Color me a volunteer, too. (After all, I make time for babble even in the midst of pressing academic things )Re: OS/2 and other "orphaned" OSes.
The basic problem with OS/2, BeOS, et cetera, is that precisely because of the sagging level of support for them it's very hard to get them to just "work". I tried BeOS + a network card once, and I was tearing my hair out. Couldn't even get it to work with dialup, can you believe that happy crappy?
OS/2 Warp or OS/2 version 4 might be suitable for older machines in the Pentium II and PPGA Celeron era though, especially as modern memory availability just blows away any silly requirements OS/2 ever had.
32 megs of RAM? Pshaw! Can't get less than 256 these days, nyeeheehee.
[ 16 June 2003: Message edited by: DrConway ]