It's been super amazing to see how much they could continue to support newer hardware and keep it going considering that I don't believe they have the kernel source.

It wasn't too long ago I saw OS/2 on some ATM machine that was crashed.

I used to love OS/2 back when developing DOS applications (since I could crash the app and not the machine). OS/2 got me interested in "real OS's" and then SunOS in college, etc.

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kjs3 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Up til 20 years ago there were a surprising number of ATMs still running OS/2; NCR and Diebold supported old machines for a long time. Especially small market/small regional banks wanted to get the absolute most out of their capex investment. Over the years, I've worked with a couple of those dead-enders on different GRC projects, mostly because I'd actually seen OS/2 before. AFAIK, those vendors stopped supporting OS/2 in the 2000s; I'd be very, very surprised if there were any left now.

I you're interested in how a very "not Unix" operating system is architected, I really recommend Deitels' "Design of OS/2". Very interesting.

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kwanbix 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I have heard that many times. Is it know why, if true?

Seems to ve very weird that IBM will give them a license to keep OS/2 updated but no access to the kernel.

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ch_123 5 hours ago | parent [-]

It's definitely true that they do not have access to the original OS/2 source - this has been confirmed by people from Arca Noae in various interviews/presentations I've seen. I've never heard a definitive explanation for why, but two reasons are usually speculated:

1) Due to the amount of third party code in OS/2 (most notably, the DOS and Win 3.x layer) that IBM is unable to license out the code, or unwilling to go to the trouble to figure out the legal implications.

2) IBM has lost some or all of the source code.

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TheCondor 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

You couldn't convince me that IBM lost it..

The licensing would be my guess, Microsoft owned some of the code, there may have been other third party code in there too.

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projektfu 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Did eComStation also lack access to the source? Weird.

	▲	ch_123 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		As far as I know, yes. There were no changes made to eCS which required source - everything was implemented as drivers, or layers on top of the base OS.