OS/2 Museum is offline...

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SoftPCMuseum
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OS/2 Museum is offline...

Post by SoftPCMuseum »

I have noticed over the past day or so that OS/2 Museum seems to be offline. This time it doesn't appear to be having server trouble - it rather appears that Michal Necasek (MichalN) decided that he didn't want to run the site anymore and to simply delete it.

You can see what I mean if you try going to the link below:
http://www.os2museum.com

I certainly hope that this is not the case, but unfortunately I have seen plenty of cases where people simply deleted their entire websites once they decided that they didn't want to run them anymore and that they would simply give up altogether.

Does anyone know what is going on with that website? I tried contacting one former user of that website, Darkstar, but unfortunately I never received a response.

This was one of my favorite websites to visit, and it would simply be a terrible shame to see it simply disappear (assuming that I was correct in that the user decided to stop running it and to take it offline for good).
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mrpijey
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Re: OS/2 Museum is offline...

Post by mrpijey »

If it's really deleted and gone then it's very sad. A while ago I tried to broker a deal with the site owner to preserve all the OS/2 releases he was in possession of but he was not at all interested to archive any of the stuff. Hopefully some info and binaries survived somewhere...
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3155ffGd
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Re: OS/2 Museum is offline...

Post by 3155ffGd »

The thing I miss the most from that page is actually the VESA driver that's incredibly useful for running early NTs under VirtualBox. It wouldn't happen that anyone has that still archived somewhere, would it?

Overdoze
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Re: OS/2 Museum is offline...

Post by Overdoze »

I hope it comes back, was a cool site. I think that's also where we got Windows/386 2.01 from.
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KRNL386 - my site about retro computing | My site about Windows 1.0 | My blog | 86Box Manager | LeakDB - list of PC OS warez leaks

ATeamInc
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Re: OS/2 Museum is offline...

Post by ATeamInc »

3155ffGd wrote:The thing I miss the most from that page is actually the VESA driver that's incredibly useful for running early NTs under VirtualBox. It wouldn't happen that anyone has that still archived somewhere, would it?
Here's a snapshot of the article if you want the technical side: http://web.archive.org/web/201709221155 ... irtualbox/
PS: You can get the floppy disk from there as well, but at a slow speed.

ibmpcat5170
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Re: OS/2 Museum is offline...

Post by ibmpcat5170 »

I hope that website comes back someday...
Otherwise, we won't be able to get the miniport graphics drivers for the early versions of Windows NT in VirtualBox anymore!
My most wanted abandonwares from original media are:
  • MMPM/2 1.0 (Int'l Business Machines Corp.·1992) {Multimedia Extensions for OS/2 2.0}
  • Microsoft Video for Windows 1.1 (Microsoft Corp.·1993) {Multimedia Extensions for Windows 3.1}
  • Microsoft Windows NT 3.1 Client build 511 (Microsoft Corp.·1993) {Operating System}

Whoever has any of these, please contribute them.
Thank you all for taking your time to read my signature!

BF10
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Re: OS/2 Museum is offline...

Post by BF10 »

Overdoze wrote:I hope it comes back, was a cool site. I think that's also where we got Windows/386 2.01 from.
If I'm correct it was also on of the first to try NT 3.1 build 297. It's sad that its gone, because we lost many drivers and other useful material as a result. It should really be archived instead of deleted.
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SoftPCMuseum
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Re: OS/2 Museum is offline...

Post by SoftPCMuseum »

UPDATE: I recently heard from louisw3 (neozeed) who has posted on that site in the past. Apparently, there were issues with the site host because of the amount of traffic, so they canceled his account completely.

I will continue posting in this topic as I receive more updates regarding the status of the OS/2 Museum site itself.
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Latest release of Virtual Computer emulator available here:
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BF10
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Re: OS/2 Museum is offline...

Post by BF10 »

This now shows us that MichalN didn't delete the website, but rather an unexpected account termination occurred. This sucks very badly now.
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ibmpcat5170
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Re: OS/2 Museum is offline...

Post by ibmpcat5170 »

Well, the site is back.
Now we can rejoice!
My most wanted abandonwares from original media are:
  • MMPM/2 1.0 (Int'l Business Machines Corp.·1992) {Multimedia Extensions for OS/2 2.0}
  • Microsoft Video for Windows 1.1 (Microsoft Corp.·1993) {Multimedia Extensions for Windows 3.1}
  • Microsoft Windows NT 3.1 Client build 511 (Microsoft Corp.·1993) {Operating System}

Whoever has any of these, please contribute them.
Thank you all for taking your time to read my signature!

SistemaRayoXP
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Re: OS/2 Museum is offline...

Post by SistemaRayoXP »

In case of something similar let's make a backup of the site in the WayBack Machine (Just in case this happens again ;))

roytam1
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Re: OS/2 Museum is offline...

Post by roytam1 »

SoftPCMuseum wrote:UPDATE: I recently heard from louisw3 (neozeed) who has posted on that site in the past. Apparently, there were issues with the site host because of the amount of traffic, so they canceled his account completely.

I will continue posting in this topic as I receive more updates regarding the status of the OS/2 Museum site itself.
aren't they use VPS?

shared hosting is no good on everything.

BTW they should use cloudflare to cut down traffics and DDoS attempts.

SoftWitch
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Re: OS/2 Museum is offline...

Post by SoftWitch »

Michał described so many interesting interna, I'm really happy that he is online again. There are lots of webhosters who practically don't limit traffic. I can recommend a very fair one in Germany, who doesn't simply delete, and help to register, if Michał reads this and wants help.
Please don't forget to be respectful to each other.

mrpijey
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Re: OS/2 Museum is offline...

Post by mrpijey »

Nice that it's back anyway, it has a lot of interesting information. I hope the binaries are also shared one day so we can preserve all that too. I don't think IBM is paying much interest to old OS/2 releases anymore...
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louisw3
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Re: OS/2 Museum is offline...

Post by louisw3 »

roytam1 wrote: shared hosting is no good on everything.
Everything goes down, everything has issues. There is always a human element that messes stuff up, and things just plain break.

In the 20+ years of doing things I can safely say that equipment in data centres fares much better than things at residential sites. And there is a clear difference between a few hundred visitors a day vs several thousand per hour. And it's far cheaper for average people to pool money together and share a machine. This is why AWS/Azure is so popular. Sometimes your time is too valuable to be playing 'patch boy' for hours on end. And sometimes things just fail for no apparent reason.

I've done it all, I've hosted servers in my house on a T1, I've rented space in colocation, I've been on VPS'es, I've rented servers in data centres, I've tried managed services, And I've tried going with containers. Every single one of them has failed at some point.

Every. Single. One.

There is no magic bullet.
"Those who don't understand UNIX are condemned to reinvent it, poorly." – Henry Spencer

mrpijey
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Re: OS/2 Museum is offline...

Post by mrpijey »

The topic has been split off to

https://www.betaarchive.com/forum/viewt ... =7&t=38756

Stay on topic in the threads, or start a new one. This one is about OS/2 Museum, not OS/2.
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