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#os2

7 posts7 participants0 posts today
movq

Made an OS/2 Warp 3-ish theme for my X11 window manager and finally added support for showing application icons in the top left corner.

Unfocused windows have a slightly darker border (unlike in OS/2), which helps me identify which window has focus.

(The WM is keyboard-driven only, hence I left out the minimize/maximize buttons in the right corner.)

#OS2

(Is X11 #RetroComputing yet?)

ltning
Ugliest and most poorly hidden #EasterEgg in #OperatingSystem history? Literally an executable - `\OS2\BITMAPS\AAAAA.EXE` - on the boot drive. CW: your eyes may bleed. Boost to people you don't like.

Don't get me wrong - I really like OS/2. But IBM never really made pretty things, did they?

And the alt text needs to be forced upon y'all in this one:

Short video clip showing a vector drawing of a green field with a road leading past some purple mountains in the background. There's a small blob of water next to the road. There are gradients everywhere: background, mountains, road, water..
The sun is orange (also gradient) with a drop shadow like only late 80s vector drawing software could. Corel Draw maybe? It reads "OS/2 Warp" in the top right corner.

There is an absurdly large metal pole with an even larger white sign full of names printed in a horribly-rendered font (probably System Proportional). The background of the sign is white and, thankfully, not gradient. I suspect this is due to technical limitation, not artistic ones.

#RetroComputing #OS2 #Warp #Ugly #IBM #BigBlue
#bigblue
Replied to Harald Eilertsen
ltning

@harald Generally, no. Let me be verbose :D There are a lot of problems with that slash in the name which makes it hard to find and post OS/2-related stuff:

  • Mastodon web UI renders it as simply <hash>OS, with the /2 dangling. I can coerce it to search for it by manually editing the URL with %2f in place of the /, but it seems to not actually search for hashtags but simply plaintext search when I do that.
  • Pleroma displays "OS/2" in your message as a link to your instance, but does not interpret it as an actual hashtag - the hash (#) itself is not part of the anchor text.
  • My preferred iOS client (Pipilo) fails, probably due to a server error, to display anything if I tap the link in your message. Other clients don't even try to send the /2 at all, considering the slash another word separator.

Whichever search engine I use (not fediverse), finding OS/2 stuff is made harder because of the same issue, and you need to treat it specially by quoting or escaping or whatever your search engine of choice prefers.

pleroma.anduin.netAnduin.net
#OS2#IBM#WeirdProblems
Ltning
Despite all the things IBM did right with OS/2, there were some absolutely mind-boggling decisions made. Today's example: Using Java (version 1.11 or better, mind you) and a Netscape browser plug-in to install TCP/IP. Other than the chicken-and-egg-problem (which is solved by installing the transport services - NIC and protocol drivers - first), there's the fact that they had a perfectly good software installation framework which ran fine on like 6-8MB of RAM (total!). This variant swaps until my CF card starts sweating with 16MB, and is s-l-o-w!

I mean yeah, great, I get a proper BSD-4.4, 32-bit TCP/IP stack and tools. But it's taken me half a day. Getting the installation files over involved loading packet drivers and using #mTCP in a DOS session. Which works .. surprisingly well. But still .. FixPak43, reboot. MPTS, reboot. Netscape 2.02, reboot. Java 1.18, reboot. Feature Installer plug-in (no reboot). Then, finally, TCP/IP.

All this to have a machine to play with at #Blackvalley.

#OS2 #Retrocomputing #WhyAreYouReadingThis #GoDoSomethingUseful
JdeBP

George Michaelson recounts some interesting history from the DEC world.

tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2025-A

From the other end of the spectrum, it is interesting to observe the reasons that #POSIX initially did not specify what happened when one did ".." from the root directory. It wasn't just because of the Andrew File System. POSIX defined an API, and theoretically one that could be provided by something that was not Unix, that did not use Unix filesystems.

Early #FAT did not have a ",," entry in the root, or even subdirectories at all in very early versions of MS/PC-DOS. ".." was wasteful of limited root directory space until FAT32 came along and root directory handling stopped having to always be a special case anyway.

#HPFS did not have "." or ".." entries on-disc at all. They were synthesized by the filesystem driver from a special start record. But the root directory had one of those.

Of course, NTFS just brings us back to the #DEC world. (-:

www.tuhs.org[TUHS] V7 ls and dot files?
#FilesystemFormats#OS2
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