UnixWare 7.x cheat sheet..

I just found out (the hard way) that the cheatsheet thing is more SCO Unix oriented, not UnixWare… And for some reason Google seems to like to slide people towards Linux.

Hmm

The IDE cdrom is…

  • mount /dev/c1b0t0l0 /mnt

While the IDE harddisk is:

  • /dev/rdsk/c0b0t0d0

Which is divided into slices (s0,s1,s3 etc..)

To prevent X windows from starting on boot..

  • scologin disable

Naturally to enable it, ‘scologin enable’ ..

To change the detected video card… (I found this out for Qemu 0.14.1..)

  • scoadmin -> hardware -> videoCirrus Logic GD5446 PCI Other 21 inch 800×600 64K-color 60Hz
  • mouseadmin .. PS/2 Mouse detect & test

Changing the mouse is done from the console (without X running)

  • mouseadmin

And of course there are virtual consoles (Ctrl+<Function Key>) … Just like, uh .. linux.

Upgrading through OS/2; Version 3.0 aka Warp

Well the time has come to install OS/2 Warp.  But first a quick commercial:

It’s not secret that this is regarded as one of the worst advertising campaigns in the history of the world.  Watch it and remember this ad aired on American TV.  If you want to alienate people first speak to them in a foreign language that they have no hope of understanding.  Next get people who clearly are not users of that product to promote it.  And finally… DON’T SHOW THE PRODUCT.

Nobody wanted to get ‘warped’.  After all warped rotors cost people a LOT of money.. Bad connotations, you know.  But apparently nobody with any common sense asked what the hell was this crap.

Anyways, let’s go and do the upgrade.

Old blue, forever there…. forever… IBM.

Oh what’s this?  A new boot logo! Clearly this isn’t OS/2 2.x!

I can feel the excitement already!  So I’m going to take the easy way out, right? It should.. keep my printer, keep my applications, and get me warped right!?

The best part about Warp is that it supports IDE CDROMs out of the box! Outside of the boot disks, no more floppy shuffle!

And tragedy struck.

Well of course I have a greater then 35MB disk, Invalid Base Product Level?  What is so wrong with OS/2 2.11?  I have a bad feeling my OS/2 3.0 CD is one of the ‘red spine’ varieties that includes no Win-OS/2 support but rather relied on the user to provide a regular copy of Windows 3.1 … And for some reason it won’t upgrade a prior Win-OS/2 installation.

Oh well.  I’ll have to dig around some more for a ‘red’ spine copy of Warp 3 …

I guess for now this is a ‘work in progress’.. but I’ll get OS/2 all the way to 4!

—- Edit

Some kind person sent me some disk images, so onward to Warp 3!

Upgrading through OS/2; Version 2.1

Kicking off the install we get our old friend the IBM logo.  At least they get to re-use stuff over and over and over…

Oh look the boot logo! ..

And… the old welcome screen.  Sometimes it’s hard to know what version you are installing.  Well other then the mountain of diskettes! It’s 23 disks by now!

This sounds.. foreboding.  I guess we’ll find out as we go along.

And once more again, OS/2 can be installed in all kinds of places.. And to keep the upgrade cycle going we are going to remain on the C drive…

I guess by now I should get used to OS/2 trying to offer to format my hard disk.

Time to feed the machine a bunch of disks…

And now we are ready to boot up the GUI… Again is this OS/2 2.0 or 2.1? It’s hard to tell.

And let’s install the whole thing… wee!

Well this is new.. CD-ROMs were becoming more and more popular.  Sadly the IDE CDROM standard had not been invented yet.  So… going stock, no IDE-CDROMs yet.

And once more again I have to select the IBM Proprinter II and assign it to LPT1.  Why oh why am I constantly having to do this?  There is no real logic as to why some versions migrate this, and others do not.

Time to feed some disks to the computer, and wonder about that warning…

Didn’t we do this before?  Again I’m going to go through with it…

Worst case I’ll have two icon sets now for Word & Excel.

