Category Archives: Microsoft

MS C 4.0 Documentation Added

Posted on November 27, 2015 by Michal Necasek

Another library expansion. This time it’s Microsoft C 4.0 documentation (1986)—because it’s not available online, is not easy to find offline, and because Jeff asked for it. MS C 4.0 was an early Microsoft compiler, implementing first glimpses of the not-yet finalized … Continue reading →

Posted in C, Documentation, DOS, Microsoft | 7 Comments

Something Happened

Posted on July 30, 2015 by Michal Necasek

My first experience with the Windows 10 media creation tool was, in a word, terrible. After 20 minutes or so of downloading, the tool told me that “Something happened” and the only option was to exit. That’s probably what passes … Continue reading →

Posted in Bugs, Microsoft | 17 Comments

Windows 3.0 DR 1.14, February 1989

Posted on January 16, 2015 by Michal Necasek

Another rather interesting software artifact surfaced just recently, after more than 25 years since its release: Windows 3.0 Debug Release 1.14 (further referred to as DR 1.14) from February 1989. This was an alpha version only provided to select ISVs … Continue reading →

Posted in 386, Microsoft, PC history, Windows | 90 Comments

mtswslnk

Posted on January 14, 2015 by Michal Necasek

Certain older Microsoft software (including Windows font files) contains mysterious strings starting with “mtswslnk”, sometimes longer and sometimes shorter. This led some people to wild speculation about the meaning and purpose of the string. Let’s start with the full string: … Continue reading →

Posted in Development, Microsoft, PC history | 2 Comments

Windows 8.1 Startup Bugcheck 0xC4

Posted on November 30, 2014 by Michal Necasek

On some systems, both physical and virtual, 64-bit Windows 8.1 as well as Server 2012 R2 consistently crashes with error code (bug check) 0xC4; 64-bit Windows 8 may run on these same systems without trouble. On physical systems, the BSOD … Continue reading →

Posted in Bugs, Microsoft, NT, VirtualBox | 15 Comments

Semantic Differences, Microsoft v. Microsoft

Posted on August 8, 2014 by Michal Necasek

While comparing the behavior of various versions of old Microsoft C compilers, I tried building a trivial hello-world type program with CL.EXE from Microsoft C/C++ 7.0 (March 1992) running on top of a 32-bit Windows Server 2003. This seemingly trivial … Continue reading →

Posted in DOS, Microsoft, Virtualization | 14 Comments

Windows Presentation Manager Documentation

Posted on July 20, 2014 by Michal Necasek

The OS/2 Museum just posted a three-volume set of draft Windows Presentation Manager reference documentation. This refers to the OS/2 Presentation Manager GUI but highlights the story Microsoft pushed in 1987: Windows and OS/2 both used the same graphical user … Continue reading →

Posted in Documentation, Microsoft, OS/2 | 5 Comments

OS/2 Programmer’s Toolkit

Posted on July 11, 2014 by Michal Necasek

For those wishing to write OS/2 1.x programs, the complete Microsoft OS/2 Programmer’s Toolkit documentation is now online. This is Microsoft’s programming documentation for OS/2 1.0 programming. It is worth noting that IBM’s programming documentation was different; worse yet, IBM’s … Continue reading →

Posted in Development, Documentation, Microsoft, OS/2 | 2 Comments

Weekend Reading, OS/2 and Windows

Posted on July 4, 2014 by Michal Necasek

In a recent post I mentioned that the OS/2 Museum’s stack of PC Tech Journal issues ironically does not include the first PCTJ issue devoted to OS/2. Thanks to pcjs.org, the October 1987 issue of PCTJ can now be read … Continue reading →

Posted in Documentation, Microsoft, OS/2, Windows | 3 Comments

Careful with that Buffer…

Posted on June 29, 2014 by Michal Necasek

Last week I was sorting through several sets of Microsoft C 5.1 disks from 1988  (more about that later). While I was comparing the disk images to see whether the disks were the same or not, despite different labels and part … Continue reading →

Posted in Microsoft, Security | 13 Comments