Category Archives: PC history

1988 Networking: NetWare OS/2 Requester

Posted on May 10, 2019 by Michal Necasek

A while ago, the question of antique NetWare OS/2 requesters came up. The oldest known surviving NetWare OS/2 Requester is version 1.2, which is designed to work with OS/2 1.2. There are clear mentions of older requesters supporting OS/2 1.1 … Continue reading →

Posted in NetWare, Networking, OS/2, PC history, Virtualization | 16 Comments

NetWare 2.x Notes

Posted on May 9, 2019 by Michal Necasek

Novell NetWare has quite a long history, but the older parts of it are now almost completely lost. In the mid-1980s, Novell offered Advanced NetWare, NetWare ELS, NetWare SFT, and other members of the NetWare 286 family. With the partial … Continue reading →

Posted in NetWare, Networking, PC history | 14 Comments

Small World

Posted on March 3, 2019 by Michal Necasek

The core of this story was originally a private e-mail, but I realized that it’s worth sharing with a slightly wider audience. Readers may know that I’m very interested in the history of PC development tools, especially C compilers, and … Continue reading →

Posted in PC history, Watcom | 16 Comments

Ancient NetWare OS/2 Requesters?

Posted on February 16, 2019 by Michal Necasek

Quite a while ago there was a discussion on this site about NetWare support for OS/2 versions prior to 1.3. Finding reliable information is difficult, especially when one doesn’t know exactly what to look for. Spurred by the discovery of … Continue reading →

Posted in NetWare, OS/2, PC history | 13 Comments

Historical ATA Standard Drafts

Posted on February 12, 2019 by Michal Necasek

After some digging, I discovered that several old drafts of the original ATA standard (later known as ATA-1) have been out in the public all along, or at least for a very long time, cleverly hiding among hundreds of SCSI-related … Continue reading →

Posted in IDE, PC history, Storage | 15 Comments

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 | 38 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