Now for the moment of truth!

Ok, looks good.. OS/2 2.1 … Which to be honest looks identical to OS/2 2.0.

The good news is that Word and Excel still work, and Bricks the breakout clone from OS/2 1.1 is still working.  I still have my two printers..

Games & Productivity look identical.

The ‘bigger’ deal is that Win-OS/2 was updated to Windows 3.1!

And it could now run in 386 Enhanced Mode, while OS/2 2.0’s Windows 3.0 was limited to ‘real’ and ‘standard’ (286 protected mode) modes of operation.  The only big limitation was that you could not load any VXD’s into Windows 3.1.  This made things like Win32s impossible to use.  But again with it’s ability to isolate programs it made OS/2 a far superior platform for Windows applications.

The other big use for OS/2 was BBSing.  It’s ability to run multiple DOS sessions was a big deal.  And if anything OS/2’s ability to multitask DOS so well made OS/2 versions of stuff kind of moot.  Even Synchronet didn’t sell that many OS/2 versions fo the BBS (I know it was largely because the tremendous rise of the Internet really changed that).

The other ‘big’ thing for OS/2 2.1 was the addition of the multimedia extensions.  Sadly they were a separate install from the OS (WHY?!) and it seems with the shuffle of time I’ve misplaced my disks… I remember that it included some bird video, and Intel video codec, and sounds.  There was a sound effect for everything but moving the mouse.. And it was annoying as hell.  But it’s March of 1993, Windows NT 3.1 is about to launch, and Multimedia was on everyone’s mind.

Also as OS/2 started to garner attention things like Sim City started to appear.

SimCity for OS/2 2.7

Thanks to BlueNexus

One thing was for sure, to stand out the next version of OS/2 needed to look.. different. Onward to Warp!

Upgrading through OS/2; Version 2.0

Well here we go, ‘A better dos then dos, a better windows then windows, better OS/2 than OS/2!’ … The 32bit version of OS/2 had been under development for quite some time, and now it was finally time to ship.. The year was 1992.

I’m going to switch from VirtualBOX to Virtual PC, as the screen redraws were just too slow on VirtualBOX.  Virtual PC cannot boot 1.0, 1.1 & 1.2 however it can run OS/2 1.3.  Thanks to Qemu’s qemu-img tool, I could quickly convert the VirtualBOX hard disk image into something VirtualPC can understand.

qemu-img.exe convert OS21.3.vmdk -O vpc OS2-13.vhd

And to test things, I first booted it on Virtual PC.

Ok, everything looks fine, let’s upgrade!

The OS/2 installer had grown so big, that now it required two diskettes to boot up.

Also back was a graphical splash, the colored OS/2 logo that in a way reminds me of the 4 panes of the windows logo.

And back to the blue on grey installer… Notice 15 diskettes! It’s grown massive!

Another amazing thing for OS/2 2.0 is the boot manager.  It lets OS/2 boot from extended partitions, and even secondary drives! As long as the boot manager is installed first.  I know some people that bought OS/2 only to manage multi-booting installations.  IBM could have sold this thing as a separate product.  Alas, since we are upgrading our way through OS/2 we have no need for it, so we just keep on upgrading our C drive.

If only there was a FAT to HPFS conversion utility.  But again, please don’t format my C drive!!!

Now we just feed diskettes to the installer..

And now we can reboot into the GUI!

And let the install continue.  I can’t help but think that I’ve done this before..

Unlike last time, I’ll actually have something to migrate..

Well the migration tool gives me a good feeling for finding my OS/2 programs.  Maybe they’ll even run!

Let’s trust the installer…

Now this confuses me, first it said (and quickly) that it migrated my existing printer, then it wants me to add another…?  I just know I’ll get two printers.  Now I feel like Arthur ‘Two Sheds‘ Jackson.

