To drag files with the mouse you drag with Button 2 (right mouse button in right-hand mode; IBM labeled them buttons 1 & 2 to prevent the right click/left click confusion with left-handed users. Index finger rests on Button 1). It makes good sense when you think about how many users accidentally drag files into a random directory when attempting to select more than one. "Pickup" is there as an accessibility option for people that don't have the dexterity to press and hold the mouse down while moving it (or using a trackball). To this day I still drag files with the right mouse button by habit.

Looks nostalgic... I've been daily using OS/2 ~20 years ago and I can remember all the features you show in the video. Well, nothing has changed since then. Same apps from the 90s, same UI. They just renamed this corpse and trying to sell it again, as Serenity Systems did. We all know how will it end. It was a nice OS for the 90s, a lot of things had evolved since: hardware, UI concepts, user expectations. But not this OS. Just bury it. Its place is in history. PS its kernel is partially 16-bit, as IBM made it in the early 90s

OS/2是我用過最好的作業系統，很高興聽到這個ArcaOS👍

This is so interesting. Thanks.

To drag an object, you drag it with the right mouse button. It can be customized to be dragged with the left mouse button just like Windows.

I wrote my first real game on OS/2 back in OS/2's 16-bit days. I called it "TetrOS/2", and you can probably guess what sort of game it was. :) I was running OS/2 because I was a CompSci nerd (LOL) and believed it was the future. (And couldn't afford SCO Unix - there was no Linux yet), but was jealous that all my friends had Tetris.

I used os2 warp for a few weeks ..in the end it was easier to use windows, inferior technically but just worked and had game support. Be interested to check this out as things have moved on since fiddling with dma, irq and slot choices. Open source os2 would be awesome

I was around at the time. Contracting with the Sears-IBM venture known as Advantis. When I talked t the IBM folks and saw things like when they made software they did a bang up good job. Problem being they never continued to support them or advertise them. It was the death of software when they bought them. Such as Harvard graphic Lotus 123 and Ami Pro. Also there own Displaywrite 4. I would like to see Arca bring this up to 32 and 34 bit programs.

A part of me is thinking “who would spend $129 for this?” but it’s so cool it also has me kind of wanting to buy a copy. [edit] I never considered industry where they might want to run old software on modern hardware

My company used to have some OS2/warp machines and they were very good. I'm not a expert but i liked the OS. Especially if you copied files in the background you could barely notice any delay in the OS. So yeah it was pretty good imo. But it wasn't chosen by people and it "died".

This inspired me to try it on a virtual machine (as i dont have older hardware than 2018), that game - Out of this world - looks interesting

Thank you so much!

I remember going to a couple of trade shows back in 1994 where both MS and IBM were pushing there OSs . I was quite keen on OS2 as we were using on the Compass Voicemail platform . During one of the OS demos some one asked the question would the Microsoft's new 32 bit Office 95 work on OS2 / Warp and when the presenter said no that nailed it for me and I went to Win 95 as I wanted MS Office .

Try right-click and drag for drag and drop: can make shadow objects or move / copy files depending on the destination and a key press. Doing this will illustrate on the screen the action with a line and direction arrow. I run ArcaOS on a laptop from 2003 and is very responsive, having just 2gb of memory. I use the Warp 3.0 theme as I found that to be best for my use. Thank you for trying OS/2 as a novice user experience demo.

Is there soundblaster support in dos games ?

Great over view. The one items channels like your channels is they hardly ever touch on the development tools for these platforms. I wished more people would touch on that subject

Is it possible to add and extra Hard drive that has an OS2 system along with software license and run those in arcaos?

Truth be told, I developed a rather large visual basic 3 application back in 1992 that I still use. Over the years I have considered porting it, but it works fine as is, so I never really bothered. At one stage I was using it on a dedicated machine with OS/2 Warp 4 until I moved my work to Windows 7. I also had a look at the eComstation live CD and I would consider Arca Os as an alternative. It looks elegant and runs a modern Firefox as well as tons of legacy software, most of which is now free or abandonware. Honestly, if Dos was still a part of modern operating systems like it is in OS/2 I would probably still be programming in it. As a matter of fact, I use QB64 on linux, but in Arca Os I could still run my original Quick Basic 4.5, Turbo Pascal 4-6, Prolog etc (I still have them on working floppies) by just installing them like I did 30 or more years ago. Nevertheless, I often wonder what OS/2 would have become if it didn't have a Windows subsystem. That fact alone meant that developers had no need to create dedicated native OS/2 software.

