OS/2 nostalgia

It has been … how long? 25 years? Probably.

I’ve been in love with OS/2 in one of my previous lives. While everybody around me praised and used Windows 95 at that time, I stubbornly stuck to OS2 Warp 4.0.

It ran Windows and DOS apps better than Win and DOS. The best thing was object-oriented desktop and Rexx scripting language.

Back to 2024. I wanted to taste it again. Fired up a VirtualBox, downloaded .iso installation disk from https://gekk.info/os2_ovas/, checked instructions at https://gekk.info/articles/os2.html and it installed it no time. I immediately felt 25 years younger.

But … after a while of playing with it, it doesn’t feel the same. It feels clunky and I forgot how to configure it.

Nevertheless, I managed to configure networking (at least ping is working), but there is no web browser included.

I had to search for it.

And while the Hobbes archive is no longer alive, there are other archives of OS/2 software (https://www.os2site.com/sw/).

I found Netscape, but I can’t install it. I tried also other programs (my favourite graphical editor Embellish), but I can’t install either. Don’t know why, but .exe files won’t run.

Have to research a bit… another rabbit hole, here I come.

Tags: #os2 #warp #retrocomputing