Hobbes OS/2 Archive: As of April 15th, 2024 this site will no longer exist | Hacker News Reader

Hobbes OS/2 Archive: As of April 15th, 2024 this site will no longer exist

hobbes.nmsu.edu

165 pointslinker300048 comments

I've alerted r/DataHoarder to the situation :) I expect some interested person will create an archive on their personal server like I plan to.

https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/192p8jc/the_ho...

Thank you!

I'm now httrack'ing the site. If anybody reads this after April 15, I'm probably not going to be around to read your comments, but you can hit me up on Matrix if you need a copy: @lorendb:nheko.im

If you're reading this before April 15 and need a copy, get it yourself.

Email info@rsync.net for a free account to store an offsite/backup copy of this.

I will help manage setting up snapshots of it that we can checksum/verify to create a "golden copy".

Or whatever - just let us know if we can be of assistance.

Thank you! I will send you an email. I've got a personal server, and I would publicly serve the backup from it, but it's got an awful connection for serving files (only 20ish Mbps up), so that would be awesome :)

It'd be great to also upload a tar.gz or something to the internet archive as well.

I tried, but the upload failed because it "looks like spam" according to Archive.

oh ffs, IA.

I am sympathetic to the finiteness of disk space and amount of actual spam they must ingest.

mmmm, weird. You may want to reach out to Jason Scott for help. He's textfiles here on HN.

Please please please only hammer the site if you intend to create a public mirror. While I appreciate the DataHoarder mentality (I am one as well), when sites announce they are going offline don't send hundreds of rabid nerds when that bandwidth is better spent on making sure public archivists can get everything.

Jason Scott: "Nobody should worry about Hobbes, I've got Hobbes handled."

https://mastodon.archive.org/@textfiles/111728995296654678

Wow. I ran this archive back in the 90s, when I was a student at NMSU and it was one of my ancillary duties when I worked part-time for the IT department. I wasn't a fan of OS/2 myself but I appreciated how much of a community there was around it and how excited people were to continue to use it. When I inherited it the website was put together with duct tape and paperclips (and Comic Sans), and the files were pretty inconsistently-organized.

At one point I spent a few months building a new website and tooling to make it easier to manage and then completely reorganized the archive, and while other students replaced the underlying code over the years (eventually replacing my not-very-great C++-based bespoke-CGI system with a much more robust PHP-based one), my design was largely intact, as was the file structure I'd established.

I'm kind of amazed it kept running for this long, but this is a personal end of an era for me. I still hold a lot of nostalgia for it and my time working on it.

EDIT: I wrote some more detailed thoughts on my blog. http://beesbuzz.biz/blog/14299-Hobbes-OS-2-Archive-An-end-of...

Pity. It was a major resource for a few hobbyists, and professionals sadly stuck with poor choices. Props to those who pulled it together and kept it up this long.

Someone was maintaining a MySQL build for OS/2 up until 2019!?

https://hobbes.nmsu.edu/?path=%2Fpub%2Fos2%2Fserver%2Fdataba...

Better yet: there is a company that is still currently maintaining and selling a commerical copy of OS/2![0]

[0]https://www.arcanoae.com/

As an IBM product, OS/2 was part of some very long support contracts with companies like banks that also had z/OS mainframes.

There was OS/2 in some ATMs well into the 2000s, but I don’t know when those might have been replaced.

Pretty sure MTA (NYC subway) ticket machines were running OS/2 into the mid 2010s and maybe still are.

Be nice if they zipped it up and offered a download link for the entire site.

Or upload it to archive.org themselves. In their own interest. Instead of inviting hoarders to hammer the server with crawlers, upload it once and say it's already there.

Seems like you could pull their site via FTP: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38933694

BitTorrent, ideally, so fans can share the bandwidth burden.

Torrent sounds like a good idea in this situation.

This brought back memories when I was an OS/2 User. I miss that desktop.

