What to do with old OS/2 stuff? (1 Viewer)

Wasn't sure the subject belonged in the computer section considering it's an old dinosaur that's way past its prime.

Our company is about to flush out everything related to OS/2 in about a month or two. We have TONS of discs, books, manuals, CDs and who knows what else that we plan to simply throw in the dumpster very soon (no sensitive info, just old stuff).

If anyone out there has any other ideas on what we can do with all this stuff, I'm open to suggestions. Creative disposal methods are also welcome.

take it all and ebay it.

I have OS/2 on floppy discs!!!! Something like 20 or so floppies. Maybe we can pool yours with mine and see if we can get them to mate and reproduce...

Jay

I kinda remember IBM OS/2. From what I recall it was (and still is) a damn stable operating system. I think what killed it was the lack of 3rd party software development right?

Jeff

You'd be welcome to my IBM DOS 1.0, 2.1 and 3.2 manuals and disks if you'd like to create a little museum.....I'm keeping my 1981 vintage IBM PC though

Mort

I threw my O/S 2 stuff out a long time ago. Had one package that was never even opened. O/S 2 was a good product, but by the time it came out, the market had been already saturated with MS O/S's.

Some of you are cruel! Instead of finding ways to get rid of our crap, you're trying to dump your own crap at our offices, making our storage situation even worse!

To you people, I say "fuddle duddle." (look it up)

Chu's Ebay idea however sounds like a great one. The only downside is that the seller will be responsible for picking up a couple hundred pounds of books and software boxes.

When the time comes, I'll let you all know when the auction is officially posted. The intro alone should be good for a few laughs.

If it's manuals you're trying to get rid of, why not take em out to the parking lot, make a big pile, and throw on a match? I hear OS/2 burns much cleaner and more efficiently than Windows.

Another option is to load em up and donate them to a school or library, and see if they realize how useless the books are. Kind of cruel, but an option nonetheless.

How about building a small fort in the office? Everyone likes forts!

You could pulp the books, roll out your own paper, and make the world's biggest paper airplane!

The office could just not have to buy toilet paper for a year...

Use the books to build someone a new cubicle wall, or a new desk.

I just chucked my Unixware 7.0 and my ultra 10 with solaris 8.0 out. Chuck it and move on.

is it only OS/2 or do you also have OS/2 Warp

I remember my sister got a IBM PS/2 as a college present...any one remember Prodigy Online? MAN those were the days...2800 baud modems...good times.

I remember using Compuserve at 300 baud. :b

Both I believe, including OS/2 Warp Server with HPFS 386 support. However, the pre-Warp floppies could be so old that they may no longer be readable. It's happened before.

When everything is put up for auction, I'll list all the versions we have including all other related software.

Can anyone say.....PCjr.......

Yes, but any cost savings would be negated by the need for Preparation H.

IBM mainframe guy here (err, Enterprise Server). We still ship OS/2 as the operating system on the laptop that runs our big boxes.
The models just released use Linux.

I also made the mistake of buying the PCjr for a girlfriend. I got to spend lots of time and $ installing a 3rd party hard drive.

I remember playing with OS/2 Warp 3 and 4 a lot back in the early- to mid-'90s. It was quite a bit better than Windows 3.1, save for one fatal flaw: a lack of good native applications.

Before the advent of broadband, it was quite useful at home for pre-emptive multitasking, allowing me to do something else with my computer during a long download over a modem (big downloads took hours at 14.4-28.8Kbps). This worked best with a $30 commercial replacement for the serial port driver. Good terminal emulator programs were hard to come by and somewhat expensive (about $125). Games and multimedia applications? Nearly nonexistent. Web browsers were late to arrive for OS/2, and were a year behind those being developed for Windows and UNIX/Linux.

In those days, other OS alternatives weren't viable. Windows 3.x was horrible. Linux (and accompanying open-source GUIs/apps) was in early stages of development and definitely wasn't ready for the mainstream (but a dedicated hobbyist could get an install up with several hours of work). Windows NT was in beta, and MS/PC/DR-DOS did not multitask.

I wound up switching over to NT 4 Workstation as soon as it was released. That gave me the multitasking ability, along with the ability to run mainstream Win32 applications.

Though I remember OS/2 fondly for helping me get my first IT job (desktop support in a mostly-OS/2 shop), it wasn't always stable. The 16-bit HPFS in OS/2 2.x-3.x didn't deal with "unclean" shutdowns/reboots very well. I had to rebuild several workstations a week (in an 800-user environment) because the HPFS file system self-destructed when a user powered off or hit the reset button. (And this was on True Blue IBM PS/2 hardware...) The file servers fared better, but they were on UPSs (no unclean shutdowns).

Now I think of OS/2 as an interesting historical relic in the development of modern PC OSs, but I wouldn't want to go back to running it every day. If you want to go the Microsoft-free route today, a good Linux distro gives you way more hardware support and choices of applications, and is at least as stable as OS/2 was at its best.