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back to article World finally ready for USB-bootable OS/2

eComStation, the Dutch-owned company that offers a PC operating system based on IBM's OS/2, has floated the idea of a USB-bootable version of the OS. The firm keeps the OS/2 torch burning by offering a PC OS that lets users run OS/2 apps. The outfit claims the likes of Boeing, Whirlpool Corporation and VMware use its software …

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  1. PhilipN Silver badge

    Never say never

    OK I won't say OS/2 never choked but I ran it for years at a time without a reboot. Admittedly just for mainstream (non-accounting) office uses. For that, especially running Wordperfect for DOS 6.2 ("Hello 2015 this is the 1980's calling") it is still the most efficient and user-friendly OS I have ever used.

    I shan't go on - I'll go on - It also had the best Fax program and MP3 player.

    Lots of one's comrades will say the Lotus Smartsuite was crap. It wasn't. It was just different. Oh alright it was crap, but why use a package when you can pick and choose individual components which are better?

    P.S. Open/Libre Office began life as Star Office - for OS/2

    34 0 Reply
    1. Purple-Stater
      Reply Icon

      Re: Never say never

      I would definitely be running Lotus SmartSuite today if it were reasonably feasible. Granted, I never had much use for the total package, but I'd be definitely still be using WordPro as my word processor of choice.

      3 0 Reply
  2. Khaptain Silver badge

    What problem will it solve ?

    So apart from the nostalgia factor what could we actually use it for ?

    I love the idea but I just don't see it's potential..

    I'm currently struggling to run Linux Mint as a VM under a Windows 10 host using Virtual Box ( the bridged networking is borked, r5.0.4) and I presume that this will not help with that problem.

    0 9 Reply
    1. Charlie Clark Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      Re: What problem will it solve ?

      The OS/2 subsystem does some things that many other OSes have been able to. It also comes with a slew of excellent terminal emulations.

      Admittedly, you probably won't need much of this but there are still a few companies with an extensive OS/2 landscape, who've saved tons of money by sticking with it.

      I think that if I wasn't using MacOS I'd probably have a machine that could boot into OS/2 as I don't know how long it would before I hosed whichever unix I installed. The WPS really is quite funky.

      11 0 Reply
      1. Anonymous Coward
        Reply Icon
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: What problem will it solve ?

        ...but there are still a few companies with an extensive OS/2 landscape, who've saved tons of money by sticking with it.

        That is so true. One of the companies we support has saved having to completely change all their machine shop equipment by sticking with OS/2. We have other clients that are using OS/2 in their server rooms that run 24/7/364 - the missing day is when we shut them down for internal cleaning.

        7 0 Reply
        1. Khaptain Silver badge
          Reply Icon

          Re: What problem will it solve ?

          "but there are still a few companies with an extensive OS/2 landscape, who've saved tons of money by sticking with it."

          How are they obtaining support, OS2 was basically shutdown in 2006. Or are they managing to simply make do with what was available at the time. If this is the case then they are not saving money they are just avoiding spending any money, the same would have been true no matter which system they used or is there something that I am completely missing here.

          0 7 Reply
          1. Charlie Clark Silver badge
            Reply Icon

            Re: What problem will it solve ?

            It's normally just a matter of money. Like Windows XP, but also earlier versions of Windows NT, you'll find that companies have signed long term support contracts. I seem to recall that Deutsche Bank for one was more than happy to shove a couple of million a year to IBM for support. There was, and may still be, a huge market for OS/2 embedded (POS, cash machines, courier (UPS at least) terminals, etc.) because OS/2 was the only OS reliable enough that ran in constrained memory: get rid of the UI and it's memory use is very modest.

            13 0 Reply
          2. Roland6 Silver badge
            Reply Icon

            Re: What problem will it solve ?

            >How are they obtaining support, OS2 was basically shutdown in 2006. Or are they managing to simply make do with what was available at the time.

