Author Archives: Michal Necasek

Solaris 2.6, 7, and 8 Crashes on Pentium 4 and Later

Posted on February 27, 2015 by Michal Necasek

A blog reader recently pointed to an interesting problem which affects older Solaris releases on certain systems. The symptoms (crash/reboot) may at first glance look like the previously described problem which affected Solaris 2.5.1 and 2.6, but both the cause and … Continue reading →

Posted in Bugs, Debugging, Intel, Solaris | 2 Comments

Digressions

Posted on February 20, 2015 by Michal Necasek

Here’s a little story illustrating the fundamental interconnectedness of all things that I wanted to share… 1) A while ago I started researching the technology of and history behind Yamaha’s OPL2 and OPL3 FM synths (just because I was curious). 2) Sometime … Continue reading →

Posted in Random Thoughts | 9 Comments

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 | 92 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