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Lost IBM OS/2 Warp 3 and 4 localizations: Looking for help finding and archiving
74 points by markostamcar 22 days ago | hide | past | favorite | 20 comments
It's amazing how software from a major company that is less than 30 years old can get lost & forgotten so fast.

Building on a 2022 post about finding a copy of the long lost Slovenian OS/2 Warp 4 - https://www.os2museum.com/wp/slovenian-os-2-warp-4/ - some fellow software archaeologists have concluded some other localization editions are still missing - copied from the post's comments:

-- OBattler says: December 8, 2024 at 9:53 am It turns out Slovenian isn’t the only version missing of OS/2 Warp 4.0 – Portuguese (Portugal) and Portuguese (Brazil) are also missing, as are Dutch, French, Finnish, Norwegian, and Swedish, and a non-trial version of Hungarian.

OBattler says: December 8, 2024 at 10:01 am I just found FixPack 5 for OS/2 Warp 3.0 (or at least, references thereof) Arabic, French (Canada), Hebrew, Thai, Turkish, and, apparently, also Bulgarian and Lithuaian! So OS/2 Warp 4.0 must have also existed in these languages.

Source: https://ecsoft2.org/system-fixpacks-and-patches --

Anyone who can help find these CDs and help the os2museum.com preserve them (and optionally upload them to archive.org, too) is very welcome to join our cause.

Also looking for any (ex)IBM employees thst worked on the OS/2 localization projects and can help with this!

Marko Štamcar Computer History Museum Slovenia




I have the Norwegian Warp 4.0 CD in a box in my parents' attic; I'll try to dig it out when I go to see them for Christmas.

IBM were so eager (understandably so) to gain market share that I simply called their Norwegian office and asked if I could have a few copies for installing in my high school's computer lab. 'Sure thing!' - days later I received a box full of retail copies along with a friendly letter suggesting I get in touch if I needed more!


> IBM were so eager (understandably so) to gain market share

I got Warp 4 easily, but sadly, in the era of Warp 2 and Warp 3, even in charge of a 6-digit IT budget, I couldn't get eval copies -- nor later as a journalist at a UK national PC magazine.

It got the message way too late.


If you are comfortable/allowed to use torrents, you may want to try this magnet link:

magnet:?xt=urn:btih:d981a11797c174ab90d5567bcb47e09da70a3451

It contains 29+GB of OS/2 related stuff, including official CDs. Just found by searching at the usual shady places, so no guarantees about contents and safety.


Thanks for raising awareness on this. I think I may have a retail box with Warp 3 in Portuguese (Brazil). I had an ISV at the time, and used to join the OS/2 meetups organized by IBM, where they regularly distributed copies to power users.

I'll try to find it next week and see if it's helpful for the folks in OS/2 museum.

edit: it seems they're looking for Warp 4; I don't think I ever saw that version. I only used 2.0/2.1 and Warp 3.


I crossposted this to the os2 reddit, as well as LinkedIn and my personal Facebook page. I used to write about OS/2 exclusively, so I'm still connected with a lot of the IBM engineers and executives. Though I would not count on them keeping every language version, any more than I kept the 300 OS/2 applications I'd acquired.


Crazy that French could be missing. It's the 6th most spoken language on Earth!


Professor Farnsworth's Universal Translator supports that language! ;)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwODwwgE6rA


Hrm. I think I had few OS/2 boxes amongst some old games I took to sell to a video game antiquarian, and I think I left it there but they didn't seem interested in them.

Frankly I don't remember which language they were, either english or finnish. I had both the red and blue boxes (was it, with windows support or not?), and other was unopened.

I usually preferred english versions myself, as I learned computers with english, it was more comfortable with me. Also IBM had some rather odd choices on some words versus Microsoft, which could be jarring (was it Umpilevy for hard drive, as opposed to Kiintolevy or Kovalevy in most other places).

One year (must of been 1997 or so?) IBM had a crazy marketing campaign at Assembly[0], where they practically just handed out the boxes to anyone who would take them. If they had handed out finnish version, I would be surprised if they were that hard to come by.

[0] https://assembly.org/en


What is the official IBM statement on this (or MS one, as it was a joint project, right?)


OS/2 Warp was long after Microsoft had anything to do with OS/2


In regards to what? Software preservation? I think every vendor should value it.


I cross posted a reference to this on 2SB (https://twostopbits.com/) in case someone over there knows something that might be of assistance.


Great, thanks!


Good luck!


Thanks! It's really hard to find any info online and even for the Slovenian version we just have a copy of a copy of the original installation CD and no photos of the original localized materials exist online.


Yeah it's really odd how much OS/2 software has been lost considering the last IBM release of OS/2 Warp was only December 2001. Thanks for your work. Personally, I am currently debating buying a ThinkPad T23 or T30 and dual booting OS/2 Warp 4.51 and Arca OS 5.1


I was a keen OS/2 2.x user.

I reviewed ArcaOS:

https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/04/arcaos_51/

... and interviewed one of the project leads:

https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/19/retro_tech_week_arca_...

So when I read this:

> dual booting OS/2 Warp 4.51 and Arca OS 5.1

... I laughed, bitterly.

It is still _extremely_ fussy about installation and across 4 test machines I never got ArcaOS to dual-boot with anything except a single basic IBM PC DOS 7.1 setup.

Anything more than a single bootable primary partition in BIOS config is highly unlikely to work, in my experience. In UEFI mode it's even fussier and of course actual IBM OS/2 won't run then.

Forget dual booting, except maybe with DOS.

Trying to dual boot two OS/2 instances sounds like a recipe for hair loss or a cardiovascular incident. I don't think I'd try to do that if you paid me. Paid me a lot.


Well, good luck. But how many copies of OS/2 Warp do you think were ever sold in Slovenia? Heck, there were not many sold in English speaking regions!

Perhaps a more interesting question would be: "how do I create a localisation CD?"


It did have a decent run in the embedded market, especially before windows 2000 as it had a clean 32-bit codebase that was more stable than win9X. A lot of ATMs used it. You’d also be shocked what you’d find in the back IT cabinets of some older companies. A former colleague who now works at a defence firm sorted through piles of old manuals from 1980s era VAX/VMS hardware during an office move (even though it was public documentation, the bureaucracy of disposing it meant they still kept it and moved it).


I wouldn't be shocked at all. In the 90s I consulted for a couple of UK firms that used OS/2 - a training company I worked for used a (nightmarish) C++ compiler that only ran, very badly, on it. And I trained several batches of VMS programmers in converting to Unix.




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