Category Archives: PC history

The Cape Cod Disaster

Posted on December 16, 2019 by Michal Necasek

Here’s a motherboard Intel very quickly wanted to forget about: It’s the Intel CC820—or Cape Cod—desktop board, a product that was late to market (not unusual) and within a few months, the subject of a recall (quite unusual). As the … Continue reading →

Posted in Bugs, Intel, PC hardware, PC history, Pentium III, RDRAM | 45 Comments

Power Trouble

Posted on December 5, 2019 by Michal Necasek

This will not come as a surprise to anyone who is deeply familiar with PC hardware; the other 99% please bear with me. A good quality and compatible power supply is crucial to the healthy operation of a PC. The … Continue reading →

Posted in PC hardware, PC history | 13 Comments

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

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

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

PC-NFS 3.0 Anyone?

Posted on July 14, 2019 by Michal Necasek

I’m looking for Sun’s PC-NFS 3.0 (circa 1989), or ideally even older PC-NFS version. The ultimate goal is to get the oldest surviving x86 NFS client going in a VM; it is almost certain that the first such product was … Continue reading →

Posted in Networking, NFS, PC history | 5 Comments

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