In a relocation that marks completion of a period, New Mexico State University (NMSU) just recently revealed the upcoming closure of its Hobbes OS/2 Archive on April 15, 2024. For over 3 years, the archive has actually been an essential resource for users of the IBM OS/2 running system and its followers, which as soon as contended increasingly with Microsoft Windows.
In a declaration made to The Registeran agent of NMSU composed, “We have actually made the challenging choice to no longer host these files on hobbes.nmsu.edu. I am not able to go into specifics, we had to assess our top priorities and had to make the hard choice to terminate the service.”
Hobbes is hosted by the Department of Information & & Communication Technologies at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, New Mexico. In the main statement, the website checks out, “After several years of service, hobbes.nmsu.edu will be decommissioned and will no longer be readily available. Since April 15th, 2024, this website will no longer exist.”
We connected to New Mexico State University to ask about the history of the Hobbes archive however did not get a reaction. The earliest record we’ve discovered of the Hobbes archive online is this 1992 Walnut Creek CD-ROM collection that gathered the contents of the archive for offline circulation. At around 32 years of ages, minimum, that makes Hobbes among the earliest software application archives on the web, similar to the University of Michigan’s archives and ibiblio at UNC.
Archivists such as Jason Scott of the Internet Archive have actually stepped up to state that the files hosted on Hobbes are safe and currently mirrored in other places. “Nobody needs to stress over Hobbes, I’ve got Hobbes dealt with,” composed Scott on Mastodon in early January. OS/2 World.com likewise released a declaration about making a mirror. It’s still significant whenever such an old and crucial piece of web history bites the dust.
Like numerous archives, Hobbes began as an FTP website. “The main circulation of files on the web were through FTP servers,” Scott informs Ars Technica. “And as FTP servers decreased, they would likewise be mirrored as subdirectories in other FTP servers. Business like CDROM.COM/ Walnut Creek ended up being methods to simply get a CD-ROM of the products, however they would frequently make the information offered at http://ftp.cdrom.com to download.”
The Hobbes website is a valuable digital time pill. You can still discover the Leading 50 Downloads pagethat includes noise and image editors, and OS/2 constructs of the Thunderbird e-mail customer. The archive consists of countless OS/2 video games, applications, energies, software application advancement tools, documents, and server software application going back to the launch of OS/2 in 1987. There’s a specific beauty in stumbling upon OS/2 wallpapers from 1990, and even the archive’s Update Policy is a historic gem– last upgraded on March 12, 1999.
The tradition of OS/2
OS/2 started as a joint endeavor in between IBM and Microsoft, carried out as an organized replacement for IBM PC DOS (likewise called “MS-DOS” in the type offered by Microsoft for PC clones). Regardless of innovative abilities like 32-bit processing and multitasking, OS/2 later on took on and had a hard time to acquire traction versus Windows. The collaboration in between IBM and Microsoft liquified after the success of Windows 3.0causing divergent courses in OS methods for the 2 business.
Through models like the Warp seriesOS/2 developed a crucial existence in specific niche markets that needed high stability, such as ATMs and the New york city train systemToday, its tradition continues in specialized applications and in more recent variations (like eComStationpreserved by third-party suppliers– regardless of being eclipsed in the wider market by Linux and Windows.
A footprint like that deserves protecting, and a loss of among OS/2’s main archives, even if mirrored somewhere else, is a cultural blow. Obviously, Hobbes has apparently practically vanished before however got a stay of execution. In the remarks area for a short article on The Registersomebody called “TrevorH” composed“This is not the very first time that Hobbes has actually revealed it’s disappearing. Last time it was saved after a great deal of problems and a variety of trainees or professors stepped forward to continue to preserve it.”
As the last shutdown methods in April, the tradition of Hobbes is a tip of the significance of maintaining the digital heritage of software application for future generations– so that years from now, historians can recall and see how things got to where they are today.
This story initially appeared on Ars Technica