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