Re:Hobbes OS/2 Archive: As of April 15th, 2024 this site wil...
by LorenDB on Tuesday January 09, 2024 @04:51PM
(#38932653)
I'm now httrack'ing the site. If anybody reads this after April 15, I'm probably not going to be around to read your comments, but you can hit me up on Matrix if you need a copy: @lorendb:nheko.im
If you're reading this before April 15 and need a copy, get it yourself.
Re:Hobbes OS/2 Archive: As of April 15th, 2024 this site wil...
by LorenDB on Tuesday January 09, 2024 @08:31PM
(#38934976)
Thank you! I will send you an email. I've got a personal server, and I would publicly serve the backup from it, but it's got an awful connection for serving files (only 20ish Mbps up), so that would be awesome :)
Re:Hobbes OS/2 Archive: As of April 15th, 2024 this site wil...
by mike_d on Tuesday January 09, 2024 @05:39PM
(#38933301)
Please please please only hammer the site if you intend to create a public mirror. While I appreciate the DataHoarder mentality (I am one as well), when sites announce they are going offline don't send hundreds of rabid nerds when that bandwidth is better spent on making sure public archivists can get everything.
Re:Hobbes OS/2 Archive: As of April 15th, 2024 this site wil...
by squarefoot on Tuesday January 09, 2024 @04:50PM
(#38932642)
Likewise. The presentation manager was much more advanced than Windows, and aside the infamous single queue "bug", a lot more stable.
I never wrote software for OS/2, aside some playing with the C compiler whose name I can't recall now, but I used OS/2 as a better multitasker for DOS instances. At that time I was writing a database software in Clipper that I adapted to work for two shops (books and furniture) and needed to have in both places two DOS machines communicating over NETBIOS, where both would work as sales terminals but only one of them would keep the db, indexes etc. The customers had two machines, and also did I, but I wanted to speed things up so I tried to open multiple DOS windows on a single machine and let them share the same directory emulating the NETBIOS shares environment, so that I could for example compile both client and server on the same machine off the same code base to keep code changes consistent in case I was for example changing common structures etc. Turns out that OS/2, after enabling something to allow data sharing between DOS instances (can't recall which option or setting), not only worked but was a lot more stable than Windows 95 at that; for some reasons Win95 appeared to work for a while, only to crash in multiple ways shortly after, while OS/2 never had a hitch, so after realizing that Windows wasn't an option I ditched it for good using only OS/2. Good times.
Re:Hobbes OS/2 Archive: As of April 15th, 2024 this site wil...
by neverartful on Tuesday January 09, 2024 @05:14PM
(#38932999)
Regarding compilers, IBM had their C Set/2 compiler and then later the VisualAge C++ one. Borland also produced a C++ compiler and IDE as well.
Funny that you should mention Clipper because I developed Clipper software too that got to be too big (memory requirements) for DOS to handle without doing crazy tricks. At that point, I sucked it up and transitioned it to OS/2 PM. I wrote the GUI front end in Watcom's VX-REXX (an excellent product) and the back-end in C and using DB2/2. Fun times!
Re:Hobbes OS/2 Archive: As of April 15th, 2024 this site wil...
by pjmlp on Wednesday January 10, 2024 @01:51AM
(#38937063)
Additionally with Visual Age for Smalltalk and SOM (OS/2 version of COM, which also did metaclasses), there was a .NET like experience with Smalltalk, before Microsoft even though of it.
Visual Age for C++ was also one of the few IDEs that back in the day provided a Smalltalk like experience for C++, especially in version 4.
Re:Hobbes OS/2 Archive: As of April 15th, 2024 this site wil...
by jiqiren on Tuesday January 09, 2024 @10:30PM
(#38935778)
I ran a BBS on my 386 in a DOS box on OS/2. I basically had a usable computer and in the background people would dial-in, play door-games, download files, get some fidonet(?) feeds, etc etc. Was completely not a bother at all.
Re:Hobbes OS/2 Archive: As of April 15th, 2024 this site wil...
by squarefoot on Tuesday January 09, 2024 @04:32PM
(#38932404)
This has been an institution for OS/2 users; they also published their CD by the same name, very useful when Internet access was uncommon or so slow that downloading so much material would have required an eternity.
Re:Hobbes OS/2 Archive: As of April 15th, 2024 this site wil...
by fluffycritter on Thursday January 11, 2024 @02:10AM
(#38948810)
The CD archive was actually published by an unaffiliated company that specialized in bundling up public data repositories onto CD-ROM. NMSU was never involved in the publishing of physical artifacts.
Re:Hobbes OS/2 Archive: As of April 15th, 2024 this site wil...
by h2odragon on Tuesday January 09, 2024 @01:58PM
(#38930345)
Pity. It was a major resource for a few hobbyists, and professionals sadly stuck with poor choices. Props to those who pulled it together and kept it up this long.
Re:Hobbes OS/2 Archive: As of April 15th, 2024 this site wil...
by glhaynes on Tuesday January 09, 2024 @03:34PM
(#38931712)
Just a few months ago I came across some reference to Hobbes and it reminded me of my early-‘90s OS/2 but pre-internet days, when I’d often see references to “Hobbes” but, like “the internet”, I didn’t quite know what it was.