            XEU.com aren't totally clear just what is meant by the term "based on OS/2". But I suspect whilst the initial release (back in 2001) may have made extensive use of original IBM/Microsoft OS/2 executables, subsequent releases have become 'owned' by XEU.com either through original development or licencing.

            What is particularly interesting is seeing a potential return of 'OS/2' to the limelight!

            Going back to the 80's and many industrial systems used DEC PDP-8's, in the early 90's IBM's backing of OS/2 (and it's ability to run on commodity h/w) helped to get it into the finance sector eg. ATM and POS, and it thus become an OS of choice in some sectors. MS hit back hard with WinCE/Windows Embedded et al and hence why we now see many ATM's, industrial systems etc. running versions of XP; now unsupported...

            However, given the extent to which MS has struggled to have a coherent client OS with which to replace XP, questions must be asked about the advisability of using Windows Embedded in any user terminal that is likely to be part of a system that will have a serviceable life of 10+ years. Looking at the alternatives and OS/2 does have many plus points over Win8/8.1 embedded...

            5 1 Reply
          3. Anonymous Coward
            Reply Icon
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: What problem will it solve ?

            How are they obtaining support, OS2 was basically shutdown in 2006. Or are they managing to simply make do with what was available at the time. If this is the case then they are not saving money they are just avoiding spending any money, the same would have been true no matter which system they used or is there something that I am completely missing here.

            They're saving money by Getting Shit Done™. Yes, support is hard to come by, but either they have enough enough expertise inhouse to keep going, or the platform is so stable that little support is needed (and not having support also means not paying for support). From what I have experienced with OS/2, it could be a cantankerous sod to get working if you didn't have the right hardware, but once it was up the only way it would fail was through hardware problems. IMHO, IBM outdid itself with OS/2 which is probably why MS had to kill its market. Microsoft would have never sold another Windows upgrade because this stuff set expectations of how computing should be done.

            I'm now mostly using Linux and MacOS, but I recall exporting Linux xterms to my OS/2 desktop, it just all worked provided you followed the Law of the Erect Member (p*nis for those with a limited vocabulary)...

            11 3 Reply
            1. Anonymous Coward
              Reply Icon
              Anonymous Coward

              Re: What problem will it solve ?

              "this stuff set expectations of how computing should be done"

              You're jesting I hope, from what I remember OS/2 was just as buggy as Windows and in such a case why didn't they simply use Linux.

              0 9 Reply
              1. AndrueC Silver badge
                Reply Icon
                Meh

                Re: What problem will it solve ?

                You're jesting I hope, from what I remember OS/2 was just as buggy as Windows and in such a case why didn't they simply use Linux.

                A lot of OS crashes were caused by people running it on clones that didn't completely follow the PC standard. I seem to recall a conversation on the CompuServe support forums which ended with a comment something like: "If we ask a motherboard for 72ns RAM refresh and it tells us it's using 72ns RAM refresh we assume that's what it's doing because that's how we build our PCs. 74ns is not the same as 72ns!".

                There also use to be an issue with printers because OS/2 insisted on using the polling facility and a lot of cheap parallel cables were cheap because that pin wasn't wired up.

                Maybe also (stretching my memory a bit) a similar issue with joysticks because OS/2 expected to be able to talk to them before it started listening.

                To my mind that was part of why OS/2 failed (and also the relationship between MS and IBM). IBM seemed to be old-school, 'do the job properly' whereas MS (and clone PC industry) was 'knock something up and if it sort of works sell it'.

                5 0 Reply
                1. bpfh
                  Reply Icon

                  Re: What problem will it solve ?

                  Ahhhh, the printer problems. I remember getting hold of the Lexmark software engineering manager to run tests on why our fleet of Lexmark Zsomthings (Z12 ?) were printing properly, but with the print head only making one side-to-side trip every 10-15 seconds (so 1 minute to print out one line of text). Ended up being told to comment out a line in the config.sys (the OS/2 config.sys being massively larger than it's MS-DOS counterparts), and deactivating some active communication setting on the parallel port fixed the issue. Took us about 3 weeks to find out what the hell was going on with the drivers, with a developer debugging on the phone with us.

