In a transfer that marks the tip of an period, New Mexico State University (NMSU) just lately introduced the approaching 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 operating 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 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 collection 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 At round 32 years outdated, minimal, that makes Hobbes one of many oldest software program archives on the web, akin to the University of Michigan’s archives and ibiblio at UNC.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 corresponding to Jason Scott of the Internet Archive have stepped as much as say that the recordsdata hosted on Hobbes are secure and already mirrored elsewhere. “Nobody should worry about Hobbes, I’ve got Hobbes handled,” wrote Scott on Mastodon in early January. OS/2 World.com additionally published a statement about making a mirror. But it is nonetheless notable every time such an outdated and vital piece of web historical past bites the mud.

Like many archives, Hobbes began as an FTP website. “The major distribution of recordsdata on the web have been by way of FTP servers,” Scott tells Ars Technica. “And as FTP servers went down, they would also be mirrored as subdirectories in other FTP servers. Companies like CDROM.COM / Walnut Creek became ways to just get a CD-ROM of the items, but they would often make the data available at http://ftp.cdrom.com to download.”

The Hobbes website is a priceless digital time capsule. You can nonetheless discover the Top 50 Downloads page, which incorporates sound and picture editors, and OS/2 builds of the Thunderbird electronic mail consumer. The archive incorporates hundreds of OS/2 video games, functions, utilities, software program growth instruments, documentation, and server software program 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 substitute for IBM PC DOS (additionally referred to as “MS-DOS” within 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 realize 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 corporations.

Through iterations just like the Warp series, OS/2 established a key presence in area of interest markets that required excessive stability, corresponding to ATMs and the New York subway system. Today, its legacy continues in specialised functions 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 price preserving, and a lack of one in every of OS/2’s major 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 announced it’s going away. Last time it was rescued after a lot of complaints and a number of students or faculty came forward to continue to maintain 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 bought to the place they’re in the present day.

This story initially appeared on Ars Technica.