So a reboot at the end, and into the GUI:

Notice how OS/2 2.0 throws the tutorial in your face… All the while the desktop is building in the background so you could ‘multitask’ doing the tutorial while your hardisk is frantically building the desk.. And I see the two printers… sigh.

As you can see Word and Excel are still working.  And unlike a stock OS/2 2.0 installation it’s preserved the 1.x color scheme.

If you’ve never used OS/2 2.0 it comes with FAR more applets then the prior versions.

No doubt IBM was trying to address people like me complaining.  PM Terminal was nice in that it supported Xmodem, Ymodem & Kermit.  Not to mention you can send a ‘break’ easily over a menu.  It’s handy for things like cisco routers.  The seek & scan files is AWESOME really where was this in the world of Windows?  Why was this so … hidden.  Kind of strange that such a great tool was hiding.

Also someone got the memo about games.  You see if people can’t play in your environment they’ll go elsewhere.  After all even in the office it’s not all work.. There is a lot of people that attribute the success of Windows 3.0 to it’s Solitaire.  You see it’s shuffle algorithm is broken, cards tend to ‘clump’.  So as you play and sort, the cards start to appear in a better and more orderly manner.  And people like to win.  I know it’s a cheap thing, but heh the Chess in OS/2 is pretty good, as is the Solitaire.  I don’t know if making them ‘broken’ and letting people win more often would have sold more installs.  It reminds me of “The Story of Mel

In the same way, being ‘good’ and ‘correct’ doesn’t win you spaces in the market place.

Also this is the appearance of Neko for OS/2.  Not to mention a Jigsaw puzzle, one of those annoying number scramble things, and .. Reversi!

OS/2 2.0 finally allowed users to do wallpaper! ..

The downside is that OS/2 relied on it’s own bitmap format that of course was incompatible with the Windows bitmap format.  Nor did it support things like GIF/PCX that were common at the time.

Another thing IBM included was a copy of Windows 3.0 that could run under OS/2 2.0 in either full screen or ‘seamless’ mode.  There was no denying it, but after the launch of Windows 3.0 the avalanche of Windows programs was.. incredible.  And to not support them would mean death.

Some say that OS/2 did such a great job of support Windows that it just encouraged people to not write OS/2 software.

The ‘killer’ feature in OS/2 was this:

That little checkbox, “Separate session” became the #1 feature of OS/2.  You see Windows applications could happily overwrite each other, and memory protection became a big problem for Windows.  The easy way to crash it out was to launch a lot of any application.  Even well behaved applications would eventually bleed the system resources out, and again instabilities would strike.  In Windows 3.0 the USER, GDI & KERNEL modules all shared stack & heap, so exceeding the 64kb stack wasn’t too hard.  Even things like Program Manager and high color icons could do this quite easily.  However with OS/2’s “Win-OS/2 separate session checkbox, it meant that this application would get it’s own copy of Windows running.  Suddenly you could run Word for Windows & Excel for Windows in separate VMs, along with say some game, and the game wouldn’t crash all three out.  And if you were a programmer, it meant your compiler,editor could run outside and protected from the program you were developing.

And with seamless mode, instead of a separate screen, now your Windows applications could run on the OS/2 desktop.  This kind of partitioning wouldn’t make it’s way to Windows NT until version 3.5 in 1994.

You can only run 12 OS/2 sessions, but you can run WAY more DOS sessions.  I just got bored of clicking and rearranging.  I wouldn’t even think of running 20 MS-DOS prompts on Windows 3.0 ..

And unlike the OS/2 prompts the DOS boxes can go between full screen and windowed mode.  Another great thing is that they support DPMI & VCPI.  So you can run dos extender software.  Another great thing, is that *SOME* hardware calls could be passed down from a VM into your hardware.  It is possible for Doom 1.1 on OS/2 2.0 to work with a soundblaster.

Really.

(SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 P330 T3 and use the fixpack for OS/2 2.0 … but really it works!)

