Author Topic: Is it possible? OS/2 for Power PC in Action on Cebit 95?  (Read 9527 times)

Sigurd Fastenrath

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Is it possible? OS/2 for Power PC in Action on Cebit 95?
« on: March 17, 2021, 04:28:08 pm »
I am wondering, does this German show from the Cebit 1995 show the OS/2 for Power PC Edition in Action??

https://youtu.be/4vNnEWTkPhk?t=1910

 :o 8)

EDIT: if the Link does not start at the right time, move on to 31:50
« Last Edit: March 18, 2021, 10:43:43 pm by Sigurd Fastenrath »

Olafur Gunnlaugsson

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Re: Is it possible? OS/2 for Power PC in Action on Cebit 95?
« Reply #1 on: March 17, 2021, 06:00:11 pm »
Yeah, good catch

ivan

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Re: Is it possible? OS/2 for Power PC in Action on Cebit 95?
« Reply #2 on: March 17, 2021, 07:06:22 pm »
Not sure because it is all in German which I'm not very good at.

Martin Iturbide

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Re: Is it possible? OS/2 for Power PC in Action on Cebit 95?
« Reply #3 on: March 17, 2021, 09:59:26 pm »
Yes, by watching the "PC" CPU I notice it should be a PowerPC. I remember seeing some similar models running AIX a lot of time ago while I was working at IBM.

But I had never experienced Warp 3 on a PowerPC, I don't even know the PowerPC models where was possible to install it.

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Martin Iturbide
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weckart

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Re: Is it possible? OS/2 for Power PC in Action on Cebit 95?
« Reply #4 on: March 17, 2021, 11:36:14 pm »
It was only officially supported on four models of IBM's Power Series computers - two desktops: The Power Series 830 and 850 and two PPC Thinkpads: The Power Series 820 and 850. One of the IBM RS/6000 workstations can also be tweaked to run it albeit unsupported.

Martin Iturbide

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Re: Is it possible? OS/2 for Power PC in Action on Cebit 95?
« Reply #5 on: March 19, 2021, 01:43:49 am »
I am wondering, does this German show from the Cebit 1995 show the OS/2 for Power PC Edition in Action??

https://youtu.be/4vNnEWTkPhk?t=1910

 :o 8)

EDIT: if the Link does not start at the right time, move on to 31:50

The one on the video looks a lot like the "IBM POWER SERIES 440" (Vertical stand).

Regards
« Last Edit: March 19, 2021, 01:46:57 am by Martin Iturbide »
Martin Iturbide
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Martin Iturbide

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Re: Is it possible? OS/2 for Power PC in Action on Cebit 95?
« Reply #6 on: March 19, 2021, 09:24:19 pm »
One of the IBM RS/6000 workstations can also be tweaked to run it albeit unsupported.

Welcome weckart.

If by any chance you remember or have some links that explain that tweak, please let me know.

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Martin Iturbide
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khadmin

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Re: Is it possible? OS/2 for Power PC in Action on Cebit 95?
« Reply #7 on: March 20, 2021, 09:32:21 pm »
It was only officially supported on four models of IBM's Power Series computers - two desktops: The Power Series 830 and 850 and two PPC Thinkpads: The Power Series 820 and 850. One of the IBM RS/6000 workstations can also be tweaked to run it albeit unsupported.

True extremely limited hardware support :-) and was killed in the beta phase and never officially released to avoid to having to support it. Remember that I colleague had it running on PPC system for beta testing and still got images of the installation media.

Kékróka

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Re: Is it possible? OS/2 for Power PC in Action on Cebit 95?
« Reply #8 on: March 21, 2021, 06:47:33 am »
Hello,

I found this link among similar ones about a big project - which was cancelled later

https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/ibm-os2-warp-powerpc-edition

That is about a special Warp 3 running on some workstations and laptops
with PPC processors as first fruitition of a Unified OS of All (Workplace OS).

