This really brings back some memories. My first career in IT was supporting and implementing an OS/2 Lan Server based banking implementation for a regional bank in the south. The bank deployed what was essentially a massive flat token ring based network interconnected via Fiber to regional areas and leased lines to branches. It was not Netbios over TCP/IP, it was straight up Netbios over the entire network. Given Netbios is broadcast based for resolution, broadcast storms were common across the network, so a gordian knot of filters and configs were setup at the routers to mitigate this. There was no concept of subnet based routing implemented yet.
I ended up taking a job with IBM supporting the TCP/IP stack on top of OS/2. It was a 24 year old me, and a grey beard 60 year old dude that literally supported the entire OS/2 Lan Server TCP/IP stack across the world during the time that corporate networks were just beginning to connect to the Internet. Everyone else on the OS/2 support team at IBM just punted to us anything that was TCP/IP related and thought we were wizards or something. What a wild time to be alive.
Cool! I have fond memories of installing the TCPIP stack on top of Warp with a six(?) disk set.
As a teenager I had a PS/2 with a token ring card and an additional serial ports card. OS/2 let us run a PPP server for Winsock clients. We used it for Quake and other lan games.
how long were you doing that for? Did the grey beard finish his career at IBM?
A tangentially related networking trivia that probably won’t be useful to anyone here:
NetBEUI (the original MS networking, running directly over Ethernet rather than TCP/IP), was using LLC-2 Ethernet frames, and as such it was a great way to test DLSw (data link switching) in a very simple lab (two windows 95 machines, separated by two routers, connected via IP link).
Why was that ever a thing? Because of
https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/zos-basic-skills?topic=llc2-how-...
And most of IBM networking used Token Ring rather than Ethernet, which was harder to get hold of and more expensive.
> “Sometimes I have the following problem to deal with: An OS/2 system uses NetBIOS over TCP/IP (aka TCPBEUI) and should communicate with a SMB server (likewise using TCPBEUI) on a different subnet.”
I wonder if there is literally anyone else in the world who has this problem in 2024.
Jokes aside, I appreciate the detailed work that OS/2 Museum does. From a developer’s point of view it often feels like everything is a Unix nowadays, so it’s easy to forget that the PC revolution’s mainstream came from very different commercial origins and gradually blended with the more “academic” tech like TCP/IP.
Wish they had a community version I could play with, but understand they would be worried about cannibalising their already small market.
Still, for something that I have only really used in one job for a year, I'm not going to try it out further without some sort of try-before-you-buy, even if it might be interesting.
I think they are not really interested in individual users, they aim at corporations having legacy applications that run on OS/2 only, so the goal is to make the system virtualization friendly and runnable on more recent hardware.
That said, my understanding (as a former OS/2 user 3 decades ago), is that a community edition cannot exist because IBM and MS still hold the copyright and intellectual property and the software cannot be distributed for free.
OS/2 Museum is one of the few sites that can feed my weird fascination with Netware and the old NT domain stuff, it’s great for getting an insight like you said in to the pre TCP/IP world.
Probably. I run all the old, insecure machines on their own subnet and physical segment, and some of the "keep them going" services are hosted on VMs running on our modern VM hosts. We've got a few things that have to cross the router/firewall between the two networks, not SMB currently though.
Which hypervisor(s) support OS/2?
Based on documentation, ArcaNoae comes with support for large hard drives, newer video chips, USB etc etc.. I guess it should run on most hypervisor(s) or virtualization systems, provided you use a humble hardware configuration (e.g. no need to use GBs or RAM) even VirtualBox or KVM most likely will work. But whether it's supported by the hypervisor vendor or not is a different story.
Plain OS/2 did not receive any update for 20+ years, it's installer won't work on modern hardware/virtualization systems.
I remember we thought it was straight up wizardry when we could get two OS/2 Lan Server servers to communicate over a network that we didn't control via Netbios over TCP/IP. It was like the dawn of a new age!