Sadly DOOM didn’t run in a window, and honestly a picture of doom is.. well.

 

gratuitous.

But why not.  It’s actually running under OS/2.  It’s something that a lot of computers in 1993 had issues running, even in plain MS-DOS.

At this point OS/2 1.0 feels like a tech demo, 1.1 – 1.3 are just toys.  Really you can see the frustration in the IBM/MS alliance as a 32bit OS is what people wanted to make, not the 16bit stuff.  It’s all goes down to the poor design of the 80286 CPU, and too many people selling them as ‘useful’ things.  Even as early as 1992 microkernel/personality people should have really taken notice in OS/2 2.0.  The key to the future was in virtualization, not in personalities.  Or more so, with things like Win-OS/2 paravirtualization, which is specialized kernel assists and drivers enabling the guest OS to bypass typical emulated hardware for IO and transfer raw datablocks in/out for things like video/disks & networks.

As awesome as OS/2 2.0 was, there is one thing you may notice here clearly lacking.

Networking.

OS/2 2.0 included *NO* networking support at all.  It was expected that people would use separate addons, even going as far to coax support for network cards in the DOS sessions and loading isolated Netware reqestors.  And of course adding these network requestors was widly varied, and there was simply no good universal way to do it.  Microsoft clearly learned the lesson about this with Windows for Workgroups & Windows NT.  It was a real pleasure with Windows 95 & Windows NT 4.0… But it was 1995-1996 by then.

Well, Next stop is OS/2 2.1!

Upgrading through OS/2; Version 1.3

Keeping with the ping-point tradition, I’m going to upgrade IBM OS/2 1.2 to Microsoft OS/2 1.30.1, the LAN Manager 2.1 install.  At this point Microsoft basically was taking IBM OS/2 1.3 and repackaging it.  All their efforts were shifting out of OS/2 and into Windows NT.  But to support existing customers and build their enterprise market OS/2 was still very much an integral part of the strategy as Windows NT wasn’t ready by a long shot yet.

Products like Microsoft Mail & SQL Server (ported & rebranded Sybase SQL) were the companies future direction, but for now they were OS/2 applications, and they needed an update from OS/2 1.2.

And continuing on, it’s the same bland tradition.

Maybe I just have mixed feelings about the grey background thing, it just feels either military or industrial.  Then again that was what OS/2 was trying to be, industrial computing on the PC.  I suspect there was a color study done by IBM on the whole look and feel.  The schema feels like a design by committee thing.

And please, don’t format my disk!

Now this selective installer is new.  Prior to this you’d get all of OS/2 and from there you could disable or delete as you wanted… But now a selective install.  I went ahead and selected everything.  Naturally this being a ‘server’ version you may not want the MS-DOS stuff at all…

It sounds like a lot more stuff… But go through and select down the line.  It is strange that my control+c (break) on is never honored, I have to always go there and enable it.

Now we just shuffle diskettes, and let the install finish up.

And to select a printer.  I don’t know why it just doesn’t upgrade my old printer, maybe it just wants to show off all the drivers… A sharp contrast from OS/2 1.0!

So with the install done, and a quick reboot we are teleported to the OS/2 1.3 desktop.

Very cool.  And… very.. 1.2’ish.

So I thought I’d first verify my applications work.  Excel launches but Word..

Ouch.  I guess this Microsoft OS/2 doesn’t do upgrades.  Although it did preserve my groups. I’ve got to say this is kinda sad.  At least it did backup the config.sys so I could simply append the lines to the PATH & LIBPATH and get my applications running again. One can’t help but wonder if this was some passive aggressive attack on Word & Excel?

Also new in OS/2 1.3 is the ability to lock the desktop!  Good stuff to keep people out, too bad it’s just a system thing, not an account / role based thing.

The default ‘screen saver’ lockout screen is the OS/2 logo.  I’ve only seen it on the Microsoft BOX, and a few Microsoft books, but here it is.

