After 32 years, one of the ’Net’s oldest software archives is shutting down

I started my computing career with OS/2 . I am downloading the full archive now and I hope to make it available on Mega by the end of the week.

I'll try to set up a torrent seed while I am at it too.

EDIT: Here is the Mega link.

https://mega.nz/file/9xskkYQI#USRixlFLzyUVjURDxgR-p6lVogAZiHP3RdczFAYY3p8

It's already on the Internet Archive:
https://archive.org/details/hobbes-os2-archive202401
- Mega link in the meantime.
  https://mega.nz/file/9xskkYQI#USRixlFLzyUVjURDxgR-p6lVogAZiHP3RdczFAYY3p8
If you post the magnet link I will put it on a seedbox and forget about it for a while ^^
- Mega link in the meantime.
  https://mega.nz/file/9xskkYQI#USRixlFLzyUVjURDxgR-p6lVogAZiHP3RdczFAYY3p8

New Mexico State University (NMSU) recently announced the impending closure of its Hobbes OS/2 Archive on April 15, 2024.

Hope the Internet Archive can back it up, I guess.

IA is quickly becoming a massive, risky single point of failure that is one bad lawsuit away from causing a major problem.
I want to hope they have an exit strategy, but I'm thinking we need to start providing alternatives. A single backup is no backup at all, and all that.
- You mean a lawsuit like the one about the "Great 78 Project" by the music companies or maybe the one about the "National Emergency Library" by the book publishers?
  I think you're right that we need to start working on alternatives, hopefully something decentralized. The Wayback Machine would be an irreplaceable loss though if the data isn't preserved somehow.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

In a move that marks the end of an era, New Mexico State University (NMSU) recently announced the impending closure of its Hobbes OS/2 Archive on April 15, 2024.

For over three decades, the archive has been a key resource for users of the IBM OS/2 operating system and its successors, which once competed fiercely with Microsoft Windows.

The partnership between IBM and Microsoft dissolved after the success of Windows 3.0, leading to divergent paths in OS strategies for the two companies.

Through iterations like the Warp series, OS/2 established a key presence in niche markets that required high stability, such as ATMs and the New York subway system.

Today, its legacy continues in specialized applications and in newer versions (like eComStation) maintained by third-party vendors—despite being overshadowed in the broader market by Linux and Windows.

As the final shutdown approaches in April, the legacy of Hobbes is a reminder of the importance of preserving the digital heritage of software for future generations—so that decades from now, historians can look back and see how things got to where they are today.

The original article contains 726 words, the summary contains 181 words. Saved 75%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

My first not embedded OS! Actually not... It wasn't the hipster "warp"... Boy i am old 😅

Never seen an OS/2 computer in the wild unfortunately. How similar was it to Windows?
- If you interacted with an ATM in the 90's - 2000's it was likely running OS/2. It was superior to windows, but lost in the end. Many of the concepts of the workplace shell were ahead of other DEs even today. KDE initiallly borrowed a lot from the wps.
- Ars wrote a decent article about it a while back. I dug it up - https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/11/half-an-operating-system-the-triumph-and-tragedy-of-os2/
  It's a fun read. The tl;dr: OS/2 had lots of features Windows didn't, but IBM is notoriously bad at marketing, and failed to beat Microsoft in the public perception arena.
- 1.3 wasn't really great, although it was used by a number of embedded systems such as ATMs and the like. Version 2.0 was actually quite good. It could typically run DOS and Windows software in addition to native stuff. I got one of the Wing Commander games to run on it.
  Sadly, there were basically no native applications, so there was no point in switching from Windows. So it never took off.

For someone who has been on the internet for quite some time, that archive was one of the later ones 😃

Anybody remembering wsmr20.army.mil, especially accessing it through bitftp@pucc (yes, that was the complete address, no com or edu!).