OS/2 Warp 4!

[conceitedjerk]

I've recently availed myself a sealed copy of OS/2 Warp 4!

Woohoo!

I'm hoping to find the time (in a month or so) to install it on one of my machines here! :-/

 

[porter]

I have a machine with OS/2 Warp 3.0, I consider that the classic version, but you do need the fixpacks. The Watcom compiler seems to work well.

 

[conceitedjerk]

I have a machine with OS/2 Warp 3.0, I consider that the classic version, but you do need the fixpacks. The Watcom compiler seems to work well.

A number of people I've talked to seem to prefer Warp 3 over other versions. It runs like a top on my 486 DX2/66!

For performance sake though, I'm gonna install Warp 4 on a spare Pentium 166MMX I have in the lab...

 

[II2II]

I ran Warp 3 on top of a 486-DX/50 for years, and yeah it ran pretty well.

As for Warp 3 being more popular, I'm guessing it's for one of two reasons:

- Most people who bought OS/2 bought Warp 3. There was a bit of a spell where noone knew what was happening with Chicago, and OS/2 provided pretty much what Windows 95 would end up offering in the long run (and sometimes it did it better). When Warp 4 came out, it was way over priced.

- Warp 4 doesn't seem to offer much. If you install the last FixPak, you will pretty much get all of the bug fixes and design changes that came in Warp 4. And Warp 4 requires so much more hardware. In the long run, it turned out that very little software needed Warp 4 anyway (for obvious reasons).

 

[Unknown_K]

Warp 3 sold very well to PC users, no idea how well warp 4 did.

I have warp 4 on my IBM PS/2 95 (P60) and it works well. I also have older versions I am planning on using on my older PS/2 systems.

 

[Anonymous Freak]

Yeah, I have OS/2 2.0, 2.1, and Warp 3 installed on my 486 PS/2. (I also have Warp 4, but it's CD-only, and the machine doesn't have a CD-ROM drive.) I also have PC-DOS 7 with Windows 3.11.

That's one of the nice things about OS/2, it handles multi-boot very nicely.

 

[Quadraman]

OS/2 is nice. I have copies of 3 and 4 around here somewhere.

 

[II2II]

Yeah, OS/2 was bundled with a very nice boot manager and the partition manager was a cinch to use (although nowhere near as useful as the partition managers shipped with Linux if you want to use non IBM and non Microsoft operating systems).

The other thing is that OS/2 had some very nice shareware software. Zap-o-comm was tremendously useful, particularly in contrast to Windows based serial communications software. PMMail was also amazingly simple to use and powerful. Multitasking of DOS applications was amazingly reliable.

Man, I feel like pulling out the P200 to play around with it. Maybe some other day though.

 

[quinterro]

Warp v4 was quite nice when I still used it. Eventually I had to give it up and use Win95. Ugh.

I purchased ZapIt (I think) which allowed for internet connection sharing. Too bad no machine in my stash of parts is old enough for it anymore...

 

[yestermac]

I have eCs 1.2.. I've used warp since 2.1. The reason Warp 4 wasn't popular is IBM had already announced the end of life for OS/2 before they released Warp 4. The last servicepack for Warp 4 will bring you to Warp 4.51. As far as being anything like Windows 95 it was quite a bit better. As usual a better product doesn't beat better marketing.

 

[porter]

I've used warp since 2.1.

OS/2 3.0 was the first Warp.

 

[II2II]

The way that I usually put it is that OS/2 is what Windows 95 should have been. It was fast enough, stable enough, and had decent backwards compatability with DOS and Windows 3.1 applications.

I don't know if I'd go as far as saying that OS/2 was quite a bit better than Windows 95. I loved it because I hung out on my moderm a lot, and the multitasking was great (remember when you waited for downloads, and couldn't use the modem for anything else). OS/2 also had some great serial communications and tcp/ip applications. But other than that an OS is only as good as its applications.

Many popular titles were not available for OS/2, the available versions were ANCIENT, or you were stuck in a DOS/Windows 3.1 VM. Windows 95, in contrast, had native applications on the day it shipped. From what I can recall, OS/2 took somewhat longer to boot, which meant that it sucked for dual-booting gamers. Thankfully I was not in that scene. OS/2 also had Windows 95's system requirements years before Windows 95 was released, which means that the former ended up being regarded as bloated even though the latter was not much better.

OS/2 lacked drivers for popular hardware, or had low quality drivers that contributed to system instability. Then there was the famous SIQ issue, which wasn't cleared up (sorta) until late in the Warp 3 FixPak cycle.

OS/2 did have its place. That place included my hard drive. But in most cases OS/2 was just plain limiting.

 

[chris]

I have an uninstalled copy of Warp 3 lying around... I'm going to go install it now.

 

[yestermac]

I've used warp since 2.1.

OS/2 3.0 was the first Warp.

Ok, Sorry to confuse you. I've used OS/2 since 2.1

 

[yestermac]

As a multitasking operating system OS/2 was quite a bit better then Windows 95. If IBM could have marketed it there would have been drivers and popular applications. They couldn't get hardware manufactures to write drivers and software developers to write software. That's what killed OS/2. I don't know if it took longer to boot then Windows. My gauge was it didn't crash. I ran a 4 line BBS with an uptime of over 200 days until I had a power failure.

 

[porter]

OS/2 2.0 was the first OS I used to have proper exception handling built into the OS.

Eg this is where the __try,__finally started.

Rather neat.

It's like a Piltdown Man between WFWG and NT.

 

[Temetka]

OS/2? 8-o

Awesome!

I...Uhh..

PM Sent.

 

[II2II]

I really don't think that OS/2 success or failure lay in the marketing (though I certainly thought so at the time). OS/2 had one big problem: IBM's perceived commitment to the product.(1) Heck, IBM wouldn't even ship OS/2 on their own PCs until near the very end. Which brings up another failing: IBM did not control the OEM channels like Microsoft did. Most people will get their first OS as an OEM version. Once they have learned it, it is harder to convince them to switch. Today, we have a situation where it is unlikely that people feel as though they could install the OS. Also consider that Windows 3.1 was very successful, even though it received very little visible marketing.

(1) IBM's perceived lack of commitment is ironic. They supported OS/2 Warp 4 for about a decade after it's release, even though it was a dead-end product from day one. Microsoft has a 10 year support cycle for a thriving OS.

 

[ckhthd]

"OS/2 a better DOS than DOS and a better Windows than Windows."

And it really was. Though OS/2 never met its promise, it remains the best way to run DOS and Win 3.x programs. It will provide in a virtual DOS machine an optimal conventional memory and XMS configuration. Win OS/2 is much more stable than DOS/WIN. My favorite version is e-com station on pentiums and OS/2 Warp 3 for windows installed over Windows for Workgrouos 3.11 on 386 or 486 machines. Today, I run Warp 3 on a 100MHZ 486 with 64 megs of RAM. In the old days, instead of DOS I alwys ran a bare bones install of OS/2 2.1 with only DOS support and I used an IBM internal text version of the workplace shell. I have usd some version of OS/2 from the day it was released. The new e-com station is a pretty good operating system ( I do not own it yet) but is still hurt by the lack of operations. Interestingly, did you know that most ATM networks and ATM machines still run on an impementation of Warp 3 connect!