For those that can't or won't leave OS/2, IBM partnered with Serenity Systems to continue OS/2 under the brand. After 2001, IBM encouraged people to transition from Windows or OS/2 over to Java and Linux. In its heyday, OS/2 ran the majority of Automated Teller Machines (ATMs), was used for hardware management consoles (HMC), and was used worldwide to run various Railway systems. IBM named its version of OS/2 version 3 and 4 "WARP", with the last version 4.52 released in 2001. The "NT" stood for New Technology, the basis for all of the enterprise-class Windows servers used today. In 1992, IBM release OS/2 version 2.0, touted as "a better DOS than DOS and a better Windows than Windows!" Both parties maintained ownership rights, Microsoft renamed OS/2 to Windows NT. By 1990, Microsoft decided it's own Windows operating system was more popular with the ladies, and decided to break off with IBM. IBM and Microsoft jointly developed OS/2 back in 1985. The systems I have that are modern and powerful enough to run hypervisors don't have floppy drives, so I opted for the Museum approach. This turned out to be more challenging than I expected. I could either use the Emulation approach and try to build an OS/2 guest image under a hypervisor like VMware, KVM or VirtualBox, or just take the Museum approach and try taking one of my half dozen old machines, wipe it clean and stand up OS/2 on it bare metal. In my follow-up post, I explained how there are many ways I could have tackled this project. The STACKVOL.DSK is just a huge binary file, like a ZIP file, compressed with algorithm that combines Lempel-Ziv with Huffman coding. The STACKER.EXE would not run on Windows XP, Vista or Windows 7.
The README.STC explains that the disk is compressed by Stacker, a program developed by. Each floppy contains only three files: README.STC, STACKER.EXE and a hidden STACKVOL.DSK file. Jokingly, I suggested that I may have to stand up an OS/2 machine just to check out what is actually on those floppies. Back in Februray, my blog post mentioned that I uncovered some diskettes compressed with OS/2 Stacker.
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