"IBM OS/2 Warp PowerPC Edition was a port of OS/2 Warp 3 to the PowerPC Reference Platform (PReP). It was a subsystem (OS/2 personality) running on the IBM microkernel, which was a refinement of the Carnegie Mellon University Mach microkernel. It was a first step to Workplace OS (or WPOS for short) was supposed to be built on top of the Mach microkernel and support multiple "personalities". The personalities would implement existing operating systems such as OS/2, AIX, Windows NT and perhaps even Mac OS. In the end this never happened and the only supported personality was OS/2."

Applicable hardwers were only :
---------------------------------

"Compatibility
Architecture: PPC
Installs only install on IBM PowerPC workstations and on Motorola PowerStack (PowerPC Reference Platform (PReP)).

Compatible IBM PowerPC workstations:
%u2022 Desktop:
Personal Computer Power Series 830 (PowerPC 604)
Personal Computer Power Series 850 (PowerPC 604)
%u2022 Laptop:
ThinkPad Power Series 820 (PowerPC 603e)
ThinkPad Power Series 850 (PowerPC 603e)"


Also among early RS/6000 you would find not just POWER but PPC versions as they started also with those processors as well.

On those it could not be hard to attempt to install this environment especially which was Prep version also and even not Microchannel but PCI bus if those above mentioned 2 PPC workstations and 2 PPC laptops were built such way.

So, let's check it out ...

You can read this on wiki page of rs/6000 about it -- starting section History :

"The first RS/6000 models used the Micro Channel bus, later models used PCI. Some later models conformed to the PReP and CHRP standard platforms, which were co-developed with Apple and Motorola, with Open Firmware. The plan was to enable the RS/6000 to run multiple operating systems such as Windows NT, NetWare, OS/2, Solaris, Taligent, AIX and Mac OS but in the end only IBM's Unix variant AIX was used and supported on RS/6000. Linux is widely used on CHRP based RS/6000s, but support was added after the RS/6000 name was changed to eServer pSeries in 2000."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_RISC_System/6000


When I searched for

"Personal Computer Power Series 830 (PowerPC 604)"

I got the following wiki

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PC_Series


and here there was a section :

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

PC Power Series
This is the PC counterpart of the RS/6000
PowerPC 604 processor at 100, 120 or 133 MHz
ISA/PCI PReP architecture
16MB parity memory standard, expandable to 192MB
Integrated 10baseT Ethernet, PCI Graphics and Audio
Supports Windows NT 3.51 or AIX Version 4
ARC BIOS
Two form-factors were available, the 3x3 (3 slot, 3 bay) PC830 and the larger 5x5 (5 slot, 5 bay) PC850.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Well I left out the table following, but you can chech it out personally
I assume one of those RS/6000 machines were attempted to install and run that limited beta OS2 Warp3 OS personality on it.

So it was possible to run the OS, but it was not a generic PPC solution, you may hope for,
there were not even network subsystem in it, or many applications ported .. except some listed on the first link above, rather like a pure OS "demo".

From the first link :

"IBM OS/2 Warp PowerPC Edition was never released as a product and was only offered to interested IBM customers as CD pack (2 CDs: "OS/2 Warp (PowerPC Edition) December 1995 Version" and "IBM Applications Sampler"). It stayed in beta status until cancelation of the OS/2 PowerPC project in 1996.

IBM OS/2 Warp PowerPC Edition had all features of its Intel counterpart OS/2 Warp 3 (including DOS and Win-OS2 support), but missing all the networking functionality of the "Connect" versions. It had a beta version of OpenGL support, which shared code with IBM's AIX workstation class implementation. Moreover, it had already many features that showed up later in OS/2 Warp 4 on Intel."

I hope these links might fullfil everyone's curiosity,
but sadly and possibly not their satisfactory.

Also however its downloadable .. playing with it possibly hard as you shuld buy compatible (rare) PPC hardwer as well .. which one should be funtioning well as expected.

For virtualized solution I suggest to read comment posts also on the first link above - this way proposed the compatible bare metal.
 
« Last Edit: March 21, 2021, 06:57:38 am by Kékróka Klán »

Dave Yeo

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Re: Is it possible? OS/2 for Power PC in Action on Cebit 95?
« Reply #9 on: March 21, 2021, 07:35:00 am »
Welcome Kékróka,
For completeness, there is the OS/2 museum take on it, http://www.os2museum.com/wp/os2-history/os2-warp-powerpc-edition/.
Someone recently asked Michal for an image of it, he said sure, if he can find it and the hard drive still works.

