Post · bonfire.cafe

@winterknell@mastodon.social · 6 months ago

Many years ago, I ran a Fidonet BBS (3:632/392, FWIW). One of the nets I belonged to, Godnet, was run by a guy in New Jersey who used OS/2 to run his PC. Although I eventually ran down an OS/2 box set, I was never able to make it work. All those floppies; some were bound to be bad.

More recently, I acquired an ISO for OS/2 Warp 4.52 and decided to try it out in PCEm.

After finally getting the virtual machine right - it worked! Kinda. 💻 🐒 See attached.

#retrocomputing #os2 #vm

PCem v17 screenshot of OS/2 Warp 4.52 File Manager displaying a detailed list of files on the hard drive, captioned "Drive C - Details View". List of file names at left, 11 columns of file information, icons at far left. Mostly comprehensible, but WTF is going on in the Size column? I know that TECHNOTE.TXT is 214,878 bytes in size. But the value displayed, "21,487,7.9,999,999,999,912", suggests a weird rounding error (214878 / 10 = 214,877.9999999999912...).

#os2 #vm #retrocomputing

Greg Hills

@winterknell@mastodon.social · 6 months ago

Emboldened and humbled by my success despite ignorance, I decided I need to learn more about OS/2 the hard way - from v1.

Actually, I decided v1.30.2 was probably less challenging. So I went.

The images show how it started and how it's going.

I successfully navigated all hurdles and installed it. Ejected the last floppy, restarted the VM, and ...

Missing operating system.

C Drive's there, looks good. Did IBM's own installer forget to make the partition bootable?

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