OS/2 was technically far superior than any other desktop OS available at it’s time. The fact that it continued to be used in ATMs by banks, ticket machines, voice mails systems, PABXs and various other systems for years after IBM sales and support was discontinued says everything. Even though it was discontinued by IBM in 2006, it is still sold as eComStation, packaged with updated drivers for common hardware available today. According to eComStation’s site, it’s still in use by a number of major corporations.
I’ve spent probably too much time recently installing and playing around with OS/2, especially since ISOs of the install disks became freely available on the Internet Archive. This article about eComStation looking for help to build a version of OS/2 bootable from USB flash drives caught my attention. Interestingly though, from my experience recently trying to install OS/2 Warp on fairly recent PC hardware, I’d rather prefer to see updated drivers for today’s CPUs, motherboards and hard disks.
Hello Kevin,
A company from the United States named Arca Noae LLC has updated drivers. They also have a completely updated OS/2 distribution called ArcaOS. And they have support to boot OS/2 from a USB stick:
https://www.arcanoae.com/arcaos-5-0-2-bootable-usb-stick-image-2018-02-12-package-released/
Best regards,
Roderick Klein
Dutch OS/2 VOICE foundation
Thanks for the info! I’ve had my eye on ArcaOS for a while, but just haven’t convinced myself yet that it’s worth the cost to buy a copy just for hobby reasons, although I could easily be convinced 🙂