Sigurd Fastenrath

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Re: Is it possible? OS/2 for Power PC in Action on Cebit 95?
« Reply #10 on: March 21, 2021, 08:55:31 am »
I am wondering wether or not this kernel of PPC Edition does have the 4GB RAM Limit as well, and in addition the "Free RAM" problems.


Dave Yeo

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Re: Is it possible? OS/2 for Power PC in Action on Cebit 95?
« Reply #11 on: March 21, 2021, 09:53:53 am »
I am wondering wether or not this kernel of PPC Edition does have the 4GB RAM Limit as well, and in addition the "Free RAM" problems.

Well, being 32 bit, it would have had the 4GB ram limit as well. What it wouldn't have had was the low vs high memory thing that we have. That's due to the i286 legacy and up to Warp v4, our address space was limited to 1GB, with half given to the kernel, then more for DLLs.
I'd assume that it didn't have the free bug that our kernels have had, it is really a bug.
What would have been really nice is if IBM released the source. Sounds like they had the copyright and it was fairly portable.

Kékróka

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Re: Is it possible? OS/2 for Power PC in Action on Cebit 95?
« Reply #12 on: March 21, 2021, 10:25:59 pm »
Welcome Kékróka,
For completeness, there is the OS/2 museum take on it, http://www.os2museum.com/wp/os2-history/os2-warp-powerpc-edition/.
Someone recently asked Michal for an image of it, he said sure, if he can find it and the hard drive still works.


Ahoy Dave !

Thanks for greetings :D

And for answering ...

Yepp, this way I wrote : "among similar ones"

Also you are absolutely right right, OS/2 Museum link covers a more detailed and accuraate answer for the initial question of Sigurd Fastenrath,
however I intended to answer to Martin Iturbide with my links, and on macintoshgarden site there are downloadable materials' links  there ... and might he can use them somehow against my last pessimistic paragraphs ;)

Aisumasen (If I was wrong)

Welcome Kékróka,
For completeness, there is the OS/2 museum take on it, http://www.os2museum.com/wp/os2-history/os2-warp-powerpc-edition/.
Someone recently asked Michal for an image of it, he said sure, if he can find it and the hard drive still works.

The person was Sebastian Blanco ... well not the football player from Argentina :D ( hehe
, I found him first ) but a developer from Spain (https://sebasblanco.com/)
Interestingly not he was from some OS/2 related project, but the requested one to provide DD image -- and mentioned by you -- Michal Necasek from osFree project.
Quite surprising, indeed ?

Beat Lerch

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Re: Is it possible? OS/2 for Power PC in Action on Cebit 95?
« Reply #13 on: March 23, 2021, 10:18:42 am »
Hello everyone,

look, I also found something from IBM
I thank you

http://www.ibmfiles.com/index.htm

Wendy Krieger

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Re: Is it possible? OS/2 for Power PC in Action on Cebit 95?
« Reply #14 on: October 10, 2021, 12:59:28 pm »
I had a look through OS/2 PPC to see what it was made of.

The DOS is based on PC-DOS 6,30, and has REXX installed as well.  There is a help command, which functions as the PC-DOS 7 help, but loads the OS/2 CMDREF instead.  Although the rexx is similar to the PC-DOS 7 rexx, command.com will not run rexx.bat scripts like in 7.0 and 7.1.  Unlike the intel version of OS/2, the DOS is pretty complete.  It's in the various reviews I write on DOS as PC-DOS 6.32.  (see http://www.os2fan2.com/files/pcdos.pdf )

The wallpapers are similar to the 3.0 set, but there are some 4.0 features in there, which is why I group it under 3.5 (3.1 is a version number i had reported by tcmdos2 under Warp Connect 3.) 

OS2 PPC does indeed look like 3.0, iconwise, but since all the books on OS/2 Warp is 3.0 stuff, i see that even OS/2 4 server reverted to the 3.0 icons.