Obscure operating systems

[andrew clarke]

On Sat 2014-05-10 11:16:25 UTC+0000, Thomas Mueller (mueller6724 at bellsouth.net) wrote:

> I used OS/2 from 1.3 to Warp 4.  Then, after a freeze or crash,
> CHKDSK, running automatically on reboot, ran amok and trashed my hard
> drive data.  I was never again able to boot OS/2 after that, even from
> floppies.  I later tried eComStation demo CD but was not favorably
> impressed.

Support for a journaled file system called JFS was added to OS/2 in
the late 1990s. There is also read/write support for JFS in the Linux
kernel.

eComStation has supported booting from JFS for about 10 years now.

There are plenty of reasons not to run OS/2 these days, but I don't
believe file system corruption has been a real risk since HPFS was
superceded.

I ran OS/2 2.1 & Warp 3 in the mid '90s and have looked at eComStation
briefly.

To me, the biggest thing in eComStation that sticks out now compared
to modern operating systems is lack of multiuser support in the
kernel. Even Microsoft had this in the first versions of Windows NT.
In OS/2 & eComStation, you're basically running everything as "root",
so there is very little to prevent a rogue program or user error from
deleting system files and rendering your system unbootable. There
could well be addons to reduce this risk, though.

Regards
Andrew