                  Excellent support and knowledgeable people. Probably the only reason I got that far up the support chain was that I was working for IBM, on an IBM site and we had about 500 of the damned things...

                  3 0 Reply
                  1. Anonymous Coward
                    Reply Icon
                    Anonymous Coward

                    Re: What problem will it solve ?

                    Probably the only reason I got that far up the support chain was that I was working for IBM, on an IBM site and we had about 500 of the damned things...

                    Nope. That simple was what OS/2 support was like. In my considerable years in IT I have yet to come across any other support which immediately gave you second level support when your support ID was flagged as being sufficiently clued up to skip first level altogether (which, I may add, were no slouches either). By the way, IBM is also the only organisation to offer the legally correct option of fully opting out of the customary "we will record your call for <fill in excuse of the day>".

                    If I could work out who developed that model I'd give him a lifelong achievement award. I was not affiliated with OS/2, the only possible variant could be that I was one of the rogues they used to beta test their software (I had a 5 year old's ability to break thing in places you'd never expect them to be vulnerable).

                    2 0 Reply
                2. AndrueC Silver badge
                  Reply Icon
                  Facepalm

                  Re: What problem will it solve ?

                  OS/2 insisted on using the polling facility

                  Oops, that came out completely wrong. OS/2 didn't like using the polling facility. The missing wire was so that the printer could signal the computer for more data which is what OS/2 expected. I suppose that up to then most PC OSes didn't need that option because they had nothing better to do anyway than sit around asking the printer "Are you done yet?".

                  0 0 Reply
              2. Gartal
                Reply Icon

                Re: What problem will it solve ?

                Because LINUX, when I had a play with it in 1993 was at about version .8 and only just worked and was written by a lot of PFY's. LINUX was supplied by download through a 9800 BAUD modem to 10 1.44 MB diskettes. OS2 was supplied by a dirty great big company in a box with 27 (I think) diskettes.

                3 0 Reply
              3. Anonymous Coward
                Reply Icon
                Anonymous Coward

                Re: What problem will it solve ?

                You're jesting I hope, from what I remember OS/2 was just as buggy as Windows and in such a case why didn't they simply use Linux.

                AFAIK, Linux was at the time of OS/2 Warp just about to become an interesting Slackware distro on an Internet that had not yet been introduced by one Tim Berners-Lee to the concept of a URL. It certainly not had the statue of a trustworthy platform for business - that came later when sysops started to use Linux instead of Windows for SMB file serving because it actually kept on working and took fewer resources.

                With the right hardware, OS/2 simply soldiered on. It was an OS that didn't need rebooting every day, and it was *far* more capable of multitasking than Windows ever was. No, it wasn't buggy.

                2 0 Reply
    2. trog-oz
      Reply Icon

      Re: What problem will it solve ?

      "I'm currently struggling to run Linux Mint as a VM under a Windows 10 host using Virtual Box"

      Is there any reason that you're not running Mint natively?

      I feel a bit left out, as I have never actually seen a computer running OS/2. I was working on Pick systems back then. I think I'll have a look at the demo and see what the fuss was all about.

      3 0 Reply
      1. Khaptain Silver badge
        Reply Icon

        Re: What problem will it solve ?

        "Is there any reason that you're not running Mint natively?"

        Yes, and these are constraints not options.

        2 1 Reply
      2. Anonymous Coward
        Reply Icon
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: What problem will it solve ?

        I think I'll have a look at the demo and see what the fuss was all about.

        Sorry but the demo is butchered and not very good. We thought we could use it to show new clients OS/2 but it was useless for that because you can't do anything useful with it.

        0 0 Reply
    3. Alan Brown Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      Re: What problem will it solve ?

      "I'm currently struggling to run Linux Mint as a VM under a Windows 10 host"

      Try doing it the other way around....

      3 2 Reply
      1. Khaptain Silver badge
        Reply Icon

        Re: What problem will it solve ?

        "I'm currently struggling to run Linux Mint as a VM under a Windows 10 host"

        See reply above. It's not a choice !

