Hobbes OS/2 Archive is shutting down • Hacker News Board

Re: Hobbes OS/2 Archive is shutting down

#31

Post by textfiles » Tue, Jan 30, 2024, 2:59 PM UTC

mikequinlan wrote: post #5

genman wrote: post #2

Did they co-ordinate with archive.org to take over this treasure of human history?

TFA says >Archivists such as Jason Scott of the Internet Archive have stepped up to say that the files hosted on Hobbes are safe and already mirrored elsewhere. "Nobody should worry about Hobbes, I've got Hobbes handled," wrote Scott on Mastodon in early January. OS/2 World.com also published a statement about making a mirror.

We didn't coordinate directly, but when people were telling me that the site was going down and I saw that it was less than 20 GB, I would rate my personal panic at a two out of a scale of 1 to 50. I figured some of the copies we already had would have almost all of it, and then they went ahead and made an easily downloadable version as well. This was hardly a four alarm fire. Happy to hold multiple copies of it going forward.

Re: Hobbes OS/2 Archive is shutting down

#32

Post by aleph_minus_one » Tue, Jan 30, 2024, 4:09 PM UTC

appplication wrote: post #22

hermitcrab wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although it is easy to criticize Microsoft (and I often do) they are very good at keeping old apps running. I believe PerfectTablePlan v1, which I wrote in 2005 still works on the latest Windows. Apple, on the other hand, like to nuke their entire developer ecosystem from orbit every few years.

Not defending Apple, but one of the big transitions was stopping support for 32 bit apps. Even 20 years ago it was clear to anyone even mildly technical that 64-bit apps were the immediate future. Continuing to develop 32-bit only apps well into the 2010s was a conscious decision by developers to limit the lifetime utility of their software to a few years at most.

> it was clear to anyone even mildly technical that 64-bit apps were the immediate future

But dropping support for 32 bit apps was a conscious decision by Apple. Windows users rather complain until today that Microsoft dropped backward support for 16 bit apps under 64 bit Windows versions.

Re: Hobbes OS/2 Archive is shutting down

#33

Post by beej71 » Tue, Jan 30, 2024, 5:03 PM UTC

sbarre wrote: post #14

noufalibrahim wrote: post #11

I never get used to the idea of how important and yet how transient digital assets like this are. Now, we rely on a third party (Internet Archive) to preserve this because of their good will.

And the goodwill of the thousands of us who donate to the Internet Archive every month (or year). There are lots of people who believe in Internet history, and try to do something about it.. But yes, if everyone thinks "someone else has got this", then we will lose our history slowly but surely.

On that note, and speaking as another one of those monthly donors, everyone should consider adding IA to their donation list. It is one of the most valuable archives ever made, and it is under perpetual threat of shutdown.

Re: Hobbes OS/2 Archive is shutting down

#34

Post by II2II » Tue, Jan 30, 2024, 5:11 PM UTC

gcanyon wrote: post #15

Not to rag on New Mexico State, but I'm totally going to rag on New Mexico State -- how hard can it possibly be to "maintain" something like this? Given that the software is from the '90s, it can't possibly total more than a few gigabytes? And the bandwidth surely can't be huge. Finally, what "maintenance" is even required? NMS surely has a large connection to the internet, so what this amounts to is one lonely machi…

It could simply be a matter of having someone interested in monitoring the server. If they can't find anyone who is interested in OS/2, which is a strong possibility these days, they probably didn't have anyone volunteer to do so.

Re: Hobbes OS/2 Archive is shutting down

#35

Post by tombert » Tue, Jan 30, 2024, 5:54 PM UTC

IntelMiner wrote: post #24

k12sosse wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Visit Dave's Garage on YouTube for some computer history of a unique time

Just watch out for when he tells lies, like "Linux is proprietary too!" https://i.imgur.com/qUNkpi0.png

I think part of this is wrong (the part that only Linus knows about), but doesn’t the kernel ship with binary blobs for some of the drivers/firmware? I thought that was the whole impetus of the Linux Libre project [1].

I am willing to give benefits of doubt that Dave heard about the binary blobs and mistakenly assumed that they were proprietary to Linus himself.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux-libre

Re: Hobbes OS/2 Archive is shutting down

#36

Post by hermitcrab » Tue, Jan 30, 2024, 6:48 PM UTC

johncoltrane wrote: post #20

hermitcrab wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although it is easy to criticize Microsoft (and I often do) they are very good at keeping old apps running. I believe PerfectTablePlan v1, which I wrote in 2005 still works on the latest Windows. Apple, on the other hand, like to nuke their entire developer ecosystem from orbit every few years.

Anecdotal, maybe, but three of the apps I am currently running on this M1 Pro are quite old and work the same: Adium (last build almost 7 years ago), Slate (12 years ago), and Notational Velocity (13 years). Laptops go, but my .app bundles stay ;-). I agree about Windows, though.

The latest build of my software applications (built with Qt 5) work back to macOS 10.13, which was released in 2017. If your macOS is pre 10.13 they won't run.

Re: Hobbes OS/2 Archive is shutting down

#37

Post by icedchai » Wed, Jan 31, 2024, 12:08 AM UTC

phendrenad2 wrote: post #3

Interestingly, a sub-licensed version of OS/2 is still sold and actively upgraded (called ArcaOS). It's in a bizarre state where their license from IBM doesn't give them enough leeway to port it to 64-bit, but they have been able to add modern things like USB 3 drivers.

To be fair, porting a 30+ year old code base to 64-bit would be a huge job. And essentially pointless since there is basically zero new development happening.

Re: Hobbes OS/2 Archive is shutting down

#38

Post by gcanyon » Fri, Feb 02, 2024, 4:28 AM UTC

nunez wrote: post #27

gcanyon wrote: post #15

Not to rag on New Mexico State, but I'm totally going to rag on New Mexico State -- how hard can it possibly be to "maintain" something like this? Given that the software is from the '90s, it can't possibly total more than a few gigabytes? And the bandwidth surely can't be huge. Finally, what "maintenance" is even required? NMS surely has a large connection to the internet, so what this amounts to is one lonely machi…

This sounds more like a response to legal action than a technical inability to continue.

Yep, could be.