New Mexico State University (NMSU) recently announced this impending closure of the OS/2 Hobbes Archive on April 15, 2024.
For more than three decades, this file has been an important resource for users of the IBM OS/2 operating system and its successors, which once competed with Microsoft Windows.
According to a statement from an NMSU representative “We have made the difficult decision to stop hosting these files on hobbes.nmsu.edu. “While I cannot go into detail, we had to weigh our priorities and make the difficult decision to terminate the service.”
At least 32 years old, Hobbes is one of the oldest software files on the Internet. comparable to the University of Michigan archives and UNC ibiblio.
Files hosted on Hobbes are safe and have already been duplicated elsewhere. Like many archives, Hobbes began as an FTP site.
The Hobbes site is a valuable digital time capsule. You can still access the Top 50 Downloads page, which includes sound and image editors as well as OS/2 versions of the Thunderbird email client. The archive contains thousands of OS/2 games, applications, utilities, software development tools, documentation, and server software since OS/2’s release in 1987.