Thanks to the joys of abandonware websites, you can play with some interesting things from the 1990s and before. One of those things is OS/2 Warp. Now, I had a go at OS/2 sometime in the 1990s after being warned by a friend that it was “pretty much impossible” to get networking going. My experience of OS/2 then was not revolutionary… It was, well, something else on a PC that wasn’t that exciting and didn’t really add a huge amount over Windows.
Now, I’m nowhere near insane enough to try this on my actual computer, and I’ve managed to not accumulate any ancient PCs….
Luckily, qemu helps with an emulator! If you don’t set your CPU to Pentium (or possibly something one or two generations newer) then things don’t go well. Neither does a disk that by today’s standards would be considered beyond tiny. Also, if you dare to try to use an unpartitioned hard disk – OH MY are you in trouble.
Also, try to boot off “Disk 1” and you get this:
Possibly the most friendly error message ever! But, once you get going (by booting the Installation floppy)… you get to see this:
and indeed, you are doing the time warp of Operating Systems right here. After a bit of fun, you end up in FDISK:
Why I can’t create a partition… WHO KNOWS. But, I tried again with a 750MB disk that already had a partition on it and…. FAIL. I think this one was due to partition type, so I tried again with partition type of 6 – plain FAT16, and not W95 FAT16 (LBA). Some memory is coming back to me of larger drives and LBA and nightmares…
But that worked!
Then, the OS/2 WARP boot screen… which seems to stick around for a long time…..
and maybe I could get networking….
Ladies and Gentlemen, the wonders of having to select DHCP:
It still asked me for some config, but I gleefully ignored it (because that must be safe, right!?) and then I needed to select a network adapter! Due to a poor choice on my part, I started with a rtl8139, which is conspicuously absent from this fine list of Token Ring adapters:
and then, more installing……
before finally rebooting into….
and that, is where I realized there was beer in the fridge and that was going to be a lot more fun.
OS/2 Warp Nostalgia https://t.co/m4PZljpZfp https://t.co/qRnUG6IU1e
@stewartsmith the beer didn’t need any emulation as it still worked much the same as in the 1990s
The problem with many VM/emulators is that they don’t adequately emulate all aspects of the 80386 microprocessor which would allow OS/2 to run. In particular, OS/2 requires that the VM properly emulators the ringed security model and just emulating ring 0 and 3 is not enough.
AFAIK, the only two VMs which do this will enough were VirtualPC and VirtualBox.
Interestingly enough though, the installer (which is still OS/2) worked fine…. it was only after the very final step of installation that everything failed.
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