Monthly Archives: November 2013

Fantasy History at Ars Technica

Ars Technica today published an article titled “Half an operating system: The triumph and tragedy of OS/2“. Although very interesting, unfortunately the article to a significant extent engages in what can best be called fantasy history, which causes the text … Continue reading

Posted in IBM, Microsoft, OS/2 | 51 Comments

IBM ThinkPad 755CD

An earlier article about PowerPC-based ThinkPad 850 mentioned that the 850 was a close cousin of x86-based ThinkPads of the era. The OS/2 Museum now takes a look at one of those laptops, and interesting laptop in its own right: … Continue reading

Posted in IBM, ThinkPad | 9 Comments

Dongle Bungle

A few weeks ago I needed a 3Com 3C589 PCMCIA network card to run Solaris on a ThinkPad Power Series 850. The Solaris PowerPC HCL only listed 3C589 and 3C589B as supported models (and no other network adapters were listed … Continue reading

Posted in Networking, PC hardware | 11 Comments

Cracking a ThinkPad 755C

Note: Most of the following information does not apply to any Lenovo-made ThinkPads or even IBM-made ThinkPads manufactured after circa 1999. If you have one of those laptops protected with an unknown password, please look elsewhere. Imagine you bought, found, … Continue reading

Posted in IBM, PC hardware, ThinkPad | 16 Comments

Don’t Let This Happen to You

I recently got an old ThinkPad on eBay for a modest price. The seller marked it as defective, with absolutely no warranty. Since the ThinkPad came with a port replicator (the kind with two PCMICA slots) and an external 2.88MB … Continue reading

Posted in PC hardware, ThinkPad | 10 Comments