Re:Hobbes OS/2 Archive: As of April 15th, 2024 this site wil...
by mike_hock on Tuesday January 09, 2024 @05:46PM
(#38933385)
Or upload it to archive.org themselves. In their own interest. Instead of inviting hoarders to hammer the server with crawlers, upload it once and say it's already there.
Re:Hobbes OS/2 Archive: As of April 15th, 2024 this site wil...
by codetrotter on Tuesday January 09, 2024 @06:27PM
(#38933843)
> Jason Scott on Bluesky
Neat! Finally someone to follow on Bluesky. I have an account but wasn’t following anyone. Finally a name on Bluesky that I am interested in following!
Re:Hobbes OS/2 Archive: As of April 15th, 2024 this site wil...
by doubloon on Tuesday January 09, 2024 @09:38PM
(#38935460)
here is the time the company that is licensing/developing OS/2 in 2023 did a takedown copyright notice to a guy on youtube who just made a video showing it working
Re:Hobbes OS/2 Archive: As of April 15th, 2024 this site wil...
by zwieback on Wednesday January 10, 2024 @02:53PM
(#38942347)
Good memories. We used OS/2 for a automated measurement tool and it was rock solid, at the time it was a great choice for true multitasking (pre-Linux and pre-NT).
My OS/2 experience got me a job at a company that IBM contracted to build a AppleTalk server component for OS/2 ("Lan Server for Macintosh", https://techmonitor.ai/technology/ibm_adds_macintosh_support...). You kids don't remember this but at that time there were a ton of incompatible LANs so we provided glue between Macs and PC networks. AppleTalk was actually pretty neat.
Re:Hobbes OS/2 Archive: As of April 15th, 2024 this site wil...
by fluffycritter on Thursday January 11, 2024 @01:57AM
(#38948720)
Wow. I ran this archive back in the 90s, when I was a student at NMSU and it was one of my ancillary duties when I worked part-time for the IT department. I wasn't a fan of OS/2 myself but I appreciated how much of a community there was around it and how excited people were to continue to use it. When I inherited it the website was put together with duct tape and paperclips (and Comic Sans), and the files were pretty inconsistently-organized.
At one point I spent a few months building a new website and tooling to make it easier to manage and then completely reorganized the archive, and while other students replaced the underlying code over the years (eventually replacing my not-very-great C++-based bespoke-CGI system with a much more robust PHP-based one), my design was largely intact, as was the file structure I'd established.
I'm kind of amazed it kept running for this long, but this is a personal end of an era for me. I still hold a lot of nostalgia for it and my time working on it.
https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/192p8jc/the_ho...
If you're reading this before April 15 and need a copy, get it yourself.
I will help manage setting up snapshots of it that we can checksum/verify to create a "golden copy".
Or whatever - just let us know if we can be of assistance.
Was it Watcom C++? I may actually still have a CD with that on it somewhere.
[1]https://open-watcom.github.io/
Funny that you should mention Clipper because I developed Clipper software too that got to be too big (memory requirements) for DOS to handle without doing crazy tricks. At that point, I sucked it up and transitioned it to OS/2 PM. I wrote the GUI front end in Watcom's VX-REXX (an excellent product) and the back-end in C and using DB2/2. Fun times!
Visual Age for C++ was also one of the few IDEs that back in the day provided a Smalltalk like experience for C++, especially in version 4.
https://hobbes.nmsu.edu/?path=%2Fpub%2Fnew
Edit, for posterity, as this site's demise is imminent, /pub/new's present contents:
https://imgur.com/a/eS5Q78r
Imgur's auto-classification be drunk ;)
(Either that, or it likes likes OS/2 :P)
But it's Dick Nixon...
Neat! Finally someone to follow on Bluesky. I have an account but wasn’t following anyone. Finally a name on Bluesky that I am interested in following!
https://hobbes.nmsu.edu/?path=%2Fpub%2Fos2%2Fserver%2Fdataba...
[0]https://www.arcanoae.com/
There was OS/2 in some ATMs well into the 2000s, but I don’t know when those might have been replaced.
https://www.os2world.com/forum/index.php?topic=3249.0
i wonder if this has anything to do with that company?
https://mastodon.archive.org/@textfiles/111728995296654678
If you're going to do that, please provide a zip of the entire website. Make things easy for archivists.
It's almost no effort on your end, relative to the effort you've already put in placing this notice.
My OS/2 experience got me a job at a company that IBM contracted to build a AppleTalk server component for OS/2 ("Lan Server for Macintosh", https://techmonitor.ai/technology/ibm_adds_macintosh_support...). You kids don't remember this but at that time there were a ton of incompatible LANs so we provided glue between Macs and PC networks. AppleTalk was actually pretty neat.
At one point I spent a few months building a new website and tooling to make it easier to manage and then completely reorganized the archive, and while other students replaced the underlying code over the years (eventually replacing my not-very-great C++-based bespoke-CGI system with a much more robust PHP-based one), my design was largely intact, as was the file structure I'd established.
I'm kind of amazed it kept running for this long, but this is a personal end of an era for me. I still hold a lot of nostalgia for it and my time working on it.
EDIT: I wrote some more detailed thoughts on my blog. http://beesbuzz.biz/blog/14299-Hobbes-OS-2-Archive-An-end-of...