In a transfer that marks the tip of an generation, New Mexico State College (NMSU) not too long ago introduced the approaching closure of its Hobbes OS/2 Archive on April 15, 2024. For over 3 many years, the archive has been a key useful resource for customers of the IBM OS/2 running machine and its successors, which as soon as competed fiercely with Microsoft Home windows.
In a observation made to The Sign up, a consultant of NMSU wrote, “We have now made the tough determination to not host those recordsdata on hobbes.nmsu.edu. Despite the fact that I’m not able to enter specifics, we needed to review our priorities and needed to make the tough determination to discontinue the carrier.”
Hobbes is hosted by way of the Division of Data & Verbal exchange Applied sciences at New Mexico State College in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Within the reliable announcement, the website reads, “After a few years of carrier, hobbes.nmsu.edu shall be decommissioned and can not be to be had. As of April fifteenth, 2024, this website will not exist.”
We reached out to New Mexico State College to inquire in regards to the historical past of the Hobbes archive however didn’t obtain a reaction. The earliest document now we have discovered of the Hobbes archive on-line is that this 1992 Walnut Creek CD-ROM assortment that amassed up the contents of the archive for offline distribution. At round 32 years previous, minimal, that makes Hobbes one of the most oldest tool archives on the web, corresponding to the College of Michigan’s archives and ibiblio at UNC.
Archivists reminiscent of Jason Scott of the Web Archive have stepped as much as say that the recordsdata hosted on Hobbes are secure and already reflected in other places. “No person will have to concern about Hobbes, I have were given Hobbes treated,” wrote Scott on Mastodon in early January. OS/2 International.com additionally printed a observation about creating a reflect. However it is nonetheless notable every time such an previous and necessary piece of web historical past bites the mud.
Like many archives, Hobbes began as an FTP website. “The principle distribution of recordsdata on the web have been by way of FTP servers,” Scott tells Ars Technica. “And as FTP servers went down, they might even be reflected as subdirectories in different FTP servers. Firms like CDROM.COM / Walnut Creek changed into tactics to simply get a CD-ROM of the pieces, however they might steadily make the information to be had at http://ftp.cdrom.com to obtain.”
The Hobbes website is a valuable virtual time pill. You’ll be able to nonetheless to find the Best 50 Downloads web page, which contains sound and symbol editors, and OS/2 builds of the Thunderbird electronic mail consumer. The archive incorporates hundreds of OS/2 video games, packages, utilities, tool building equipment, documentation, and server tool relationship again to the release of OS/2 in 1987. There is a positive appeal in working throughout OS/2 wallpapers from 1990, or even the archive’s Replace Coverage is a ancient gem—final up to date on March 12, 1999.
The legacy of OS/2
OS/2 started as a three way partnership between IBM and Microsoft, undertaken as a deliberate alternative for IBM PC DOS (often known as “MS-DOS” within the shape offered by way of Microsoft for PC clones). In spite of complex functions like 32-bit processing and multitasking, OS/2 later competed with and struggled to realize traction towards Home windows. The partnership between IBM and Microsoft dissolved after the luck of Home windows 3.0, resulting in divergent paths in OS methods for the 2 firms.
Via iterations just like the Warp sequence, OS/2 established a key presence in area of interest markets that required top steadiness, reminiscent of ATMs and the New York subway machine. As of late, its legacy continues in specialised packages and in more moderen variations (like eComStation) maintained by way of third-party distributors—regardless of being overshadowed within the broader marketplace by way of Linux and Home windows.
A footprint like this is price retaining, and a lack of one in all OS/2’s number one archives, even though reflected in other places, is a cultural blow. It sounds as if, Hobbes has reportedly nearly disappeared ahead of however gained a keep of execution. Within the feedback phase for a piece of writing on The Sign up, anyone named “TrevorH” wrote, “This isn’t the primary time that Hobbes has introduced it is going away. Closing time it was once rescued after a large number of court cases and numerous scholars or college got here ahead to proceed to handle it.”
As the general shutdown approaches in April, the legacy of Hobbes is a reminder of the significance of retaining the virtual heritage of tool for long term generations—in order that many years from now, historians can glance again and spot how issues were given to the place they’re nowadays.
This tale at first seemed on Ars Technica.