In a recent post I mentioned that the OS/2 Museum’s stack of PC Tech Journal issues ironically does not include the first PCTJ issue devoted to OS/2. Thanks to pcjs.org, the October 1987 issue of PCTJ can now be read online. It’s interesting to read what computer professionals thought about the future in OS/2 back before it was released. Not surprisingly, the issue also includes screenshots and a detailed description of a mid-1987 OS/2 beta build available in the MS OS/2 SDK. It looks like the 1.01 SDK from the screen captures.
But there’s more. The OS/2 issue of MSJ (Microsoft Systems Journal) from May 1987 is now also available thanks to pcjs.org. This may have been the first in-depth information about OS/2 publicly available after the initial announcements in April 1987. The interview with Gordon Letwin is one of the more interesting items.
The Evolution and History of MS-DOS article in this MSJ issue may also be of interest, even if it probably doesn’t present any new information.
But wait, there’s more… for truly hardcore fans of Windows 1.x and 2.0, there is now the Windows 2.0 SDK documentation as well as a good chunk of the Windows 1.03 SDK documentation available in the new Windows Library page on this site.
This should be useful to the two or three people on this planet who care about writing Windows 1.x or 2.x applications in this millennium.
Historic OS/2 programming documentation will be coming up next, for both OS/2 1.x (from Microsoft) and for OS/2 2.0 (from IBM).
I think it’s great having those SDK docs online now–thanks for sharing them. And I for one look forward to writing my first Windows 1.x application one of these days, and rebuilding some of my old OS/2 1.0 applications, using tools, docs, operating systems and virtual machines that are all online. It’ll be great fun for the lucky few who care. 🙂
Jeff, between you and me, that’s two people writing Windows 1.x software.
Thanks for posting these; they inspired me to finish off a little project I’d set aside, of constructing source code that builds to the Windows 1.x keyboard driver, starting with the Windows 3.1 DDK and working backward.
I picked a keyboard driver because it’s fairly simple, but at some point I’d like to have a go with a video driver, too…