Category Archives: PC history

NetWare 3.12 vs. Large IDE Disks

Posted on February 1, 2019 by Michal Necasek

Recently I had an occasion to find out why NetWare 3.12 using the shipped IDE driver (IDE.DSK) behaves, very, very strangely when let loose on disks bigger than about 500MB (a very foolish thing to even try). The driver loaded … Continue reading →

Posted in Bugs, IDE, NetWare, PC history | 46 Comments

Fox in the Crypt

Posted on January 19, 2019 by Michal Necasek

Some time ago I wrote a bit about examining the “branding” system which was used by XENIX and other SCO products and based on the crypt() UNIX library function. At the time I assumed that only SCO had used this … Continue reading →

Posted in PC history, SCO, Software Hacks, Xenix | 3 Comments

Yep, Norton Did It

Posted on January 12, 2019 by Michal Necasek

Some time ago, the question of the oldest executable compression tool came up. EXEPACK was identified as a widespread and unexpectedly troublemaking specimen, but Realia SpaceMaker was reportedly older. Only initially no one could come up with surviving executables compressed … Continue reading →

Posted in Compression, PC history | 6 Comments

My Second AMD

Posted on December 13, 2018 by Michal Necasek

A few weeks ago I became a happy owner of a ThinkPad A485, the first ThinkPad (together with the E485 and related variants) to use an AMD CPU. History buffs will know that it’s far from the first ThinkPad with … Continue reading →

Posted in AMD, PC history, ThinkPad | 39 Comments

A Piece of History

Posted on November 21, 2018 by Michal Necasek

A few months ago I received a well-used but not abused copy of Rakesh K. Agarwal’s book 80×86 Architecture and Programming (Volume II): Architecture Reference, published by Prentice Hall in 1991. This is an unusually well-informed book, no doubt because … Continue reading →

Posted in 386, Books, Cyrix, Intel, PC architecture, PC history | 6 Comments

The History of a Security Hole

Posted on August 31, 2018 by Michal Necasek

Warning: If you do not care for the finer points of x86 architecture, please stop reading right now—in the interest of your own sanity. A while ago I was made aware of a strange problem causing a normal user process … Continue reading →

Posted in 386, BSD, Bugs, Documentation, PC history | 44 Comments

A Sound Card Before Its Time

Posted on August 15, 2018 by Michal Necasek

A mysterious full-length sound card recently arrived at the OS/2 Museum. It was clearly manufactured by IBM in 1985, and sports a 20 MHz Texas Instrument TMS32010 DSP (the DSP is the large black DIP chip near the lower left … Continue reading →

Posted in IBM, PC history, Sound | 20 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

A Brief History of Unreal Mode

Posted on June 15, 2018 by Michal Necasek

After a run-in with a particularly crazy manifestation of unreal mode (Flat Assembler, or fasm), I decided to dig deeper into the history of this undocumented yet very widely used feature of 32-bit x86 processors. For the purposes of this … Continue reading →

Posted in 386, Corrections, Microsoft, PC history, Undocumented | 47 Comments

USB 0.9

Posted on June 2, 2018 by Michal Necasek

A couple of months ago I lamented the fact that historic USB documentation appears to have vanished from the face of the Earth. Today I finally found one such document, the USB 0.9 specification from April 13, 1995, published almost … Continue reading →

Posted in Documentation, PC history, USB | 30 Comments