On 09/27/11 07:45, Steven Hirsch wrote:
On Mon, 26 Sep 2011, Dave McGuire wrote:
On 09/26/2011 01:38 PM, Michael Kerpan wrote:
I have
done. Most annoying that it won't work under VirtualBox, which
is what I normally use.
But real hardware is more fun.
That's funny that eComstation would fail on VBox, because Warp 4
actually worked fine on it the last time I tried it...
OS/2/s use of the processor's Ring 2 is what trips is up on most
virtualization platforms.
The original Parallels release for 32-bit Linux was optimized for running
OS/2. The story I recall is that it was written for use by Russian banks,
who were heavily dependent on OS/2 running on aging Microchannel hardware.
Originally there was VirtualPC by Connectix which ran as host under Windows
and Mac PPC but ran OS/2 really well within the VM. In 2001 or so a German
company, Innotek, was contracted to release an OS/2-eCS hosted version.
http://www.os2voice.org/VNL/past_issues/VNL0602H/vnewsf2.htm This was
developed using an updated version version of IBM's win32 API subsystem for
OS/2 called Odin.
http://svn.netlabs.org/odin32 OS/2 actually had the
ability to run win32 programs by translating the win32 API to OS/2s native
API, but IBM gave up because Microsoft kept changing the win32 API. Then
in 2004 Microsoft bought Connectix's IP and killed off both the Mac and
OS/2 versions. They then supposedly worked on incorporating the VM into
newer Windows releases. I don't use Windows so I have no idea how that
turned out.
At about the same time as Microsoft was killing VirtualPC, a Russian
company that I seem to recall was named 2P2, was developing a VM to run
OS/2 virtually on Windows. I think it was for Russian/European banks as
you said. They contracted with Serenity Systems (the OEM vender for
eComStation branded version of OS/2) for a version called SVista
(
http://www.serenityvirtual.com) which never left beta quality stage, but
ran hosted on Linux, Windows, BSD and OS/2-eCS. Then all of a sudden the
company was bought and renamed Parallels and released a product which ran
on Intel OSX,windows and Linux, but not OS/2. As I recall this became a
big reason people started to consider Macs since they could run their
Windows applications.
In the mean time Innotek, the developers who ported VirtualPC to OS/2 began
working on a new open source VM called VirtualBox. They were bought out by
Sun, who was later bought out by Oracle. VBox was only released officially
for Windows, OS X, Linux and Solaris, but never OS/2. But the Community
open source has been compiled for OS/2, it just isn't supported and doesn't
have some features of the released platforms.
I just find it interesting how each time there was a new VM product for
OS/2, something dramatic always seemed to happen to kill off the OS/2 version.
Mark