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.

screenshot of os/2 warp

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3 responses to “OS/2 nostalgia”

  1. jaKa Močnik Avatar

    @tomi ot, I used the amiga flavour of rexx, arexx, on my amiga 3000. rexx was the lua of that era. 🙂

  2. Jure Repinc :linux: :kde: Avatar

    @tomi About the same story here. Loved OS/2 Warp 4 back in the day. And I remember playing countless hours of Galactic Civilizations on it. REXX was also my first "serious" programming/scripting language I used after Basic. Nice memories. Still remember what a disappointment it was when father had to switch to Windows since he needed it for some application for work 🙁 Only a couple of years latter GNU/Linux put fun back into computing again.

    #TeamOS2 #OS2 #REXX

  3. GlitchedHeart Avatar

    @tomi @binaryphile I wrote my first cgibin programs in REXX. OS/2 was great and that’s where I learned presentation manager and win16 programming.

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