- infernal machines
- Oct 11, 2012
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we monitor many frequencies. we listen always. came a voice, out of the babel of tongues, speaking to us. it played us a mighty dub.
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okay so I like dicking around with old computers, bit of a hobby. I actually make money off it.
On and off I've tried to use OS/2 because people apparently liked it in the 1990s. My experiences thus far:
- Unable to boot on a Pentium 60 due to the video card not working right. Unable to ever fix. This hardware was absolutely on the shelves at the time and this was never fixed.
- Unable to install on various hard drives because they were just TOO DANG BIG. How the gently caress you manage to balls this up so bad that within years of your OS release you can't actually install it on anything I don't even know. Mac and Windows* don't have this problem so it's not like it was some sort of secret mythical magic.
- Unable to install the video card drivers for a 1997 system because they are bugged, despite using the newest 2001 release, which inexplicably does not come with drivers.
- Unable to get the sound card on the same system to work because, again, inexplicably it lacks built in ones. Installing the OEM ones is a dumb PITA and I hate it.
- Neither the video card nor sound card drivers are recognized by the system driver installer app, and both have their own weirdo bespoke installer systems.
- lmfao it uses literal config.sys
- which you cannot edit from the terminal
- Unable to get CD drives to work with various attempts because for some reason it has no generic ATAPI driver. Despite, again, that a driver existed for DOS that's super easy to use so what the gently caress IBM.
Let alone the fact it's just a cluttered and lovely mess to actually use with a UI designed by the same team in charge of fighter jet cockpits. It's trash hell garbage even compared to how awful everything was in the era and I cannot fathom why anyone would choose this over Mac or windows. Installing Red Hat 6 was literally easier and more user friendly.
was everyone just stupid and/or drunk in the 1990s why was this acceptable and beyond that desirable.
this os is a pos
*NT-old does but I suspect that's entirely because it shared the OS2 team early on and they suck.
this is an ibm product from the 90s, the QVL is not a suggestion, it is an actual list of what the os will run on.
if you gently caress with old hardware as a hobby i have no idea how you've never run into both low level bios and filesystem limitations on drive geometry and volume size, that too was a thing for a very long time.
did you know it's possible to have too much ram to boot some os?
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Aug 15, 2023 16:08
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May 17, 2024 00:36
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- infernal machines
- Oct 11, 2012
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we monitor many frequencies. we listen always. came a voice, out of the babel of tongues, speaking to us. it played us a mighty dub.
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like, congratulations, you've discovered what computer touching was like in the 90s. the things you described were the norm and the biggest difference from today is you didn't have 30 years of collected knowledge and drivers at your fingertips
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Aug 15, 2023 16:10
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- infernal machines
- Oct 11, 2012
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we monitor many frequencies. we listen always. came a voice, out of the babel of tongues, speaking to us. it played us a mighty dub.
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windows 95 even through XP had you needing to install vendor drivers manually, hardly anything was built into the OS. if you lost that cd that came with your motherboard with the word "chipset" printed on it, you were hosed
how are you only just discovering that drive size limits are a thing in older OSes? 
DOS didn't like anything over 504MB. early windows didn't like 2GB. various BIOS bugs caused 8GB, 32GB, or 64GB limits. and >128GB wasn't supported until one of the XP service packs
op sounds like someone whose first computer was a pentium 4 running windows xp.
drivers being distributed with the os was basically not a thing for the longest time, and if you did get something with basic feature support, you'd still want to dig up the oem driver disk because if it worked at all it would be slow as poo poo and missing features
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Aug 15, 2023 16:31
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- infernal machines
- Oct 11, 2012
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we monitor many frequencies. we listen always. came a voice, out of the babel of tongues, speaking to us. it played us a mighty dub.
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wait until op discovers that hard drives had jumpers to set certain settings including limiting the reported capacity to the bios because otherwise the system couldn't boot with them attached
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Aug 15, 2023 16:34
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- infernal machines
- Oct 11, 2012
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we monitor many frequencies. we listen always. came a voice, out of the babel of tongues, speaking to us. it played us a mighty dub.
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the only thing i had to install drivers for was the xircom pcmcia ethernet card. somehow the original floppy still worked
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Aug 15, 2023 16:54
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- infernal machines
- Oct 11, 2012
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we monitor many frequencies. we listen always. came a voice, out of the babel of tongues, speaking to us. it played us a mighty dub.
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i would like to use the laptop with the thickness of a phone book (unironically)
if i rebuilt the battery it'd be as good as the day it was built. i have a vaio of the same vintage and it's a hell of a lot thinner
doesn't run os/2 though
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Aug 15, 2023 23:48
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- infernal machines
- Oct 11, 2012
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we monitor many frequencies. we listen always. came a voice, out of the babel of tongues, speaking to us. it played us a mighty dub.
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to remind him of the road not taken
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Aug 16, 2023 03:27
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May 17, 2024 00:36
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- infernal machines
- Oct 11, 2012
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we monitor many frequencies. we listen always. came a voice, out of the babel of tongues, speaking to us. it played us a mighty dub.
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to answer the question though, nobody used OS/2. it was a massive failure.
i saw some atms still running os/2 in the 2010s
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Aug 16, 2023 04:34
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Aug 15, 2023 16:08
