Author Archives: Michal Necasek

Breaking Into ASOS

Posted on August 1, 2020 by Michal Necasek

The OS/2 Museum recently acquired a Quantum Bigfoot TS hard disk in mint condition. The Bigfoot drives, as some readers may remember, were rather oddball late-1990s 5.25″ IDE drives that were cheap, slow, and relatively big. There was a sticker … Continue reading →

Posted in Compaq, PC history, SCO | 4 Comments

X7DBE WTF

Posted on July 23, 2020 by Michal Necasek

Several years ago I got two Supermicro X7DBE boards at a bargain price. These are nice dual Socket 771 boards of circa 2007 vintage, built around the Intel 5000P Blackford chipset and using FB-DIMMs with up to 32GB memory supported. … Continue reading →

Posted in PC hardware, Supermicro, Xeon | 18 Comments

Well Hello

Posted on July 14, 2020 by Michal Necasek

So after some furious disassembling, assembling, and linking, things got this far: It took longer than it ought to have because although IDA is great, I couldn’t figure out how to make it work with GW-BASIC’s bizarre segment usage. The … Continue reading →

Posted in Compaq, Microsoft, PC history, Source code | 7 Comments

How Old Is OMF?

Posted on July 9, 2020 by Michal Necasek

The Object Module Format (OMF), used by most DOS development tools, and eventually displaced by COFF/ELF in the 32-bit world, is quite old. It is a somewhat strange format because of its age, and it is quite complex, both because … Continue reading →

Posted in Development, Intel, Microsoft, PC history, x86 | 8 Comments

GW-BASIC Source Notes

Posted on June 23, 2020 by Michal Necasek

When I learned that Microsoft released the GW-BASIC source code, I was mildly curious to find out what is or isn’t there. The short answer is that there’s a whole lot, but a lot is also missing. Spelling note: Both … Continue reading →

Posted in Microsoft, PC history, Source code | 20 Comments

PCLP CSD Hunt

Posted on June 21, 2020 by Michal Necasek

Not long ago the OS/2 Museum acquired a boxed copy of the IBM PC LAN Program (PCLP) version 1.3 (1988) on 3.5″ floppies. The IBM PC Network Program (1985), later renamed to the IBM LAN Program, was IBM’s first PC … Continue reading →

Posted in Archiving, IBM, Networking, PC history | 9 Comments

Those Win9x Crashes on Fast Machines…

Posted on June 2, 2020 by Michal Necasek

It is well known that Win9x variants prior to Windows 98 have a tendency to crash on fast CPUs. The definition of “fast” is of course fuzzy but the problems were known to occur on AMD K6-2 processors running at … Continue reading →

Posted in AMD, Bugs, Intel, Microsoft | 24 Comments

Seagate Cheetah Date of Manufacture

Posted on May 12, 2020 by Michal Necasek

Lately I found myself in the possession of several Seagate Cheetah 15K.7 SAS drives. These represent the pinnacle of hard disk engineering; with 15,000 RPM, the drives deliver up to around 200 MB/s sustained throughput (both read and write!) and … Continue reading →

Posted in Seagate, Storage, Undocumented | Leave a comment

ThinkPad Audio PnP Hell

Posted on May 4, 2020 by Michal Necasek

The other day I pulled an old ThinkPad 770X (300 MHz Pentium II, good old 440BX chipset, released in late 1998) out of the closet to see if it still works. It does, but I had the terrible idea to … Continue reading →

Posted in Crystal Semi, IBM, Sound, ThinkPad | 14 Comments

Memory Trouble in Stormville

Posted on April 18, 2020 by Michal Necasek

The OS/2 Museum recently acquired a genuine Intel DX79SR (Stormville) board. Together with its close siblings DX79SI (Siler) and DX79TO (Thorsby), these were the last “great” Intel motherboards, supporting the big LGA 2011 socket for the Sandy Bridge E platform—but … Continue reading →

Posted in Bugs, Intel, PC hardware, PC history | 14 Comments