Author Archives: Michal Necasek

The i860 Conspiracy

Posted on November 10, 2019 by Michal Necasek

I’ve been thinking of acquiring a board with the Intel 860 (Colusa) chipset. This chipset is historically interesting because it was Intel’s first chipset for NetBurst Xeons, and–at least according to Intel–the only chipset that supports the original Foster Xeon … Continue reading →

Posted in Intel, PC hardware, PC history | 15 Comments

More About That Strange Pentium 4

Posted on October 26, 2019 by Michal Necasek

A few years ago I wrote about a strange NetBurst processor with SL7HY S-spec that landed at the OS/2 Museum. After renewed reader interest I pulled it out of the closet and tested the processor again. A collection of miscellaneous … Continue reading →

Posted in Intel, PC hardware, PC history, Pentium 4, Undocumented | 32 Comments

It’s Zen Time

Posted on October 14, 2019 by Michal Necasek

Back in 2003, it was Hammer Time for the PC industry. My own home PCs missed the wave because I had just bought a 3.2 GHz Northwood Pentium 4, which was replaced in 2006 by a Core 2 E6600, a … Continue reading →

Posted in AMD, PC hardware, Ryzen | 8 Comments

Synology Strikes Again

Posted on October 10, 2019 by Michal Necasek

Three years ago I ran into a problem with a Synology DSM update preventing vintage SMB clients from connecting to my NAS. Now I ran into a similar but different problem. The symptom was DOS and (at least old) OS/2 … Continue reading →

Posted in LAN Manager, Networking, Software Hacks | Leave a comment

PC Keyboard: The First Five Years

Posted on September 3, 2019 by Michal Necasek

The vast majority of PC users today have no memory of what PC keyboards looked like before the standard 101/102-key layout arrived, even though various OEMs do their best to mangle the standard layout in order to minimize usability, especially … Continue reading →

Posted in IBM, Keyboard, PC hardware, PC history | 19 Comments

How Not to Buy a Computer

Posted on August 24, 2019 by Michal Necasek

The following is an unauthorized translation of an article by Jiří Franěk, published in the Czechoslovak computer magazine List sometime in early 1989. Some readers probably remember those times, others have forgotten. As for the rest—consider yourselves lucky. The number … Continue reading →

Posted in PC history, PC press | 27 Comments

Where’s Intel When You Need Them?

Posted on August 21, 2019 by Michal Necasek

As readers of this blog know, I’m a long-time happy user of Intel desktop boards. I’ve now been using Intel boards for my main machine continuously for over 15 years (D865PERL, DG965RY, DQ67OW, DQ77CP); I have some fond and some … Continue reading →

Posted in Intel, PC hardware | 14 Comments

LAN Manager Product Specification, 1987

Posted on July 31, 2019 by Michal Necasek

Now available is the preliminary yet fairly complete product specification for the LAN Manager server and workstation from October 14, 1987. This document was available to developers months before any pre-release LAN manager code, and about a year before any … Continue reading →

Posted in Archiving, Documentation, LAN Manager, Microsoft, OS/2, PC history | 1 Comment

PC-NFS 3.0.1

Posted on July 24, 2019 by Michal Necasek

Between a search engine and a friend, the search for PC-NFS 3.0 yielded a set of seven 360K floppy images of Sun PC-NFS 3.0.1. Hooray for the Internet, and thank you! Judging by the timestamps, PC-NFS 3.0.1 was finalized in … Continue reading →

Posted in Networking, NFS, PC history | 9 Comments

SCO UNIX 3.2.0f, Limping Along

Posted on July 17, 2019 by Michal Necasek

For the purposes of ancient TCP/IP and NFS research, I wanted to run old SCO UNIX in a VM. I was able to run XENIX with TCP/IP earlier, but SCO’s NFS (provided, like the TCP/IP stack, by Lachman Associates Inc.) … Continue reading →

Posted in NFS, SCO, Software Hacks, TCP/IP, UNIX, VirtualBox, Virtualization | 14 Comments