        0 0 Reply
        1. phil dude
          Reply Icon
          Thumb Up

          Re: What problem will it solve ?

          In my "under the hood work", you might find it easier to optimise Mint over Win10, by getting a minimal kernel to boot - just what it needs to run.

          This may mean you have a non-mint kernel, but I have found this the most expeditious way of finding "what breaks".

          Just FYI, I am trying to run Linux within Linux, but get the GPU's to work properly..

          P.

          0 0 Reply
        2. Anonymous Coward
          Reply Icon
          Anonymous Coward

          VirtualBox is a dumpster fire

          >I'm currently struggling to run Linux Mint as a VM under a Windows 10 host using Virtual Box

          Assuming if its for work then your employer is cheap if you are using Virtual Box. Linux Mint also is not an ideal choice for say a server VM. As for your problem I have seen that same thing before and it was a VirtualBox issue not OS. Going to get down voted but VirtualBox is garbage and should only be used if you have no other choice (like us BSDers). It's buggy and its performance sucks in general but its windows guest performance is especially abysmal. If you need to get real work done you are much better off with VMware even if its just the player.

          0 3 Reply
          1. Khaptain Silver badge
            Reply Icon

            Re: VirtualBox is a dumpster fire

            The Office environment is VmWare + Netapp, but I don't get to bring that home.!!!!

            I have a work test rig at home for W10. I don't believe in VMs for everything, I want to see an OS on metal, with real spinning rust, low memory and shitty drivers, VM's tend to hide some of the problems that can occur etc etc ..

            So far W10 won't run the Cisco VPN Client, so that puts an end to a lot of discussions... and from what I understand Cisco will not be continuing the client in it's current form and our MotherShip is not ready to upgrade technology....status quo.

            VirtualBox and Mint are just involved in order that I can directly VPN into the office on the test rig.. ( since Cisco don't work), downloaded the v5.0.5 tonight which at least has helped with the Bridged Networking problems....

            0 0 Reply
            1. asdf
              Reply Icon

              Re: VirtualBox is a dumpster fire

              Hmm being as you sound like more of a windows user make sure you at least use Linux Mint xfce, as it is noticeably leaner. Ideally you would use something even more minimal like puppy Linux or smaller to reduce the amount of memory (you have to allocate) and cpu cyles your vm will steal while you leaving it running. Of course that route is not as user friendly and requires more fuss.

              0 0 Reply
    4. Roland6 Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      Re: What problem will it solve ?

      A very real problem: ATM and POS terminal upgrade!

      As many have posted, many ATM's are running some version of Windows XP.

      Whilst XP desktop and Windows XP Professional for Embedded Systems reached end of normal support life on 8-Apr-2014, other variants are still in support, thus depending on which variant is being used, end of normal support could be 2016 or 2019.

      We also know that ATM's generally have a USB port, that is typically used for service purposes.

      So an obvious market would be to enable the rapid field replacement of XP in these systems: the engineer simply inserts a USB stick and (optionally) removes the XP HDD and reboots back to full working state. Given the frequency of field service visits, no additional visits would be required to effect an OS upgrade - neither is a hardware refresh.

      I suspect a similar case can be made for POS terminals.

      Given the list of customers eComStation gives on their website, I suspect eComStation are doing their part in making this scenario a real possibility.

      0 0 Reply
  3. Thomas Gray

    Russian? Shurely Shome mishtake:

    eComStation is owned by XEU.com, a Dutch company, and presumably the successor to Mensys BV who co-owned it with Serenity Systems, an American company set up by a former IBM-er. It has never been a Russian owned venture, as far as I know.

    4 0 Reply
    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Russian? Shurely Shome mishtake:

      No comment. That is a sore point to many in the OS/2 world.

      0 0 Reply
  4. Lee D Silver badge

    And there was I thinking that the rest of the world was desperately trying to STOP people booting from USB sticks, especially those that are in embedded devices that are running obsolete operating systems?

