In a transfer that marks the tip of an period, New Mexico State University (NMSU) lately introduced the upcoming closure of its Hobbes OS/2 Archive on April 15, 2024. For over three a long time, the archive has been a key useful resource for customers of the IBM OS/2 working system and its successors, which as soon as competed fiercely with Microsoft Windows.
In an announcement made to The Register, a consultant of NMSU wrote, “We have made the difficult decision to no longer host these files on hobbes.nmsu.edu. Although I am unable to go into specifics, we had to evaluate our priorities and had to make the difficult decision to discontinue the service.”
Hobbes is hosted by the Department of Information & Communication Technologies at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, New Mexico. In the official announcement, the positioning reads, “After many years of service, hobbes.nmsu.edu will be decommissioned and will no longer be available. As of April 15th, 2024, this site will no longer exist.”
We reached out to New Mexico State University to inquire in regards to the historical past of the Hobbes archive however didn’t obtain a response. The earliest document we have discovered of the Hobbes archive on-line is that this 1992 Walnut Creek CD-ROM assortment that gathered up the contents of the archive for offline distribution. At round 32 years outdated, minimal, that makes Hobbes one of many oldest software program archives on the web, akin to the University of Michigan’s archives and ibiblio at UNC.
Archivists akin to Jason Scott of the Internet Archive have stepped as much as say that the information hosted on Hobbes are protected and already mirrored elsewhere. “Nobody ought to fear about Hobbes, I’ve received Hobbes dealt with,” wrote Scott on Mastodon in early January. OS/2 World.com additionally revealed an announcement about making a mirror. But it is nonetheless notable at any time when such an outdated and vital piece of web historical past bites the mud.
Like many archives, Hobbes began as an FTP website. “The main distribution of information on the web have been through FTP servers,” Scott tells Ars Technica. “And as FTP servers went down, they might even be mirrored as subdirectories in different FTP servers. Companies like CDROM.COM / Walnut Creek grew to become methods to simply get a CD-ROM of the objects, however they might usually make the information obtainable at http://ftp.cdrom.com to obtain.”
The Hobbes website is a priceless digital time capsule. You can nonetheless discover the Top 50 Downloads web page, which incorporates sound and picture editors, and OS/2 builds of the Thunderbird e mail shopper. The archive accommodates 1000’s of OS/2 video games, purposes, utilities, software program improvement instruments, documentation, and server software program relationship again to the launch of OS/2 in 1987. There’s a sure attraction in working throughout OS/2 wallpapers from 1990, and even the archive’s Update Policy is a historic 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 substitute for IBM PC DOS (additionally known as “MS-DOS” within the kind offered by Microsoft for PC clones). Despite superior capabilities like 32-bit processing and multitasking, OS/2 later competed with and struggled to achieve traction towards Windows. The partnership between IBM and Microsoft dissolved after the success of Windows 3.0, resulting in divergent paths in OS methods for the 2 firms.
Through iterations just like the Warp sequence, OS/2 established a key presence in area of interest markets that required excessive stability, akin to ATMs and the New York subway system. Today, its legacy continues in specialised purposes and in newer variations (like eComStation) maintained by third-party distributors—regardless of being overshadowed within the broader market by Linux and Windows.
A footprint like that’s value preserving, and a lack of considered one of OS/2’s main archives, even when mirrored elsewhere, is a cultural blow. Apparently, Hobbes has reportedly virtually disappeared earlier than however obtained a keep of execution. In the feedback part for an article on The Register, somebody named “TrevorH” wrote, “This just isn’t the primary time that Hobbes has introduced it is going away. Last time it was rescued after numerous complaints and quite a few college students or school got here ahead to proceed to keep up it.”
As the ultimate shutdown approaches in April, the legacy of Hobbes is a reminder of the significance of preserving the digital heritage of software program for future generations—in order that a long time from now, historians can look again and see how issues received to the place they’re as we speak.
This story initially appeared on Ars Technica.