After 32 years, one of the ’Net’s oldest software archives is shutting down

In a transfer that marks the finish of an period, New Mexico State University (NMSU) just lately introduced the impending closure of its Hobbes OS/2 Archive on April 15, 2024. For over three many years, 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 a press release made to The Register, a consultant of NMSU wrote, “We have made the troublesome resolution to now not host these information on hobbes.nmsu.edu. Although I’m unable to enter specifics, we needed to consider our priorities and needed to make the troublesome resolution 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 website reads, “After a few years of service, hobbes.nmsu.edu will probably be decommissioned and can now not be out there. As of April fifteenth, 2024, this website will now not exist.”

We reached out to New Mexico State University to inquire about 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 this 1992 Walnut Creek CD-ROM assortment that gathered up the contents of the archive for offline distribution. At round 32 years previous, minimal, that makes Hobbes one of the oldest software archives on the Internet, 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 secure and already mirrored elsewhere. “Nobody ought to fear about Hobbes, I’ve obtained Hobbes dealt with,” wrote Scott on Mastodon in early January. OS/2 World.com additionally revealed a press release about making a mirror. But it is nonetheless notable at any time when such an previous and necessary piece of Internet historical past bites the mud.

Like many archives, Hobbes began as an FTP website. “The main distribution of information on the Internet have been through FTP servers,” Scott tells Ars (*32*). “And as FTP servers went down, they’d even be mirrored as subdirectories in different FTP servers. Companies like CDROM.COM / Walnut Creek turned methods to simply get a CD-ROM of the gadgets, however they’d typically make the information out there 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 electronic mail consumer. The archive accommodates hundreds of OS/2 video games, purposes, utilities, software improvement instruments, documentation, and server software relationship again to the launch of OS/2 in 1987. There’s a sure allure in operating 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 alternative for IBM PC DOS (additionally known as “MS-DOS” in the kind bought by Microsoft for PC clones). Despite superior capabilities like 32-bit processing and multitasking, OS/2 later competed with and struggled to achieve traction in opposition to Windows. The partnership between IBM and Microsoft dissolved after the success of Windows 3.0, resulting in divergent paths in OS methods for the two corporations.

Through iterations like the Warp collection, 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 in the broader market by Linux and Windows.

A footprint like that is price preserving, and a loss of 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 is not the first time that Hobbes has introduced it is going away. Last time it was rescued after loads of complaints and a quantity of 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 for future generations—in order that many years from now, historians can look again and see how issues obtained to the place they’re right this moment.