While catching up on my RSS news feed over the weekend, I came across an interesting article titled: Ancient pre-release version of OS/2 2.0 discovered, released in VM-friendly packages and of course the VM-friendly packages caught my attention but I had never heard of or used OS/2 before.
From the article, a software archaeologist known as Neozeed shared a pretty unique experience of installing a pre-release version of Microsoft and IBM OS/2 2.0 ...
A software archaeologist known as Neozeed recently shared a pre-release version of OS/2 2.0, an ambitious PC operating system that Microsoft and IBM were developing together in the 1990s before the former decided to pursue the Windows route.
and this was made possible with the use of the free version of VMware Workstation Player, where they had attributed to the speed of Workstation Player:
VMware is incredibly fast, it's the #1 reason why I had done this.
which I thought was a really cool shoutout for VMware Desktop Hypervisor team!
Neozeed also published a complete video for installing and configuring Microsoft OS/2 using Workstation Player for those intersted:
While I do use VMware Fusion for my macOS desktop, I was curious if the OS/2 VM could also run in ESXi (hint: it does) and wanted to see what the steps would be to run this piece of history on the latest ESXi 8.0 Update 2b release 🙂
Step 1 - Download the Internet Archive OS/2 Workstation VM image that was created by Neozeed
Step 2 - Create a new MSoS2-6.78 directory under your ESXi datastore and upload all files (except for the VMDK, it may fail if you are using vSAN storage like I am)
Step 3 - SCP the MSOS2-6.78.vmdk into the same directory where the rest of the configuration files
Step 4 - Next, we need convert the desktop hypervisor VMDK format to one that ESXi by running the following command in the ESXi Shell:
vmkfstools -i MSOS2-6.78.vmdk -d thin MSOS2-6.78-NEW.vmdk
Step 5 - Register the OS/2 VMX file and then attach the newly created VMDK and finally power on the VM!
Note: For the best desktop experience, connect to OS/2 VM using the Standalone VMRC Client.
One of the banks in South Africa I used to work for ran virtualised OS/2 until very recently to run some Forex related apps that interfaced with the Mainframe.
I was looking for something totally unrelated and found this! I have to admit I didn’t think about trying to run it on ESXi! I guess the real question is can any of the old NDIS 2 legacy drivers work? It’d be cool to use this as at least a LAN client in the cloud!
OS/2 was a great operating system. In the days before Windows 95 it was pretty much the only thing on the PC that could truly multitask. I ran it in college for 3 or 4 years. IBM built the whole Lotus suite natively for it, so there were lots of great apps you could run. I also used it to run multiple copies of my DOS-based BBS software so that I could support multiple phone lines. It was great stuff.
While I worked for IBM, OS/2 was very big back then during the early 90s. It was a very robust OS and miles ahead of Windows 3.0. You can actually run a modified version of OS/2 via e-com station right now. For nostalgic reasons, I am running OS/2 as a vm in vsphere. Unfortunately IBM stopped supporting it so now OS/2 is just another dead OS among all the other dead OSes…
Laughed at "but I had never heard of or used OS/2 before". Made me feel old.
And I’m old enough to remember we disparaged it by calling it “OS/who?”
The only people that disparaged it were clueless folks. Just like those today who think Windows Server is the best Server OS.
OMG I was part of the initial group of beta testers back in 1990. I loved this product. Native OS/2 was soo much quicker than Windows, even early NT.
I got interviewed for a job in 2005, and was asked if I had my choice of Windows or Linux which would pick...I told him none of the above. Give me OS/2!
IBM blew it in the marketing against Windows!
I know it’s silly to ask, but do you still have any of them around? I spent 1990 until last month to find this one! It’d be great to even get fragments like compilers or libraries!
My best desktop was a machine running Dual Pentium 133 with 64MB of RAM.
I had 4x200MB SCSI disks and 1 IDE.
I could dual boot DOS, Windows NT 3.51 and OS/2
My main desktop was Windows NT 3.51 and I would boot into DOS/Windows 3.11 or OS/2 when testing. OS/2 2.x was pretty solid and fast on Single CPU machine.
Could we do this to be able to run macOS vms on vSphere?
You've been able to run virtualized macOS for more than a decade now starting with vSphere 5.1 🙂 https://williamlam.com/apple
I have IBM OS/2 Warp running in a VM on some old laptop somewhere. Very fast, GUI with no lag even with only 2Mb!!
IBM also had an unreleased hypervisor for OS/2. Saw a demo of running Novell NetWare 3.x in a VM with OS/2 as the host. It was to help companies migrate off Novell due to its many issues.
Also was demoed OS/2 running on POWER PC CPU. IBM later created a very interesting demo where they fabbed a 486SLC integrated with a POWER CPU. Using OS/2 Warp the Ferengi Windows 3 layer ran on the 486SLC, while OS/2 ran on the POWER side. It was built in a PS/2 Model 95 desktop. A 486SLC was an IBM license built variation of the Intel 486SX with no FPU and had a lower TDP.
The last one was a demo of OS/2 running to show off SMP. But IBM built a 4 node host using (4) 486SLC desktop CPU's. Weird but interesting because Xeon didn't exist yet and only a Intel 486DX could do SMP at the time. Used a coherency method called SLiC which was developed with Cyrix, AMD and some of their predecessors.
OS/2 is not "dead". IBM has licensed it to Arca Noa and its sold as Arca OS. It is still maintained and has periodic feature updates.
You can find Virtualbox 5.1 here (and many more )
https://hobbesarchive.com/?path=/pub/os2/apps/emulator
“software archeologist” - shout out to those of us who are forced to work with ancient software, LoL! I might request a title change from HR haha
It really should be a thing, shouldn’t it?
A little known fact is that VMware virtual machine monitor (vmmon) engineering team used OS/2, installed from 29 floppy disks, to exercises the full rang of binary translation as early as 2000. Ask Ole or Mendel about that.
I lent the QA team my OS/2 Warp installation CD at a later date to test installation from an ISO image.
Worked with OS2 for an Italian bank in mid 90s. At some point OS2 was about to go mainstream, I remember IBM OS2 Warp logo on city bus sides commercials in Milano..
Very nice, things like this are fun to discover. I like the SQII easter egg, one of my most memorable series of games from back in the day, ahhh...Sierra!!