Help needed with OS/2

[Ampera]

I feel like a confused gorilla looking at a strange flashy box at this point.

I am experimenting with the OS/2 operating system. It's one that I love for it's amazing features, but I can't even figure out how to create a folder without using a DOS prompt, or to copy files over without using one.

My issue at the moment is one of installing a Windows program. Mine comes with an installer on a floppy, and when I install it says I need around 5-6MB of drive space. I have around 2400MB of drive space available for all of what the program may need, yet whenever I choose a directory to install it (any directory, in C, or in the weird space where it keeps all the Windows stuff) it claims I have no space left on the disk.

This is (at least to me) obviously some sort of write access thing, but no matter how hard I slam my head into the keyboard trying to use google, I can't come up with anything.

So maybe someone can help a lowly plebian like myself, and tell me what I am doing wrong.

Basic info about my config:

OS/2 Warp 4
120Mhz 486
32MB of RAM
2.5GB hard drive on EIDE (VESA controller)
Installing off the A drive.

The one thing I have not tried is copying the files off the A drive. Would that in any way help. It would help me to know how to do that using OS/2's strange file manager instead of resorting to Windows or DOS.

[Ian.M]

Something I've seen before with old software from the sub 528MB HDD limit era is installers that wont accept the extremely large amounts of free space potentially available under a newer OS + BIOS that eliminates that limit, because of a maths overflow when testing the free space against the known disk space required.   You may be able to get the install to proceed by creating large dummy files to reduce the free space to under 32MB (Pre MSDOS 4.0 partition limit) then deleting them afterwards.

[Ampera]

That barely occurred to me.

Gonna try to install it on PC-DOS first and then copy it over to OS/2

[MosherIV]

Hi

Try re-partitioning the drive into 1 that is around 600-700MB and the rest of the disk for the other partition.
OS2 Warp should cope with large 2GB partitions, it was around just when HDD were around that kind of size.

[stj]

had to click the "respect" button, for anybody still using Warp.

it was 32bit while windows wasnt. 
very popular btw, most people dont know this, but a lot of banks used it uptill only a few years ago because of stability.

[3db]

I think it was also the OS that banks used in ATM's

[tooki]

I think it was also the OS that banks used in ATM's

It was common in ATMs, but sadly not universal - lots use Windows.

I guess some modern ATMs probably use Linux now? Does anyone know?


I never got to use OS/2, but I always wanted to try it. Some interesting design decisions in it (including a garish default color scheme designed to be usable by color-blind users, a nice nod to accessibility).

[stj]

i would hope they use Linux or BSD,
but unfortunatly enough BSOD's have been foto'd to prove otherwise!

what asshole wants a cashpoint "phoning home" with "telemetry"? 

[Howardlong]

i would hope they use Linux or BSD,
but unfortunatly enough BSOD's have been foto'd to prove otherwise!

what asshole wants a cashpoint "phoning home" with "telemetry"? 

You can be sure that a retail bank won't deploy anything that is going to need to phone home, a typical infrastructure will be full of different security domains in many different segregated networks with several tiers of security. The Enterprise versions of Windows work differently in this respect and have different licensing models, although I wouldn't be surprised if some of them still run Windows XP.

What the security is around the mini ATMs that you see in hotel lobbies and convenience stores consists of nowadays I don't know, but they'd be nuts to connect it to anything without multiple tiers of security. They may still connect over ISDN or analogue POTS, and nowadays quIte possibly GSM for all I know.

[Howardlong]

I go back to 1990/91 with OS/2 when it was still 16 bit! I worked with it in the banking world until about 1996 or so when the finance world was rapidly switching to NT 3.51, particularly server side.

The worst thing was having both OS/2 and NT in the same server room. Presing Ctrl-Alt-Del on an OS/2 server is rather more catastrophic than doing it on NT (I speak as the voice of experience here!).

The programming API for OS/2 is far more logical and uniform than Windows' mess. To this day it's unclear to me why Microsoft dropped OS/2 other than for private political reasons. Technically it made little sense.

It was still possible to run 16 bit OS/2 programs on Windows NT 4.0 which provided a bunch of API shims and translations, although ISTR it was limited to console only apps, no Presentation Manager.

We ran OS/2 on clients longer than we ran it on servers due to application support.

