You read right, OS/2. We have a really old but very important legacy program here at work that was written for OS/2. We have a dedicated machine for it and everything. Every few days, when I go back to make sure it’s still happy, that damn pop-up window is back, with that damn cartoon elephant telling me about all the benefits that come from registering the damn operating system. Granted, I just have to hit “Cancel” and go on about my business, but sheesh! Can’t this thing take a hint? It’s been, what, 10 years now?
One of these days when we’re not using the thing, I might just go ahead and register it, just to see what happens. I’m imagining the look on the face of some poor peon at IBM when an email inbox that hasn’t been used in decades one day pops up an OS/2 registration…
Omigod! I remember how to get rid of the damn elephant - I did it on my laptop.
What you need to do is download PMPatrol, and when the elephant comes up, find the process name. Then, slay the process, go out to the disk, and delete the file that spawns the process. IIRC, OS/2 never complains that it can’t find the .EXE, it just stops bothering you.
AHunter3 - yes, you can still buy OS/2, but it’s really hard to. IBM refuses to admit it exists when you call them. You need to walk them through it.
I can’t believe you know that, Una. I feel bad now. I wish I cared enough to actually go out and put that much work into solving this problem, now that you’ve so kindly instructed me…
You sure can. My company sells it. We’ve got it in stock. We can have it to you tomorrow. Er, Monday. I don’t want to spam the boards with commercial self-promotion, so email me if you want the (800) number.
It was nothing. I used OS/2 full-time, at work and at home, for nearly 5 years straight. I’ve forgotton more about OS/2 than most people know about Windows. I still have 4 PC that are set up with Win95/WinNT/OS/2. I was going to run the UnaBoard off of OS/2 at one time, since everything I needed (vBulletin, PHP, MySQL, Apache) had an OS/2 version. But then I realized that that was not a good thing.
That’s just selfish of you - think of the sheer joy it’d give OS2’s programming team to get another convert after all this time. You owe it to those poor souls to register your copy immediately.
Ooo. Anthracite, can you remind me of something that’s been bothering me lately? I haven’t used OS/2 in 5 or more years, and I was just thinking the other day about the magic keystroke to give the focus to the desktop. I remember if your mouse ever went wonky you had to get focus on the desktop to bring up the ‘shutdown’ menu, but you couldn’t alt-tab to it, you had to do something like ctrl-alt-F10 or something.
Does this ring a bell? I was thinking about this because I recently came across my old REXX scripts I wrote for OS/2 lo these many eons ago, and it’s been bugging me ever since. Ah, the good old days.
I can’t remember any special keystroke like that. I did have a special application rigged up once, that listened to the serial port to bring up PMPatrol - if your mouse locked up, you could cycle power on your modem, and PMPatrol would come up, and you could arrow through the menus to slay whichever processes were locking the machine up. It worked amazing well.
Also, there are some places you can buy old software for cheap. It also turns up on Ebay or other such places, for example here, asking price (0 bids) $10. At $8 shipping/handling, I suspect someone’s going to be keeping his copy of Warp 3.
Anthracite, your application to reset the mouse sounds ultra cool. The biggest problem i had with OS/2 was the requirement that everything be set in your config.sys, which could only be read at boot time. At least, when I first started mucking about with 2.0/2.1 it was that way - in a command window, you could change PATH but not LIBPATH, or something stupid like that.
Since everything uses DLLs, nothing would work unless I changed config.sys and rebooted. I had to build a program to generate a new config.sys from a template and then I’d reboot everytime I needed to switch from the IBM compiler to the Borland or Microsoft one, or to use different versions of my product. Since I was programming a shell-like thing on OS/2, my friend convinced me to learn REXX just for that purpose. Had I been in my right mind I would have compiled perl or awk or something.
Who said $5? But seriously, aside from shipping cost, I wouldn’t want much of anything for it.
Yes, you are remembering correctly. PATH could be changed in each session dynamically, but LIBPATH was global. This made it a pain when I was trying to test different versions of my program, which had DLLs which had the same name, but were different.
I didn’t have to reboot to use different compilers - I ran 4 different compilers at once. I did have to to be able to change so I could look at different versions of the same-named DLL though. What I finally ended up doing was getting 3 computers. It was the easiest solution in the long run.
