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Category Archives: PC history
How to make sure your program doesn’t run on Windows 95
For Christmas, I bought myself the book The Old New Thing by Raymond Chen, a long-time Microsoft programmer. The purchase was spurred by discovering, through Google Books, an excerpt of a riveting description of how various software titles abused the DPMI … Continue reading
Posted in PC history
10 Comments
Running 1-2-3 R3 in a VM
I recently tried to install the infamous Lotus 1-2-3 Release 3 from 1989 in a VM. The program disks included both DOS and OS/2 executables, and both were failing. The DOS version stopped with “Cannot initialize system driver” immediately after … Continue reading
Posted in DOS, PC history, VirtualBox
3 Comments
IBM DOS 5.0 QBASIC hangs on non-IBM systems
Much like its predecessors, IBM DOS 5.0 has no trouble running on clone systems, as long as they’re sufficiently compatible. That includes virtual machines. However, the QBASIC.EXE (and consequently EDIT.COM) program dated May 9, 1991 consistently hangs on any non-IBM … Continue reading
Posted in BIOS, DOS, PC history
20 Comments
Happy 30th Birthday!
In honor of the thirtieth anniversary of the IBM Personal Computer, the OS/2 museum started a new series of articles, this time dealing with the history of DOS—the predecessor of OS/2 and the first OS developed by Microsoft in cooperation … Continue reading
Posted in DOS, PC history
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Windows/386 2.01
The OS/2 museum recently obtained a boxed copy of the original Microsoft Windows/386. That is, version 2.01 of Windows/386 from September 1987. Windows/386 was Microsoft’s first product utilizing the 386 hardware in the DOS world. Microsoft was involved in the … Continue reading
Posted in PC history, Windows
48 Comments
DOS Memory, Managers & Extenders, Part I
To understand why the maddeningly complex world of DOS memory managers and extenders came to be, it’s necessary to understand the evolution of the PC platform. Even though memory managers and DOS extenders reached their peak on 32-bit 386 and … Continue reading
Posted in DOS, PC architecture, PC history, x86
27 Comments
Researching the history of PC computing
Finding out what happened in the world of PC computing 20 or 25 years ago isn’t always easy. The 1980s were over before the Internet took off, which means that most of the information was never publicly available in electronic … Continue reading
Posted in PC history
2 Comments