[Halcyon]

Something I've seen before with old software from the sub 528MB HDD limit era is installers that wont accept the extremely large amounts of free space potentially available under a newer OS + BIOS that eliminates that limit, because of a maths overflow when testing the free space against the known disk space required.   You may be able to get the install to proceed by creating large dummy files to reduce the free space to under 32MB (Pre MSDOS 4.0 partition limit) then deleting them afterwards.

Yep, I've come across similar issues where very old installers fail to detect disk size correctly. Usually they report that the disk is full (even when it's not) but I've never had one simply fail to install before.

Try creating a small partition <500MB and try installing to that, if it works, that's your problem.

What program are you trying to install?

[Ampera]

WinCiv. I ended up reinstalling OS/2 because I couldn't figure out how to run fdisk on OS/2

I made another partition sub 500MB, gonna try that out.

[Ampera]

I'm good now. Thanks.

[Halcyon]

Awesome!

[NivagSwerdna]

...but a lot of banks used it uptill only a few years ago because of stability.

In a previous life I wrote some of the networking layer of CICS OS/2.  At one point it used to drive all the point of sales terminals in the Sears department stores amongst others.  You may have used some of my other software at some time too... 

[ivaylo]

Wow, 25 year old memories... Thanks for bringing them back!

[borjam]

Or because they had equipment contracts or supply deals with IBM who were keen to use an inhouse product wherever possible. The mainframe computers and larger disk and network controller devices that populated the datacenter generally came with a configuration console running OS/2.

I used it in the 90s for a quite complicated develpment (multi channel audio recorder for call centers).

We didn't choose it because of any contract with IBM or anything like that, but because the alternative was Windows.

I didn't quite like it (at some times I hated it actually) because of so many absolutely insane design decisions by IBM. It even had stupid bugs due to the coexistance of 16 and 32 bit code. I remember one particularly well, passing a buffer that crossed a 16 bit memory boundary to the send() or recv() functions in the socket library caused memory corruption even in 32 bit programs.

Memory management was pure crap, there was absolutely no serious performance monitoring software, the design had such horrible flaws that removing the diskette controller and driver made shell pipes (using "|" in the shell) stopped working... I could write pages and pages.

But at the time (and even adding a small hardware supervisor that hit the reset line in case OS/2 hung because of some UI event queue idiocy, which managed to block even some background operations) we achieved uptimes in excess of a year. We usually only stopped
the recorders when the DDS tape drives needed a replacement. Also I must admit that the API wasn't bad for concurrent programming. We ran hundreds of threads and the toolset was fine.

You can like or dislike IBM (actually I have banned IBM hardware at work recently thanks to their great support with a defective SAS controller) but it was really shocking that people who are supposed to know how to design operating systems produced that piece of crap.

But again, Windows was remarkably worse. If I remember well, the Windows versions from the 90's even had some serious uptime limitations because of some counter overflowing. And of course at the time doing silly stuff like changing an IP address required a Windows reboot, even on NT.

[Halcyon]

But again, Windows was remarkably worse. If I remember well, the Windows versions from the 90's even had some serious uptime limitations because of some counter overflowing. And of course at the time doing silly stuff like changing an IP address required a Windows reboot, even on NT.

My experiences with Windows NT4 and Windows 2000 differ. At my old workplace, we actually discovered a "lost" machine which had been running for several years. The room it was in used to be a server room, but as the company grew, infrastructure was moved out of there into larger off-site premises. In the end, all the room was used for was storage, patching (for a floor which was vacant) and a small corner which was leased to Hutchinson/Vodafone to house repeater equipment for a pager base station.

Anyway this machine running NT4 Server remained running, doing whatever it did and was just forgotten about.

[NivagSwerdna]

OS/2 predated Windows NT.  In OS/2 heyday the Windows alternatives used segmented memory and were highly crashy, the first Windows that really worked was Windows 3.1.  Windows NT was an evolution (I believe there was a joint development with Microsoft/IBM at the time). WinNT (and the Win32 API) arrived in Windows NT 3.1 but it was highly buggy, it wasn't until later with Windows NT 3.5 (and 3.51) that Win32 hit the mainstream.  The huge step change in stability came from processor support for virtual memory/protection levels (kernel mode et al.)  Wow... that was a LONG time ago.   

[Zero999]

But again, Windows was remarkably worse. If I remember well, the Windows versions from the 90's even had some serious uptime limitations because of some counter overflowing. And of course at the time doing silly stuff like changing an IP address required a Windows reboot, even on NT.