Very nice video. I always loved OS/2 on x86 ;) and that comes a boingball guy :D

Thanks for great video! Dan could you Tell wher to get pimiga?

I have OS2 Warp in a VM, to be honest it did not live up to my memories, it is easy to lose track of just how long ago it was...

When I was able to pick up OS/2 Warp it changed so much of my expectations of future PC experience, sadly Windows has failed to reach my expectations, various Linux distributions have done better but all fall short. as the hardware slowly makes huge improvements, the OS lingers back in the past.

Ow yes. The install (pre-internet, not able to google) took me two months and tons of swearing...just to get OS/2 installed...NOW I remember why I run Linux...thanks for reminding me why OS/2 never made it :)

I had demo of OS/2 from some cebit alike local thing. I was able to start it but my hardware was lacking in so many parts at the time that I just tested it out of curiosity. I think that OS/2 was an interesting idea but for someone who would invest huge amount of money into it for about 2-5 years till hardware was able to give decent specs for majority of people, not just millioneirs who could run it on the top of the shelf PCs.

ArcaOS is really worth the money. It is pure joy.

We used to use OS/2 interacting with a pagination service, way back. It's odd, but neat to see in 2022.

OS/2 definition of pain, installing your os from 44 floppy discs !

what song was playing in the outro of this video

man.... i miss OS/2..... might spend on this and see if i can get my old bbs stuff running....

Its interesting to hear that OS/2 is the Original OS that made for Windows, ReactOS and ArcaOS

I will be buy it soon

For personal edition of ArcaOS, is the licence confined to one single computer?

this OS and BEos makes me reminisce the past. makes you wonder if any of the two had full dev support and let it reach it's full potential.

OS/2 Warp was amazing in it's time!

I used and loved OS/2 Warp back in the 90s on my 66MHz Pentium!

Drag & drop was done with the right mouse button. WPS was/is an object -oriented shell. Each object on the desktop can be individually configured with fonts and colours etc. And drag & drop could be used to install hardware too.

Does it come with the developer tools OS/2 had? Like the C++ compiler, Visual Rexx, etc.

Another reason they can't release the source code is that 2 major .DLL's that allowed Windows to run under OS/2 specifically Mirrors.dll and oasis.dll which were written by Microgeafix. Which is out of business. And still Microsoft code is in OS/2 as well. So IBM's hands are tied.

Back in the 90s, we used the server version for file sharing, printing and cc:mail. Had Win 3.1 for desktops (not 3.11) then moved to Win 95. Not sure why but it seemed to work fairly well.

I actually installed OS/2 back in the day and your installation experience is actually pretty authentic to the real thing 🙄

A coworker and I went to Seattle back in the day when Microsoft was developing OS/2 for training in it. Our employer was considering developing OS/2 software for a potential customer. At that time, my recollection is that Microsoft was developing both MS and IBM versions of OS/2. The instructor joked that the developers would work on the MS platform except for when people from IBM were around and then they would use the IBM platform.

I used to be Level 1 and 1.5 support for OS/2 back in the day. Good times.

Is it possible to download somewhere?

Drag-and-drop is done with the right mouse button. A little odd, but can be changed in settings.

OS/2 still in use in older VCS. :)

As a hobbyist I like OS/2. I even bought eComstation back some years ago. But it ceased development shortly thereafter. Arca Noae brought out it's current OS 5.0 out back in 2017. That's almost 5 years ago. I keep looking to see if there's been any updates since then but sadly no. On there website they indicate that the next release, 5.1 would be a paid upgrade, whenever that shows up. Its glacial speed is a shame really, so I held off for that reason too.

Oh man I loved OS/2

I've got a "one-off, complete demo build given at a tradeshow" before they stopped OS/2 development. That, along with eComStation, and things like NextOS/Solaris -- I loved all the goofy OSes.