    2 0 Reply
    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      In the field, given a choice of compromising a stick or compromising a laptop, which would you pick? A very fast (about one half speed of my SSD's) 64 GB SanDisk cost me $39.02 including tax. Decisions, decisions.

      2 0 Reply
  5. Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

    Softeach

    Ah, takes me back to those heady days of Softeach at the Penta Hotel in Heathrow. Hundreds of techies spending the whole weekend queuing to see the latest software - funny that the biggest queues were where product worth $$$ was being given away. With IBM the queues were long, not because the product was being given away (it wasn't), but because the demonstration was so impressive. Nobody seemed brave enough to be the guinea pig to try it on their own kit though. I think the reason was, in those days hardware was still comparatively expensive to tie up a pc for testing and demonstration purposes, so the tendency was to wait and see what happened in the marketplace. Sadly it never happened at that time.

    2 0 Reply
  6. Anonymous Coward
    Happy

    Ahhh OS/2 Warp

    the joys of watching the install fail at disk 237 (well it seemed that way).

    7 0 Reply
    1. Dave 126 Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      Re: Ahhh OS/2 Warp

      I seem to remember that is how far I got,, back when I was a spotty teenager. A hardware / media fail, not the fault of OS/2 (though as I mostly played games on my PC, I might not have had too much for it really).

      In 2008, an ATM in Peru rebooted on me, and I saw an OS/2 boot screen.

      2 0 Reply
      1. Anonymous Coward
        Reply Icon
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Ahhh OS/2 Warp

        The ATM at the top of my road ( in England ) did that last year - showing OS2 boot screen.

        0 0 Reply
        1. Fred Flintstone Gold badge
          Reply Icon

          Re: Ahhh OS/2 Warp

          The ATM at the top of my road ( in England ) did that last year - showing OS2 boot screen.

          May have been a Barclays one. Barclays had a *massive* OS/2 based setup.

          2 0 Reply
    2. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Ahhh OS/2 Warp

      That would have been Warp 3 that was available as a pack of 3.5" disks. Warp 4 came as a CD but it did give the option to make floppies if you felt that you must do it that way.

      Installing an OS from floppies (19 for Warp 3, 56 for Warp 4) gave the floppy drive a good workout and I have seen many such drives fail in that type of situation.

      3 0 Reply
      1. lorisarvendu
        Reply Icon

        Re: Ahhh OS/2 Warp

        I remember being very impressed by the fact that I could open a second Dos prompt while formatting a floppy in the first...and the floppy kept formatting! At that time the latest Windows was 3.11, and this was the first time I'd seen true multitasking in action.

        Not so impressed by that fact that after installing Warp from a CD, it was common for it to no longer recognise the CD drive upon reboot. And as for SYS errors, involving trawling through the largest Config.sys file known to man....

        0 0 Reply
    3. Montreal Sean
      Reply Icon

      Re: Ahhh OS/2 Warp

      I actually got OS/2 Warp 3 to install after a couple of tries and a floppy drive replacement.

      I kept it for a couple of days and then went back to Windows because I was a teenager and wanted to play games.

      It was a nice OS though.

      0 0 Reply
    4. DrXym
      Reply Icon

      Re: Ahhh OS/2 Warp

      IBM used to use a weird format on their OS/2 install disks to pack more information on the disk. Very impressive technically but a pain in the arse when you had to make duplicates. Even today getting OS/2 to work on a VM is hassle.

      1 0 Reply
      1. esven
        Reply Icon

        Re: Ahhh OS/2 Warp

        Yeah, it was some strange non-standard format that allowed an incredible 1.8 Mb on each disk instead of the standard 1.44 Mb, but which also made them much more likely to fail, and required a custom backup program that nobody bothered to use until it was too late.

        0 0 Reply
      2. esven
        Reply Icon

        Re: Ahhh OS/2 Warp

        Yes, they used some non-standard format that allowed an incredible 1.8 Mb on each disk, instead of the standard 1.44 Mb, but which made them much more likely to fail, and required a custom backup program that nobody bothered to use until it was too late.

