Hobbes OS/2 Archive

» see hobbes.nmsu.edu as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

I missed OS/2 entirely. Every machine I ever sat in front of in Turkey came with Windows on it, from the cafes to the university labs, and IBM's operating system was a thing I read about in magazines as a war that had already been settled. So Hobbes is a grave for a stack that was never mine, which would normally put it at arm's length. Except this one died in April 2024, at forty years old, while I was awake and working and could have read the announcement the week it went out.

It started in 1990 in the Small Systems Graduate Computer Lab at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces. An FTP server with some OS/2 files on it, run as a service by the university's IT department, at a moment when OS/2 still looked like it might win. Discs of its contents were being pressed as early as 1992. It kept going long after Warp lost and after every commercial reason to maintain it had evaporated, and it ended up as the single largest collection of OS/2 software that existed anywhere.

That is the actual story here and it has nothing to do with OS/2. A university let a service keep running for thirty four years past the point where anybody could have justified it on a form. Nobody signed off on that. It just did not get switched off, year after year, until the year somebody looked at the list and it did.

~ the dossier ~

~ what was on it ~

Roughly eighteen gigabytes when it was packed up at the end. Drivers, utilities, development tools, games, documentation, plus a pile of DOS and Windows software that mattered to OS/2 users for one reason or another. None of that is a large number in 2024 terms and all of it is irreplaceable, because software for a dead platform does not get re-uploaded when it goes missing. There is no second source. The vendor is long gone and the shareware authors are unreachable, and a good share of those files were the only copy in public circulation.

An archive like this has a specific kind of value that shows up only at the moment somebody needs one file. For thirty four years, if you were the person keeping an OS/2 machine alive in a factory or a back office somewhere, Hobbes was where you went and it was always there. That reliability was not a feature anyone was paid to provide. It was just an address that kept answering.

~ the notice ~

The announcement went up in January 2024 and gave a date: the fifteenth of April. NMSU said it had made the difficult decision to no longer host the files and could not go into specifics beyond having evaluated its priorities. That is the whole public explanation. It reads like a budget line, or like one retirement in a department that nobody backfilled, and those cannot be told apart from outside.

What it did do, and this is worth crediting, is give three months of notice with a hard date on it. Most services that die on somebody's balance sheet just stop answering one Tuesday. Hobbes announced its own end far enough ahead that the people who cared could act, which turned a loss into a transfer.

~ the rescue ~

They did act. The full archive went up on the Internet Archive as a tar file in January 2024, months before the deadline, and the OS/2 community at os2world put mirrors of its own in place. Jason Scott said publicly that the files were safe. A mirror at hobbes.os-2.in came up and is still serving.

So the collection survived and the address did not, and those are two different kinds of survival. A mirror is a copy of the files. What died on 15 April 2024 was the address that every OS/2 document written since 1992 points at, down to the readme files that tell you where to go for the update. The bytes are fine. Thirty years of accumulated pointers to them are all broken now, and no mirror fixes that.

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