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« Last post by JTA on July 09, 2025, 03:31:36 pm »
" Nobody is using OS/2 any longer. And this is really sad. But I have to accept that. "
We don't have actual numbers because no company releases them in an easily digestable form, easily found by all. I'd contend that there are still quite a large number out there based upon:
- ArcaNoae's info page: arcanoae.com/faqwd/os2-still-used-today/
(ask AN to release real numbers, which they should have)
- OS2World's "hit count" on many pages, showing 10's of 1000's of views
- popularity of archive.org content, and many other sites hosting such content
- gaming, dev, ...
For myself, it is super-easy to use OS/2 (Warp 4.52, ArcaOS) in virtualization, so I actually use it quite frequently, not having any of the problems that most have, trying to run natively on modern (or old) hardware ... for details, look at the virtualization sub-forum on this site:
os2world.com/forum/index.php/topic,3501.0.html (many AToF posts)
I only point this last part out, because, virtualization allows you to run a modern 64-bit os as a "service" for your dev machine or other functional use (the AToF scheme); the x64 service removes all OS/2 problems. On top of that, you can have multiple OS/2 vm's running (an Athena dev vm), each dedicated to your dev, testing or usage requirements. In particular, you can craft a specific DEV vm for os/2 (GCC, EMX, etc.) that is both easy to create (snapshots until it's perfect), or, you can have some of the dev experts create one for you (I respectfully suggest @Kyo, @Paul, many others), perhaps for money, to repay their time?
What has fallen by the wayside isn't OS/2 itself, it's the lost knowledge of how to tune it for modern times (in a vm). I routinely bring up a VM with os/2 2.11, or warp 3 or 4, or arcaos, and it is built as if the year was still 19xx (4.52 or earlier), or 2025 (AOS 5.x or later), and they work flawlessly, each running the software of it's time. Virtualization enables this ...
I'd suggest recreating your athena programming environment to reflect running OS/2 in the same way as when Athena did run (natively) in a reasonable fashion. Then, many can compare vm's to see if AOS can be improved to move Athena forward, or if it should remain available, but only on older OS/2 versions that continue to run perfectly fine in a VM.
Hope this helps ...