        0 0 Reply
        1. BinkyTheMagicPaperclip Silver badge
          Reply Icon

          Re: Ahhh OS/2 Warp

          xdfcopy - also ran in DOS if I remember correctly, so you didn't need an OS/2 box to write it. Not actually an IBM developed technology, but a clever extension of the 3.5" DSHD format that worked on practically every drive.

          1 0 Reply
    5. Dunhill
      Reply Icon
      Happy

      Re: Ahhh OS/2 Warp

      Still have the box with the CD's on the shelf

      AND

      a VM running it,

      still there are some things that goes easier/quicker than with linux

      0 0 Reply
  7. Your alien overlord - fear me

    Remember running it on a PS/2 - no young 'uns that was an IBM computer not a Sony games console (unfortuneately).

    9 0 Reply
    1. Teiwaz
      Reply Icon

      1 out of many

      When I was at college in the early 90's there was one IBM PS/2 with OS/2 on it.

      Few ever went near it. Even the lecturers ignored it.

      Personally I think the new owners should have gone for a 'free for non commercial licence', the amount of interest and warm fuzzy feelings for this platform among It people might have led to a little growth to it rather than stagnating or merely frozen in time.

      Just my five and half pence.

      7 0 Reply
  8. MaxHertz

    Networking

    Only bad memories. Trying to setup networking on OS/2 was a royal PITA.

    0 2 Reply
    1. Peter Gathercole Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      Re: Networking

      I have to admit that it's nearly 15 years since I needed to do this, but I don't remember it being any more difficult than on current operating systems. Mostly point, click and type, just like any other OS, and you can bet that there was a CLI accessible to do it from a command prompt.

      Of course, in those days it was all static IP addresses. Maybe the DHCP support is a bit lame.

      3 0 Reply
      1. Anonymous Coward
        Reply Icon
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Networking

        you can bet that there was a CLI accessible to do it from a command prompt

        Ah, the main cause of swearing at AIX, at least for people that came from other Unix variants. If you didn't do stuff with the menu, nothing would work as expected. Setting an IP address, configuring a default gateway - the commands executed without error message, but nothing changed unless you use the menu. On the plus side, once you used the menu it was all easy.

        1 0 Reply
        1. Peter Gathercole Silver badge
          Reply Icon

          Re: Networking

          Oh ho! someone who knows me (even though they're too cowardly to post in their own name).

          But when it comes to configuring anything on proprietary UNIXs, there is/was no commonality. Sun users used to think that their way was the only way, ignoring the fact that all the other vendors, such as HP, Digital, Data General and IBM (and Sequent, Pyramid, Altos, Siemens, Nixdorf, NCR, Silicon Graphics, Intergraph...) all did it differently! People tend to forget this.

          Unfortunately, the split between the major proprietary UNIX variants occurred before the general adoption of TCP/IP (and yes, I know about the relationship between TCP/IP, DARPA and BSD), but all vendors had their own source trees, and implemented support particularly for networking in different ways. As such, there were no real 'standard' ways of doing things. Especially when some TCP/IP support was 'bolted on' to another vendor's UNIX system.

          The main difference with AIX was the fact that the ODM was decoupled from the so-called standard commands, so running ifconfig, route et. al. would (within the bounds of different implementations) configure the interfaces, but it would not persist across a reboot.

          I think that if you wanted commonality, you would have to have settled on sysadm from the AT&T base code to really have something 'standard'. And I don't think that would have suited anybody.

          3 0 Reply
          1. Anonymous Coward
            Reply Icon
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: Networking

            even though they're too cowardly to post in their own name

            Maybe you ought to keep in mind that some people on this site may have a few things to protect, like clearances, customers or maybe the odd business or two. In today's world of shamists (Monica Lewinsky) and outragists (Scott Adams) it takes but one wrong word or bad joke to be publicly sacrificed on the altar of other people in search of more advertising, page hits or their daily fix of rage, irrespective of who gets hurt in the process.

            3 0 Reply

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