I remember running OS/2 Warp 3 back in 1994, on the most powerful machine in the company – a 486DX running at 33 MHz with 8MB of RAM – and really enjoying the experience.  And actually using it in anger to do proper work with as well, using the Windows 3 (blue) edition.

The one I bought off eBay is the red one – no built in Windows 3 layer – but it works nicely for me (using FreeTCP, of course).  What is fairly timely (or was, a month ago) is a second round of petitioning from the OS/2 World site to open source OS/2 to be sent to IBM.  Sure, there is still development on OS/2 – Serenity Systems continue to develop eComStation, and have recently issued version 2.0 release candidate 4 – and there’s still a few great OS/2 download sites around as well.  You can still get all the fixpaks and the device drivers from IBM’s ftp site (not available on the website any more), there’s still hobbes (although sadly leo seems to have disappeared), and that’s about 6GB there for your downloading pleasure (or otherwise, depending on your inherent level of patience…  if you’re using Windows, I recommend FTPSync, by the way – not updated for ages but works fine on Vista.)

Virtual PC Guy has an excellent guide to installing Warp 3 in Virtual PC 2004 – in Virtual PC 2007 there’s nothing much changed, except turn hardware-accelerated virtualisation off before you start.   And of course, you can get Firefox for OS/2 quite easily (much easier than IBM Web Explorer, Netscape 2.02 or Netscape 4.61, none of which I was able to find).

Tags: Free app of the week, OS/2

This entry was posted on Friday, December 28th, 2007 at 01:33 and is filed under Operating Systems. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.