My experiences with Windows NT4 and Windows 2000 differ. At my old workplace, we actually discovered a "lost" machine which had been running for several years. The room it was in used to be a server room, but as the company grew, infrastructure was moved out of there into larger off-site premises. In the end, all the room was used for was storage, patching (for a floor which was vacant) and a small corner which was leased to Hutchinson/Vodafone to house repeater equipment for a pager base station.

Anyway this machine running NT4 Server remained running, doing whatever it did and was just forgotten about.

Don't confuse NT with Windows 3.x & 9x. It's a totally different beast. The non-NT based versions of Windows were a nasty mess of DOS code and protected mode code. NT was 32-bit from the ground up and much more stable.

[Ampera]

NT was also useless to anybody who cared anything about DOS. To Microsoft's credit, it wasn't meant for those people either.

I am having a hard time liking OS/2. To start off with, it is the most confusing thing I have ever used. Instead of cloning what every single reasonable operating system did, the file manager in OS/2 is completely ass backwards. This makes me use Windows or DOS to move or do anything with files.

The better DOS than DOS and better Windows than Windows is a neat concept, but it seems to be a bit under cooked on my end. A game I tried to run (WinCiv) doesn't have any audio, seemed to have palette issues (Although I can say I forgot to change the screen mode to 800x600x16, so my fault there). My sound card is working (It likes to bleat annoying noises at me whenever I do anything) yet it doesn't want to play the simple audio out of the Windows game.

On a 486, Windows, or even OS/2 is not that great of an idea. Of course it can run it, but I legitimately had trouble running Sim Tower, which is by no means a demanding game. I do want to like OS/2, it's just to convoluted, and too broken for me to use.

I do like IBM in a way, more for the cool points over anything. It's a strange concept to anybody uninitiated in the now present retro computing scene. I unfortunately have to go with what works and has worked for a long time, and that is PC-DOS 2000 with Windows 3.1

[Halcyon]

I think OS/2 was the operating system of choice for those who "hated" Microsoft... justifiable or not. The alternatives were much more painful than Windows of the time, although MacOS wasn't too bad... it was in the 90's when Apple was good, since then it's just dumbed down rubbish.

I remember a family friend ran OS/2 on a 386. Not sure how successful he was. It was almost as if he was a Windows hater "just because".

That said, I think Windows 7 is the last version of Windows I'll be running at home.

[NivagSwerdna]

I think OS/2 was the operating system of choice for those who "hated" Microsoft... justifiable or not.

OS/2 was primarily popular with people that had IBM big-iron.  It was a logical progression from a 3270 to something smarter on the desktop.  OS/2 and Windows had a lot in common.  Presentation Manager (the windowing part of OS/2) was developed in the UK 



IBM Hursley, Such a tough place to work.... it had a pub and tennis courts in the grounds. 

[stj]

My experiences with Windows NT4 and Windows 2000 differ. At my old workplace, we actually discovered a "lost" machine which had been running for several years. The room it was in used to be a server room, but as the company grew, infrastructure was moved out of there into larger off-site premises. In the end, all the room was used for was storage, patching (for a floor which was vacant) and a small corner which was leased to Hutchinson/Vodafone to house repeater equipment for a pager base station.

Anyway this machine running NT4 Server remained running, doing whatever it did and was just forgotten about.

that will be my Torrent server - i wondered where i left it! 

[medical-nerd]

I ran OS/2 very successfully on a 386sx/25 with 4 meg of memory in 1993. It was much more stable than windows and more responsive. I particularly liked the integrated multimedia features and easy purchase of updated drivers from CompuServe. When it became warp I was disillusioned and moved to Linux using the slackware floppy distribution.
8 virtual screens with multiple instances of netscape, editors and sound playing in the background on a 486-dx/66 and 8meg memory. I only had a dual boot system since the CompuServe program would not work within wine.
Demon Internet dialup at 56K, 1 pence a minute. It took me 3 months to download Tom Baker's Doctor Who episodes. (about 8gig).
Who remembers a.out, looking for programs using archie, usenet electronics newsgroups, updating things like binutils and libc with interaction and answers from Linux/GNU developers to us mortals  and mounting sunsite.unc.edu as a network drive?

Good times.

Cheers