alt Hacker NewsThe cool thing about OS/2 2.1 was that you could easily boot off of a single 1.44 Mb floppy disk, and run multitasking operations, without the need for the GUI.
I had (and likely have lost forever) a Boot disk with OS/2, and my Forth/2 system on it that could do directory listings while playing Toccata and Fugue in D minor in a different thread.
I wrote Forth/2 out of pure spite, because somehow I heard that it just wasn't possible to write OS/2 applications in assembler. Thanks to a copy of the OS/2 development kit from Ward Christensen (who worked at IBM), and a few months of spare time, Forth/2 was born, written in pure assembler, compiling to directly threaded native code. Brian Matthewson from Case Western wrote the manual for it. Those were fun times.
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> I wrote Forth/2 out of pure spite, because somehow I heard that it just wasn't possible to write OS/2 applications in assembler
I was thinking about this recently and considering writing a blog post about it, nothing feels more motivational than being told "that's impossible." I implemented a pure CSS draggable a while back when I was told it's impossible.
That is very cool. I had a similar boot disk w/ DOS 3.x and TurboPascal. It made any PC I could walk up to a complete developer box.
Just to be clear, when you say "without the need for the GUI", more accurately that's "without a GUI" (w/o Presentation Manager). So you're using OS/2 in an 80x25 console screen, what would appear to be a very good DOS box.
Look at MenuetOS and KolibriOS for a newer multitasking OS, with a GUI, that also fits on a single floppy.
> The cool thing about OS/2 2.1 was that you could easily boot off of a single 1.44 Mb floppy disk, and run multitasking operations, without the need for the GUI.
It was cool, but don’t forget that you could do the same thing with MP/M on an 8-bit machine in late 1979.
Even Microsoft developed a similar operating system a year later, but never released it. The code name was M-DOS, or MIDAS, depending who you ask.
i mean, you could boot linux and X off a single 1.44MB circa 2001 or so, with a number of drivers for common network adapter cards built in.
There was an awful lot of nonsense put about during the Operating System Wars, a lot of it by people who had not the first bloody clue about operating systems at all.
Sometimes it was a very clueless manifestation of the telephone game effect, where the fact that OS/2 API was designed to be easily callable from high-languages, without all of the fiddling about with inline assembly language, compiler intrinsics, or C library calls that one did to call the DOS API, could morph into a patently ridiculous claim that one could not write OS/2 applications in assembly language.
Sometimes, though, it was (as we all later found out) deliberate distortion by marketing people.
Patently ridiculous? Yes, to anyone who actually programmed. The book that everyone who wanted to learn how to program OS/2 would have bought in the early years was Ed Iaccobucci's OS/2 Programmers Guide, the one that starts off with the famous "most important operating system, and possibly program, of all time" quotation by Bill Gates. Not only are examples dotted throughout the book in (macro) assembly language, there are some 170 pages of assembly language program listings in appendix E.