Early OS/2 betas unearthed

[louisw3]

http://www.pcjs.org/disks/pc/os2/misc/

The really interesting thing is football. The groundwork on cruiser was really started back in 86.

[The Distractor]

I do seem to remember a blog post, I think from Raymond Chen, that mentioned how *ball codenames were related to OS/2, and mentioned pinball (HPFS), and it also mentioned football but didn't say what it was.

I guess we now know.

(And for those of you wondering about snowball/winball, remember that LAN Manager originally ran on OS/2!)

[voidp]

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnew ... 9/?p=33133

hpfs was called pinball.sys because pinball was the code name of the project that resulted in the filesystem known as pinball (more-or-less).

There were a number of "-ball" code names in Lan Manager, pinball, football, winball, etc.

HPFS was IBM’s name for the filesystem that was implemented in the pinball project.

[The Distractor]

ah, it was a comment by LarryO on one of raymond chen's blog posts.

thanks for searching for it.

[louisw3]

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnew ... 9/?p=33133

hpfs was called pinball.sys because pinball was the code name of the project that resulted in the filesystem known as pinball (more-or-less).

There were a number of "-ball" code names in Lan Manager, pinball, football, winball, etc.

HPFS was IBM’s name for the filesystem that was implemented in the pinball project.

Cool, that brings it all together, and why on earth pinball.sys was a filesystem.

[SoftWitch]

Did you notice? Seems like OS/2 2.x series (i386 features) was forked from the 16 bit 1.x series even before 1.0 was released! That would explain why OS/2 1.3 had a i386-version of HPFS on board.

The OS/2 FOOTBALL Boot Disk (v7.68.17) contained a prototype version of OS/2 from February 1987 that was designed to test two important new features of the Intel 80386 processor: paging and V86-mode. This prototype was forked from pre-1.0 OS/2 sources, and the only hardware it supported was the COMPAQ DeskPro 386-16.

The OS/2 FOOTBALL Boot Disk (v4.41.00) contained an updated FOOTBALL prototype. It was built in December 1987, using final OS/2 1.0 sources merged with assorted FOOTBALL changes, and although it was originally assigned version number 1.3, this version of OS/2 would ultimately become 2.0.