Building on a 2022 post about finding a copy of the long lost Slovenian OS/2 Warp 4 - https://www.os2museum.com/wp/slovenian-os-2-warp-4/ - some fellow software archaeologists have concluded some other localization editions are still missing - copied from the post's comments:
-- OBattler says: December 8, 2024 at 9:53 am It turns out Slovenian isn’t the only version missing of OS/2 Warp 4.0 – Portuguese (Portugal) and Portuguese (Brazil) are also missing, as are Dutch, French, Finnish, Norwegian, and Swedish, and a non-trial version of Hungarian.
OBattler says: December 8, 2024 at 10:01 am I just found FixPack 5 for OS/2 Warp 3.0 (or at least, references thereof) Arabic, French (Canada), Hebrew, Thai, Turkish, and, apparently, also Bulgarian and Lithuaian! So OS/2 Warp 4.0 must have also existed in these languages.
Source: https://ecsoft2.org/system-fixpacks-and-patches --
Anyone who can help find these CDs and help the os2museum.com preserve them (and optionally upload them to archive.org, too) is very welcome to join our cause.
Also looking for any (ex)IBM employees thst worked on the OS/2 localization projects and can help with this!
Marko Štamcar Computer History Museum Slovenia
IBM were so eager (understandably so) to gain market share that I simply called their Norwegian office and asked if I could have a few copies for installing in my high school's computer lab. 'Sure thing!' - days later I received a box full of retail copies along with a friendly letter suggesting I get in touch if I needed more!
I got Warp 4 easily, but sadly, in the era of Warp 2 and Warp 3, even in charge of a 6-digit IT budget, I couldn't get eval copies -- nor later as a journalist at a UK national PC magazine.
It got the message way too late.
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:d981a11797c174ab90d5567bcb47e09da70a3451
It contains 29+GB of OS/2 related stuff, including official CDs. Just found by searching at the usual shady places, so no guarantees about contents and safety.
I'll try to find it next week and see if it's helpful for the folks in OS/2 museum.
edit: it seems they're looking for Warp 4; I don't think I ever saw that version. I only used 2.0/2.1 and Warp 3.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwODwwgE6rA
Frankly I don't remember which language they were, either english or finnish. I had both the red and blue boxes (was it, with windows support or not?), and other was unopened.
I usually preferred english versions myself, as I learned computers with english, it was more comfortable with me. Also IBM had some rather odd choices on some words versus Microsoft, which could be jarring (was it Umpilevy for hard drive, as opposed to Kiintolevy or Kovalevy in most other places).
One year (must of been 1997 or so?) IBM had a crazy marketing campaign at Assembly[0], where they practically just handed out the boxes to anyone who would take them. If they had handed out finnish version, I would be surprised if they were that hard to come by.
[0] https://assembly.org/en
I reviewed ArcaOS:
https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/04/arcaos_51/
... and interviewed one of the project leads:
https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/19/retro_tech_week_arca_...
So when I read this:
> dual booting OS/2 Warp 4.51 and Arca OS 5.1
... I laughed, bitterly.
It is still _extremely_ fussy about installation and across 4 test machines I never got ArcaOS to dual-boot with anything except a single basic IBM PC DOS 7.1 setup.
Anything more than a single bootable primary partition in BIOS config is highly unlikely to work, in my experience. In UEFI mode it's even fussier and of course actual IBM OS/2 won't run then.
Forget dual booting, except maybe with DOS.
Trying to dual boot two OS/2 instances sounds like a recipe for hair loss or a cardiovascular incident. I don't think I'd try to do that if you paid me. Paid me a lot.
Perhaps a more interesting question would be: "how do I create a localisation CD?"