OS/2 1.3 is said to be more stable then OS/2 1.2, and faster.  I couldn’t tell the difference, I’m sure being under emulation would be one of the reasons, the other being on a significantly faster machine.  Nobody could imagine Ghz CPUs in 1987.

I don’t have much to add to OS/2 1.3 as it really feels like OS/2 1.2.

Next up is OS/2 2.0, the first of the 32bit releases of OS/2… Operate at a higher level!

Upgrading through OS/2; Version 1.2

I couldn’t find a Microsoft OS/2 1.2 so on with IBM OS/2 1.2.  I figured it was still a joint project that IBM should upgrade a Microsoft install.

OS/2 1.2 installAnd away we go!

Into good old fashioned blue on grey. I’m not even going to bother with the dual boot thing, and anyways who cares, right, better dos then dos? right!

New in OS/2 1.2 is the HPFS filesystem.  I could go on about it’s extended attributes, long file names, speed, but I’m sure others have written far better about it then me.  Also how it didn’t have any journaling, could crash out easily, and there was no method to map longfilenames onto the 8.3 filesystem could easily leave DOS applications in the dark.

So basically we let it load and hit enter… select a keyboard and..

Again don’t let it format the disk.  I wonder how many people went ahead and formatted thinking it’d preserve anything… Oh well we’ll keep things FAT for the duration of this exercise.  Which reminds me, it’s a shame IBM/Microsoft didn’t include a tool to convert FAT to HPFS.  I guess that was another lesson learned for WindowsNT.

The install also asks if I’d like to keep my old program groups (yes!) and a mouse & serial port.  The IBM OS/2 1.2 version has no support for PS/2 mice on AT computers.  Oddly enough the PS/2 driver won’t load on VirtualBOX, so the real fix is to load the OS/2 1.3 PS/2 mouse driver on OS/2 1.2, add it to the mouse driver, and it’ll work fine.

So with the installation out of the way, let’s boot it up!

And here we are, in the OS/2 1.2 GUI.  Notice how it looks more Windows 3.0’ish which is a nice improvement.  The timestamps are from 8-31-1989.

Two BIG things that were absent in OS/2 1.1 is the inclusion of a Tutorial, “Introducing OS/2”, and the “OS/2 Command Reference”.  It’s sure nice having online help for the system commands.

The text mode editor is gone, replaced by the PM e editor.

E seems designed for you to use the mouse, not the alt/arrow keys.  But that’s how I navigate and I find it kind of forceful to alt, then letter to get a command menu. Oh well.

As you can guess by the grey backgrounds, OS/2 doesn’t do wall paper.  Not even a screen saver.  As you can see for the late 1980’s and early 1990’s OS/2 is missing out on two of the big sellers for bored office workers.  It’s an IBM inspired system, which meant GREYS and YAWNS.  But it sure can multitask, but boy is it BORING.

Oh sure there is a control panel, but it’s mostly rigged to date, time, and the incredibly convoluted process for adding a printer.  I’m just glad that my printer has been preserved to this point.

Since this is OS/2 1.2 there is some applications at this point I do have that will work.  Namely Microsoft Excel 3.0 for OS/2.  Installation is just like installing Excel 3 on Windows.  3 disks, and a reboot.

Excel 3.0 for OS/2 1.2Since there was no divorce at this point Excel runs just fine.

And PMWord 1.1 (Microsoft Word 1.1 for OS/2).  So far so good, right?

And it can shutdown!  So really what are my impressions of OS/2 so far?  It’s come a LONG way, it’s starting to feel like something workstation esque, but really it’s just so.. barren.  With the ‘standard’ version you don’t have all the accessories you did get with Windows.  I know they were largely ‘junk’ but hell even having the windows terminal with X-modem was still awesome for the time as you could actually kind of multitask. It would have been different for OS/2 but you’d never know it.  IBM & Microsoft really expected people to fall in love with the multitasking, and basically bear with the ultra minimalism of OS/2.  But Windows 3.0 changed everything.

