Some time ago, I lamented that even though the OS/2 Museum had a good number of disks of the final OS/2 2.0 beta, level 6.304, there wasn’t enough to install the OS, let alone any of the development tools or add-ons (Extended Services, LAN Server).
And now, more or less exactly 30 years after build 6.304 was released (February 1992), an IBM DAP (Developer Assistance Program) CD-ROM turned up with the complete 6.304 disk set, plus Developer’s Toolkit, C Set/2 compiler, Extended Services, LAN Server 2.0 Entry/Advanced, documentation, and a couple of other goodies. IBM also sometimes referred to OS/2 level 6.304 as EEP, or Early Experience Program, and provided a helpful “Product Considerations” booklet.
There was also one surprise: It was possible to install this pre-release of OS/2 2.0 directly from CD-ROM (that was also possible with the Limited Availiability Level 6.177 CD-ROM, but with completely different storage drivers).
As far as I know, OS/2 2.0 was never available on CD-ROM, although IBM shipped OS/2 on CD-ROM with certain PS/2 Ultimedia models. It was only with OS/2 2.1 (1993) that IBM started offering OS/2 on CD-ROM, thought by the time Warp 4 was released (1996), OS/2 was available on CD-ROM only.
When OS/2 6.304 came out in early 1992, CD-ROMs were just starting to ramp up. The trouble was that the market was rather fragmented. There were SCSI CD-ROMs (and IBM sold those), but there were also several proprietary interfaces from Philips, Sony, and others. Even SCSI CD-ROMs weren’t all that standardized before the SCSI MMC (Multi-Media Commands) specification appeared.
The upshot was that even though OS/2 6.304 included CD-ROM support, it was far from certain that a user equipped with a CD-ROM would be able to use it on a non-IBM machine. Even with a “standard” SCSI CD-ROM, the user might need to supply a driver for the SCSI HBA (IBM only shipped drivers for the most common Adaptec 154x/174x HBAs with OS/2, plus a couple of Future Domain models), and that wasn’t enough either; a separate CD-ROM support driver was required, and CDROM.SYS shipped with OS/2 only supported IBM and Toshiba SCSI CD-ROMs.
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