Likewise. The presentation manager was much more advanced than Windows, and aside the infamous single queue "bug", a lot more stable. for OS/2, aside some playing with the C compiler whose name I can't recall now, but I used OS/2 as a better multitasker for DOS instances. At that time I was writing a database software in Clipper that I adapted to work for two shops (books and furniture) and needed to have in both places two DOS machines communicating over NETBIOS, where both would work as sales terminals but only one of them would keep the db, indexes etc. The customers had two machines, and also did I, but I wanted to speed things up so I tried to open multiple DOS windows on a single machine and let them share the same directory emulating the NETBIOS shares environment, so that I could for example compile both client and server on the same machine off the same code base to keep code changes consistent in case I was for example changing common structures etc. Turns out that OS/2, after enabling something to allow data sharing between DOS instances (can't recall which option or setting), not only worked but was a lot more stable than Windows 95 at that; for some reasons Win95 appeared to work for a while, only to crash in multiple ways shortly after, while OS/2 never had a hitch, so after realizing that Windows wasn't an option I ditched it for good using only OS/2. Good times.

The infamous "SIQ" problem is synchronous (not single) input queue.

Regarding compilers, IBM had their C Set/2 compiler and then later the VisualAge C++ one. Borland also produced a C++ compiler and IDE as well.

Funny that you should mention Clipper because I developed Clipper software too that got to be too big (memory requirements) for DOS to handle without doing crazy tricks. At that point, I sucked it up and transitioned it to OS/2 PM. I wrote the GUI front end in Watcom's VX-REXX (an excellent product) and the back-end in C and using DB2/2. Fun times!

I used VX-REXX as well for a back end written in C++ (IBM compiler, IIRC.) No DB2 for this one, it was a network relay for some incoming data.

Additionally with Visual Age for Smalltalk and SOM (OS/2 version of COM, which also did metaclasses), there was a .NET like experience with Smalltalk, before Microsoft even though of it.

Visual Age for C++ was also one of the few IDEs that back in the day provided a Smalltalk like experience for C++, especially in version 4.

> I never wrote software for OS/2, aside some playing with the C compiler whose name I can't recall now...

Was it Watcom C++? I may actually still have a CD with that on it somewhere.

It's still being developed[1]; but I have no idea of the state of the OS/2 support. I wouldn't rely on it being up to date, myself.

[1]https://open-watcom.github.io/

I ran a BBS on my 386 in a DOS box on OS/2. I basically had a usable computer and in the background people would dial-in, play door-games, download files, get some fidonet(?) feeds, etc etc. Was completely not a bother at all.

Someone should alert archive.org to make sure they have a complete mirror.

I mentioned it to Jason Scott on Bluesky.

> Jason Scott on Bluesky

Neat! Finally someone to follow on Bluesky. I have an account but wasn’t following anyone. Finally a name on Bluesky that I am interested in following!

Good memories. We used OS/2 for a automated measurement tool and it was rock solid, at the time it was a great choice for true multitasking (pre-Linux and pre-NT).

My OS/2 experience got me a job at a company that IBM contracted to build a AppleTalk server component for OS/2 ("Lan Server for Macintosh", https://techmonitor.ai/technology/ibm_adds_macintosh_support...). You kids don't remember this but at that time there were a ton of incompatible LANs so we provided glue between Macs and PC networks. AppleTalk was actually pretty neat.

This has been an institution for OS/2 users; they also published their CD by the same name, very useful when Internet access was uncommon or so slow that downloading so much material would have required an eternity.

The CD archive was actually published by an unaffiliated company that specialized in bundling up public data repositories onto CD-ROM. NMSU was never involved in the publishing of physical artifacts.

If you hated Windows in the nineties and you're feeling sentimental, seems like there's plenty of anti-Microsoft stuff in there for old time's sake

    lftp hobbes.nmsu.edu 6 Jun 19  2022 delayed 74 Jun 14  2023 dos 4096 Jan 09 22:51 incoming 63 Mar 22  2023 java 94 Mar 22  2023 multimedia 4096 Jan 09 08:01 new 87 Jan 10  2022 os2 6 Jan 09  2020 text-archives 77 Jun 14  2023 windows

To Hobbes OS/2 Archive:

If you're going to do that, please provide a zip of the entire website. Make things easy for archivists.

