Warp This, Buddy

Greg first started playing with OS/2 back in the days of version 1.2, the first version with HPFS (circa 1990?), and made the full-time plunge with version 1.3 (not coincidentally, the first version of which IBM was in charge). In fact, he still occasionally tests 1.3 on that same system, a Toshiba ``laptop'' with a measurable gravitational field.

Up until 1997 or so, Greg's main system had both OS/2 2.1 (fullpack) and OS/2 Warp 3.0 (non-Windoze). Due to various incompabilities, he never managed to get the latter successfully upgraded to the full version of Warp Connect, nor did he manage to get it installed on a laptop; that was the same period that Greg made the switch to Linux full-time, and, well...OS/2 just wasn't worth the effort anymore.

But for three years, OS/2's totally nifty Boot Manager switched between the two OS/2 partitions, the Linux partition, and a small modem-Doom partition (DOS). Not only that, but thanks to the wizardry of Matthieu Willm and Deon van der Westhuysen, OS/2 achieved full read/write access to the Linux ext2fs partitions. Whoa, majorly gnarly.

Greg was a member of the OS/2 Bay Area User Group for two or three years and occasionally contributed in various small ways, the most recent of which was as the nominal leader of the New User Clinic, and he once presented a brief Tip of the Month on cross-compiler portability at a Developer's SIG meeting. The DevSig met on the second Monday of every month, and the main group met on the fourth Monday. Meetings were once announced in the Usenet newgroup comp.os.os2.announce, but that's probably no longer the case.

Cool OS/2 Images

David Barnes, IBM's resident OS/2 nutcase, presented an outrageously funny show at the OS/2 BAUG main meeting in January 1995; besides showing off all the cool things Warp can do and a bunch of cool apps and games, he also had a variety of desktop backgrounds which looked stupendously lovely on his 65536-color IBM Thinkpad 755CE with an 810MB disk and 40MB of RAM. (He repeated the specs many times during his presentation, so the whole audience now has his configuration memorized.) These images are all available in their original 640x480 OS/2 BMP format from somewhere in Kentucky (one would assume).

Note that the background on this page (currently visible only to users of Netscape 1.1, probably) is a colored variant of David's grayscale lite background. The Barnes archive contains two other tileable backgrounds called swirl and swirl2. (The latter is used as the background for Greg's David Barnes logos page.)

Greg now has a separate OS/2 images page with a growing number of really nice images from the Internet, including two preview shots of the coming Avarice game.

Other OS/2 Links

To learn more about OS/2, check out the OS/2 Warp home page or the IBM Internet Connection home page. For one of the best collections of OS/2 links anywhere, check out Raj Singh's list of WWW pages. Also have a look at the Team OS/2 home page, the Berkeley OS/2 Users Group home page and the ADD Consulting home page for some nice links. Gosh, there are just so many things to see...