Where’s Intel When You Need Them?

Posted on August 21, 2019 by Michal Necasek

As readers of this blog know, I’m a long-time happy user of Intel desktop boards. I’ve now been using Intel boards for my main machine continuously for over 15 years (D865PERL, DG965RY, DQ67OW, DQ77CP); I have some fond and some less fond memories of Intel Advanced/AS (Atlantis) Pentium board, and good experience with AN430TX and AL440LX boards.

For me, Intel boards have always been extremely reliable (the DQ67OW board has been running since 2011 and still works great), the boards are not loaded with gimmicks but no-nonsense and very business-like. Intel boards are not for overclockers, they’re for people who need to get work done. Intel’s support has been very good and Intel still provides downloads for very old boards.

Unfortunately Intel quit the board business five years ago. And although the DQ77CP board with a Core i7-3770 processor, 32GB RAM, and a SSD is no slouch even today, there’s not much further one can go with Intel boards (just a little bit). For a modern desktop CPU with 8 or more cores, I’d need a board from ASUS or MSI or Gigabyte or whoever.

Only… if I have to buy an ASUS or MSI board, why bother with an Intel CPU at all and not get a Ryzen instead? AMD’s recent offerings have been difficult to refuse and the Ryzen 9 CPUs are very, very tempting.

Posted in Intel, PC hardware | 16 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 LAN Manager 1.0 OEM products became available.

The document was quite a pain to scan, because for some mysterious reason the LAN Manager group decided to print on 9×11″ paper, a size so unusual (despite its nice round dimensions, at least in boutique and obsolete units) that common office equipment cannot deal with it. The scanner I use can run documents up to 8.5″ wide through the automatic feeder, but 9″ simply won’t fit. So I had to scan manually, and lose a few millimeters on each side, which resulted in no loss of actual information.

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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 May 1989 but this particular disk set was sold in January 1991 or later. How can we tell? The files have timestamps of 05/18/1989, except for PCNFS.SYS, which is dated 01/30/1991. PCNFS.SYS is marked with a serial number. Without knowing exactly how Sun did it, it appears likely that the floppy sets were mass duplicated and then PCNFS.SYS individually serialized on demand. And it even works!

PC-NFS 3.0.1 on IBM DOS 4.01
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Posted in Networking, NFS, PC history | 9 Comments

SCO UNIX 3.2.0f, Limping Along

Posted on July 17, 2019 by Michal Necasek

For the purposes of ancient TCP/IP and NFS research, I wanted to run old SCO UNIX in a VM. I was able to run XENIX with TCP/IP earlier, but SCO’s NFS (provided, like the TCP/IP stack, by Lachman Associates Inc.) never supported XENIX.

A search of the basement yielded 5.25″ floppies of SCO UNIX 3.2.0f from June 1989 (30 years old!), which must be very close to the oldest SCO UNIX version. There was just one small problem. SCO UNIX kernels released before 1993 or so do not run on any post-Pentium processor, and also don’t run in emulators/hypervisors.

The gory details are in the old blog post mentioned above but the gist is that the SCO UNIX kernel (but not, for whatever reason, 386 XENIX) relies on more or less unspecified micro-architectural behavior of then-current 386/486 CPUs, and through instruction pipelining and/or TLB behavior manages to execute an instruction which is not mapped in the page tables, even though paging is enabled.

This misbehavior is not entirely trivial to patch, but I realized that it’s not that difficult to manually work around in the VirtualBox VM debugger.

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Posted in NFS, SCO, Software Hacks, TCP/IP, UNIX, VirtualBox, Virtualization | 14 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 Sun’s original PC-NFS in 1986. Unfortunately the oldest PC-NFS versions may not have survived.

I did successfully get PC-NFS 4.0 going in a VM and it can talk to a modern Synology NAS without trouble.

Posted in Networking, NFS, PC history | 5 Comments

OS/2 + WebExplorer does Gmail

Posted on July 13, 2019 by tenox

(This is a guest post from Antoni Sawicki aka Tenox)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GR2Y9H_gws

I think no further commends are required. Send me an email!

Download here

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Taking WebExplorer for a spin in 2019

Posted on July 11, 2019 by tenox

(This is a guest post from Antoni Sawicki aka Tenox)

I have just released Web Rendering Proxy 4.0 beta/preview for testing. There is a little bit more technical details here.

To test it out I took out WebExplorer on OS/2 for a spin on the “modern web”:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EifNY7G2o8w

The beta version is available for download. Please try it out and report any issues on github. Thank you!

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

PowerPC Archival

Posted on July 7, 2019 by Michal Necasek

For the 0.7 persons out there who have a working IBM Power Series desktop but not OS/2, here’s the first and final release of OS/2 for the PowerPC, from December 1995, as well as a beta plus cross-development SDK from December 1994.

And there’s also the October 1995 issue of the IBM Technical Connection, chock full of fixes, drivers, manuals, product data, and support information. Looking for further editions of the Technical Connection.

Posted in Archiving, IBM, OS/2, PowerPC | 2 Comments

MacBook Memory Upgrade Hell

Posted on July 7, 2019 by Michal Necasek

About a month ago I got an old 2007 white MacBook for free. It was in original condition (2.2 GHz Core 2 Duo CPU from the 65nm Merom generation, 120GB hard disk, 2GB RAM), fully functional except for a completely dead battery. Not used for the last few years, still running the original OS X 10.5 Leopard.

I upgraded the OS to 10.6 Snow Leopard, which made the laptop slightly more usable. And I figured that upgrading the RAM from 2GB to 4GB ought to help. This laptop uses 667 MHz DDR2 memory (aka PC2-5300S). It officially supports 4GB, unofficially 6GB in a mismatched 2+4G configuration. I decided to go for 2+2G, in part because 4GB DDR2 modules are quite expensive.

The laptop uses the mobile Intel 965 chipset and hardware-wise it’s mostly a standard PC. How hard can it be to upgrade the memory? As it turns out, a lot harder than I had thought.

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Posted in Apple, Fakes, OS X | 3 Comments

Same Old Disk Bug

Posted on June 24, 2019 by Michal Necasek

After I Kryofluxed my MS OS/2 SDK 1.01 disks, I once again tried installing the OS in a VM. While the system booted up fine, it stubbornly refused to get past FORMAT. At the end, after going through all the cylinders and heads, it would always hang.

FORMAT hanging in MS OS/2 1.01 SDK

Analyzing the VM I realized that it does not so much hang as crash, because the OS kernel stack gets exhausted. And it gets exhausted because the disk driver gets into a funk, keeps repeatedly doing SET DRIVE PARAMETERS and READ VERIFY SECTORS, then crashes, probably tries to show the trap screen, and just miserably dies without actually showing anything. But why?

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Posted in Bugs, Microsoft, OS/2, Virtualization | 2 Comments