It's almost no effort on your end, relative to the effort you've already put in placing this notice.

Just a few months ago I came across some reference to Hobbes and it reminded me of my early-‘90s OS/2 but pre-internet days, when I’d often see references to “Hobbes” but, like “the internet”, I didn’t quite know what it was.

Weird, they even still have recent additions:

https://hobbes.nmsu.edu/?path=%2Fpub%2Fnew

Edit, for posterity, as this site's demise is imminent, /pub/new's present contents:

  Directory: /pub/new Description                                                                                         Type                                  Upload Date (to /pub)                                                                                           (dir) WPS class that implements the "Become" functionality for file objects per drag and drop [Detail]    application/octet-stream 18.74 KB     2024/01/03 WPS class that implements the "Become" functionality for file objects per drag and drop [Detail]    application/octet-stream 18.74 KB     2024/01/03 LabelA 2.00 beta (2004-12-09) [Detail]                                                              application/zip 417.38 KB             2024/01/06 Agena is a procedural programming language [Detail]                                                 application/octet-stream 10.22 MB     2024/01/07 Jd - A Graphical Debugger for Java 1.10 (1998-01-28) [Detail]                                       application/zip 214.23 KB             2023/12/30 Anti Microsoft Fun Old BMP wallpapers Vol 1 [Detail]                                                application/zip 3.07 MB               2023/12/31 Blue Portals theme rel 2 for Dynamic Icons (2023-12-31) [Detail]                                    application/zip 5.25 MB               2023/12/31 David's ArcaOS Wallpapers Vol 1 (2023-12-31) [Detail]                                               application/zip 12.54 MB              2023/12/31 David's XWorkPlace Boot Logos Vol 1 (2023-12-31) [Detail]                                           application/zip 1.72 MB               2023/12/31 File Cabinets theme rel 5 for Dynamic Icons (2023-12-17) [Detail]                                   application/zip 4.54 MB               2023/12/31 File Cabinets 2 theme rel 5 for Dynamic Icons (2023-12-21) [Detail]                                 application/zip 4.76 MB               2023/12/31 Ice theme rel 2 for Dynamic Icons (2023-12-31) [Detail]                                             application/zip 4.69 MB               2023/12/31 Looking Glass theme rel 3 for Dynamic Icons (2023-12-31) [Detail]                                   application/zip 5.16 MB               2023/12/31 Nature and Photography Old BMP wallpapers Vol 1 [Detail]                                            application/zip 8.59 MB               2023/12/31 Pink theme rel 2 for Dynamic Icons (2023-12-31) [Detail]                                            application/zip 4.79 MB               2023/12/31 Red theme rel 3 for Dynamic Icons (2023-12-31) [Detail]                                             application/zip 4.92 MB               2023/12/31 Warp It Up Wallpapers (1995-04-30) [Detail]                                                         application/zip 1.2 MB                2023/12/31 Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) client. [Detail]                                                      application/zip 1.91 MB               2023/12/31 Mouse Pointers by David Graser (2018-12-25) [Detail]                                                application/zip 161.85 KB             2024/01/01 Password Manager 5.0.3 beta (2005-07-28) [Detail]                                                   application/zip 764.47 KB             2024/01/06 eComStation Wallpapers Vol 4 (2007-02-18) [Detail]                                                  application/zip 3.47 MB               2024/01/01 Pointer Pak 1.3 (2024-01-01) [Detail]                                                               application/zip 316.71 KB             2024/01/01

If anyone caught their eye on the wallpapers:

https://imgur.com/a/eS5Q78r

I can bemusedly vouch for the very non-NSFW provenance of the entire album.

Imgur's auto-classification be drunk ;)

(Either that, or it likes likes OS/2 :P)

There is a random Dick pick in that collection for some reason.

But it's Dick Nixon...

Quick, call the Archive Team!

here is the time the company that is licensing/developing OS/2 in 2023 did a takedown copyright notice to a guy on youtube who just made a video showing it working

https://www.os2world.com/forum/index.php?topic=3249.0

i wonder if this has anything to do with that company?

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