Author Archives: Michal Necasek

ThinkPad 701 Restore Using CF Media

Posted on February 15, 2015 by Michal Necasek

Thanks to a kind reader, the OS/2 Museum obtained a file archive of the ThinkPad 701 recovery CD. The 701C/701CS was also known as Butterfly thanks to its unique folding keyboard. The recovery tool appears to have been designed for … Continue reading →

Posted in IBM, ThinkPad | 23 Comments

Demented Board

Posted on January 31, 2015 by Michal Necasek

Last week I encountered a problem that I have never seen before with a recently acquired Socket 7 motherboard. The board was a Gigabyte GA-586HX (Rev. 1.58), a relatively uninteresting older Socket 7 board based on the well-regarded Intel 430HX … Continue reading →

Posted in Bugs, PC hardware | 14 Comments

Windows 3.0 DR 1.14, February 1989

Posted on January 16, 2015 by Michal Necasek

Another rather interesting software artifact surfaced just recently, after more than 25 years since its release: Windows 3.0 Debug Release 1.14 (further referred to as DR 1.14) from February 1989. This was an alpha version only provided to select ISVs … Continue reading →

Posted in 386, Microsoft, PC history, Windows | 90 Comments

mtswslnk

Posted on January 14, 2015 by Michal Necasek

Certain older Microsoft software (including Windows font files) contains mysterious strings starting with “mtswslnk”, sometimes longer and sometimes shorter. This led some people to wild speculation about the meaning and purpose of the string. Let’s start with the full string: … Continue reading →

Posted in Development, Microsoft, PC history | 2 Comments

OS/2 Technical Library Scans

Posted on January 10, 2015 by Michal Necasek

After a lot of scanning and OCRing, here’s the OS/2 2.0 Technical Library (well, most of it) in PDF form. This was IBM’s complete programming documentation for OS/2 2.0, covering general programming, GUI development, Workplace Shell, and device drivers. Certainly … Continue reading →

Posted in Documentation, OS/2 | 8 Comments

Book Review: Inside Windows NT

Posted on January 3, 2015 by Michal Necasek

A Few Decades Late Book Reviews Inside Windows NT, by Helen Custer Microsoft Press, 1992; 385 pages, ISBN 1-55615-481-X; $24.95 Inside Windows NT was one of the earliest published books about Windows NT, predating the actual July 1993 release of Windows NT … Continue reading →

Posted in Books, NT | 6 Comments

Ladders and Dragons

Posted on December 28, 2014 by Michal Necasek

While looking at the Windows 95 disk subsystem, something seemed oddly familiar. The nagging feeling was confirmed by the Windows 95 DDK documentation (a file called BLOCK.DOC). The new Windows 95 layered block device driver model called “Dragon” wasn’t all … Continue reading →

Posted in OS/2, PC history, SCSI, Windows 95 | Leave a comment

Curious Instructions

Posted on December 13, 2014 by Michal Necasek

Years ago, Geoff Chappell (the author of DOS Internals, among other things) published an article about mysterious instructions that Microsoft’s LINK knows but Intel’s documentation is silent about. The fourteen listed instructions were: LOADALL, CFLSH, WRECR, RDECR, SVDC, RSDC, SVLDT, … Continue reading →

Posted in Documentation, Intel, x86 | 11 Comments

Windows 8.1 Startup Bugcheck 0xC4

Posted on November 30, 2014 by Michal Necasek

On some systems, both physical and virtual, 64-bit Windows 8.1 as well as Server 2012 R2 consistently crashes with error code (bug check) 0xC4; 64-bit Windows 8 may run on these same systems without trouble. On physical systems, the BSOD … Continue reading →

Posted in Bugs, Microsoft, NT, VirtualBox | 15 Comments

ThinkPad 850 Hardware Maintenance Manual

Posted on November 14, 2014 by Michal Necasek

Thanks to a very helpful reader (Mike Senior—thanks!), the OS/2 Museum can now publish the ThinkPad Power Series 850 Hardware Maintenance Service and Reference manual in the form of a PDF. This is IBM document number 30H2383. The manual might … Continue reading →

Posted in Documentation, PowerPC, ThinkPad | 5 Comments