Category Archives: Microsoft

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

Same Old Disk Bug

Posted on June 24, 2019 by Michal Necasek

After I Kryofluxed my MS OS/2 SDK 1.01 disks, I once again tried installing the OS in a VM. While the system booted up fine, it stubbornly refused to get past FORMAT. At the end, after going through all the … Continue reading →

Posted in Bugs, Microsoft, OS/2, Virtualization | 2 Comments

Microsoft OS/2 Programmer’s Guide

Posted on June 24, 2019 by Michal Necasek

For once, the OS/2 Museum lives up to its name… After a long pause, a new document from the MS OS/2 SDK has been uploaded. It’s the pre-release Microsoft Operating System/2 Programmer’s Guide from April 1987. This document was part … Continue reading →

Posted in Documentation, Microsoft, OS/2 | Leave a comment

Why Does Windows Really Use Backslash as Path Separator?

Posted on May 24, 2019 by Michal Necasek

More or less anyone using modern PCs has to wonder: Why does Windows use backslash as a path separator when the rest of the world uses forward slash? The clear intermediate answer is “because DOS and OS/2 used backslash”. Both … Continue reading →

Posted in DEC, DOS, IBM, Microsoft, PC history | 42 Comments

Pointedly Confusing

Posted on May 10, 2019 by Michal Necasek

While working on an unrelated problem, I stumbled across very surprising (to me) behavior of a C compiler. My code was the equivalent of the following: #include <stdio.h>int arr[42];int main( void ) { printf( “%u\n”, sizeof( &arr ) ); return( … Continue reading →

Posted in C, Microsoft | 9 Comments

LAN Manager 2.0 Primary Domain Controller

Posted on April 11, 2019 by Michal Necasek

While messing around with late 1980s and early 1990s networking software, I had the need to switch a LAN Manager 2.0 server to the primary domain controller role, so that it could run the Netlogon service and I could use … Continue reading →

Posted in LAN Manager, Microsoft, Networking | 3 Comments

FasterModeSwitch: Is It Really?

Posted on October 31, 2018 by Michal Necasek

Short answer: Yes. Before launching into the long answer, let’s recap what it even is. FasterModeSwitch is a SYSTEM.INI setting in Windows 3.1 which applies only to Standard (286) mode and can therefore be found in the [standard] section of … Continue reading →

Posted in 286, BIOS, Microsoft, Windows | 10 Comments

Crazy World

Posted on October 17, 2018 by Michal Necasek

After I successfully upgraded two Windows 10 VMs to the 1809 release at the beginning of October, I tried to do the same with more VMs and an actual laptop this week. But I couldn’t, no update was offered. While … Continue reading →

Posted in Bugs, Microsoft, Random Thoughts, Windows | 9 Comments

Three Weeks

Posted on July 27, 2018 by Michal Necasek

I happen to own several old laptops, now about 10 years old, that had the misfortune of being delivered with a Windows Vista license and matching Windows Vista OEM installations on their recovery partitions/media. About a year ago, I noticed … Continue reading →

Posted in Bugs, Microsoft, Windows | 27 Comments

OS/2 2.0, Spring ’91 Edition

Posted on July 10, 2018 by Michal Necasek

Thanks to a generous reader, a curiously nondescript box labeled “OS/2 32-Bit Pre-release” recently turned up at the OS/2 Museum. The box looks very much like retail IBM products from the early 1990s, but has no identifying description except for … Continue reading →

Posted in IBM, Microsoft, OS/2, PC history, Pre-release | 35 Comments