The problem I have with these OS/2 "modernizing" projects is how the feature-set locks them out of 64-bit long mode. I think the only way to really try to revitalize OS/2 is to jump to 64-bit and seamlessly run 16-bit apps in a VM/emulator. But at that point you might as well just run OS/2 in a VM, which works really well even on free options like VirtualBox. So it seems like there is only a small and shrinking audience for a native 32-bit OS/2.
So this is the same deal as with eCos, i.e. the provider doesn't have source access to the innards and just fiddles with some common drivers and desktop tools?
Arca Noae was founded in July, 2014 when several of the developers who previously worked on the eComStation project felt that the future for the platform looked bleak, a feeling which came about due to lack of progress (or any work being done at all), therefore demonstrating a distinct lack of commitment on the part of the project’s new owner.
I thought it was just the PowerPC one (which had a different, Mach-based kernel), but it turns out¹ that it has had some sort of SMP support since 2.11 in 1993.
> In New York City’s subway system, for instance, the travelers who gain entrance by swiping their MetroCards over 5 million times each weekday do so with the assistance of IBM’s theoretically defunct software.
Classic Mac OS seems to be the system from that era that's no longer available. There's still Amiga systems on the market. RISC OS is available for Raspberry Pi. DOS lives on in the form of FreeDOS. And now there are two OS/2 distributions (eComStation and ArcaOS).
You can't forget BeOS, currently alive in the form of the open-source reimplementation Haiku. In spite of their perpetual Alpha status, I'm still continuously amazed that it's even half as good as it is.
I just can't find a way to download a trial ISO or something that will let me experiment. I guess their target audience already knows very well what to expect.
The grocery store I worked at as a teenager had an OS/2 frontend to an AS/400 that was hooked into all of the cashier stations and inventory management. I doubt that they've replaced it.