Anyways, Onward to OS/2 1.3!

Upgrading through OS/2; Version 1.1

Continuing from the previous post, let’s get started with Microsoft OS/2 1.1

I added a 500MB hard disk to VirtualBOX, booted up an OS/2 1.1 boot diskette I had created that allows me to fdisk/format and do basic backup/restores, esp since OS/2 1.0 cannot install on a large (lol) 500MB disk.

So with the restore done, I’m booting up the Microsoft OS/2 1.1c Nokia OEM release.

Nokia OS/2 1.1c splash screenAnd..

The dates for this release is 2/20/1989.  I would have imagined that the original version of OS/2 1.1 shipped in 1988, as mentioned by the copyright. Apparently the Microsoft versions of OS/2 1.0 & 1.1 included support for the 386 method of switching from protected mode to real mode, while the IBM versions only included the 286 triple fault method.  I’d imagine the Microsoft ones would include both, but the only way to verify is to install on a 286.  Something that I simply do not have.

This style of the OS/2 installer will be with us for quite some time.  it’s not until Warp did the look and feel start to change.

It’s a little worrisome that OS/2 is always looking for a way to format your drive.  OS/2 1.1 only supports the FAT filesystem at this point, and formatting defeats the point of the upgrade.

The setup program renames my config.sys , autoexec.bat and startup.cmd files.  Obviously things are now different from OS/2 1.0

And at this point it’s just an install disk to prepare the disk, then we reboot off the hard disk to continue the install, in text mode.

We just feed some disks to the OS, then we get to select a mouse.

Thankfully the PS/2 option is in here! Very exciting stuff.

For some reason things like serial ports are optional, so after letting it load the serial driver, we are all set to go!

Ok, let’s experience some real OS/2 power!

What is cool is that my printer choice has been preserved.

And the C drive has been cleaned up… some.  Although most of this stuff is backups of my OS/2 1.0 stuff, along with some portion of the OS/2 1.0 install in os2.000 .. I just deleted all of this crap.

Now to see OS/2 1.1 in action…

OS/2 1.1 stress testSo again you are limited to 12 sessions in OS/2, along with the single DOS Box.  However notice that the windowed icons (the black ones) and the full screen are independent.  This was also another annoyance in OS/2, that you cannot switch an application from full to windowed at will, and some text mode stuff is compiled as full screen so launching it from a window will jump you fullscreen.  OS/2 also finally included a game, a breakout clone, with various neat pictures.  I like the Seattle one myself.

And a text editor! A nice one too.  Also I don’t know if it’s VirtualBOX but the UI is VERY sluggish, the worst thing you can do is open a command window and have it scroll.

But all in all, OS/2 1.1 was certainly a step in the right direction, and really what people would start to expect in an OS.  The GUI really is needed to get a feel for multitasking.  It’s a shame that ‘paging’ the real mode box out to disk and going between multiple sessions could have been done…. But I imagine they tried it, and it failed badly.  Or the paging got out of hand.. Hard to say.

As a slight detour I’ve also setup IBM OS/2 1.1 Extended Edition, which you can see my quick review here.

And for the few people who care, here is what 1.1 in Mono EGA mode looked like:

The other things that Microsoft OS/2 is really lacking is online documentation, and a way to shut down the OS from the desktop. It’s still control-alt-delete.

Onward to OS/2 1.2

Upgrading through OS/2; Version 1.0

On the heels of the upgrading Windows, I thought I’d do something similar with OS/2.

So to get things started, let’s start with OS/2 1.0

I’ve got to admit it, I really like the splash screen stuff.  It’s a shame that basically it wouldn’t come back until Windows 95.  This one does animate, but on VirtualBOX it is hard to see what it’s doing but I think it’s the logo coming together, like it did in early Windows.

The installer is text based, as is the OS back then.  To get this to run, I had to hexedit the keyboard driver (as discussed here) and change the hard disk driver from a non-working IBM version of OS/2 1.0 .  None of the Microsoft ones seemed to work.

In 1987 this would be an awesome kickass machine.  Now kids toys have better features.  At any rate, back then FAT was limited to 32MB partitions. I just gave this thing a 32MB disk, as I didn’t feel the need to mess with it too much.

Talk about a weird installation process.

Notice the lack of PS/2 mice?  This would go back and forth as one of many weird things that one or the other would not support.  It’s very strange.  But at the time of course, only PS/2 machines could have PS/2 mice.  Not that it really matters in OS/2 1.0’s text only interface.

And the next time you feel like complaining about a lack of drivers for anything.. Look at this extensive list.

Anyways basically pick out what you are going to do , and away it goes copying the first floppy then it’s time to reboot.

I should also point out at this point the install for OS/2 is three (yes 3!) high density diskettes.

On reboot we continue the install..

And then on to disk 3.

And we are done!

And now we can eject the disks, and reboot.  We get the nice splash screen only to be dumped to…

This. Now you can see why so many people were underwhelmed by OS/2.  Now I know it’s a tough thing that Microsoft & IBM were at here, the basic underlying structure of OS/2 was working, IBM had been selling IBM AT’s since 1984 going on about some advanced OS, and the PS/2 line had just launched, with… MS-DOS.  The need to spend 15+ thousand dollars on a fancy 286 to run MS-DOS just seemed totally insane.  So they launched without the UI.

I’m thinking this must be a late version of 1.0 as my files are timestamped 12/15/1987. While not immediately obvious, this version can multitask like all the others. hitting control-escape brings up the Program Selector:

OS/2 1.0 task selectorAnd tabbing around we can run a bunch more of the OS/2 command prompts, and select the single MS-DOS task that the 1.x versions of OS/2 are limited to.

Shutting down OS/2 involved control-alt-delete.  Remember OS/2 was designed to be a single user workstation, not a multi-user time-sharing system like Unix.

One thing I dislike immensely about OS/2 1.0 is that it dumps all the files into the root directory.  What a mess!  I mean look at this!  Ugh.

Also it was interesting that you can run 12 OS/2 sessions, and the one MS-DOS session.  Oh well it’s a heck of a lot more responsive the Windows trying to run this many sessions.  Also for you GWBasic fans out there, you’ll be happy to know OS/2 includes GW Basic 3.20

GWBasic under OS/2Oddly enough there are no text editors.  I guess everyone is expected to be running wordstar under the ‘MS-DOS’ session box.  And of course sure you can task switch but only ONE copy.. and no cut/paste…

Ok, So now I’m going to backup this OS/2 1.0 session, restore it onto a larger disk (which OS/2 1.0 cannot boot from) but then I can ‘upgrade’ it to 1.1.

Onward to OS/2 1.1

Installing OS/2 1.x in VirtualBox

OS/2 Museum just published this great article detailing what is needed to run older versions of OS/2 on VirtualBox. The ‘skinny’ is that Microsoft OS/2 is the way to go as they included the 386 method of switching from protected mode to real mode in their product, while 1.0 and 1.1 from IBM relied on the 286 triple fault.

Almost all versions have timing issues however. And again they are covered.

I may finally have that excuse to dig around and install OS/2 1.0!

Javascript MIPS

Hot on the heels of the javascript 80386 emulator, I found this javascript MIPS syscall emulator, jsmips.

What is cool about this one, is that commands are downloaded on demand.  And it supports more browsers, like Internet Explorer (well modern ones, IE 5.5sp2 didn’t work).

Vi works, but you’ll need to reset the terminal afterwards.  At least with this on demand filesystem it’d make it easier to add new binaries…

It’s amazing how far the world of javascript has come, but at the same time, it’s scary how precarious it is perched on browsers where stuff only seems to work at the moment and on select browsers.  But then that’s the way things seem to go.