Author Archives: Michal Necasek

Two More TIGAs

Posted on January 24, 2014 by Michal Necasek

Since some readers appear to enjoy identifying prehistoric graphics cards, I thought I’d post photos of two more TIGA boards from my junk pile. I know what these are, but do you? One of them ought to be fairly easy … Continue reading →

Posted in Graphics, PC hardware | 14 Comments

Another Vermont Microsystems Board

Posted on January 22, 2014 by Michal Necasek

My junk pile turned out to contain another board by Vermont Microsystems, Inc. (VMI), probably no less exotic than the mystery board. This one is a Microchannel board built around an Intel 82786. An in this case, VMI was kind … Continue reading →

Posted in Graphics, PC hardware | 19 Comments

Have You Seen These Cards?

Posted on January 19, 2014 by Michal Necasek

While cataloging my junk pile, I came across two graphics cards that I could not identify. Both are high-end ISA graphics accelerators from the early 1990s and both utilize Texas Instruments GPUs (long before the term “GPU” was first used, … Continue reading →

Posted in Graphics, PC hardware | 38 Comments

Apologies for the outage

Posted on January 7, 2014 by Michal Necasek

The site has been unavailable for a while because some creative person or persons decided to use it for sending out spam and setting up a beautifully crafted facsimile of PayPal. It appears that a vulnerability in an old WordPress … Continue reading →

Posted in Site Management | 5 Comments

Undocumented 8086 Opcodes

Posted on December 21, 2013 by Michal Necasek

A minor mystery recently surfaced while analyzing DOS boot sectors. DOS uses several criteria when deciding whether a boot sector contains a valid BPB, and one of the criteria is (oddly enough) checking whether the first two bytes of the … Continue reading →

Posted in 8086/8088, Documentation, Intel, x86 | 62 Comments

Installing Oct ’91 NT from CD

Posted on December 15, 2013 by Michal Necasek

With VirtualBox 4.3, it is possible to install the oldest known pre-release of Windows NT directly from CD, the way Microsoft intended. This is the Fall ’91 Comdex preview which only supported the x86 architecture and a very short list … Continue reading →

Posted in Microsoft, NT, SCSI | 35 Comments

SMD Fun

Posted on December 6, 2013 by Michal Necasek

I recently tried to revive an old ThinkPad 600 (with a 300 MHz mobile Pentium II processor). The system wouldn’t boot up and reported errors (173, 163) which are usually a good indication of a dead CMOS battery. In a … Continue reading →

Posted in PC hardware, ThinkPad | 2 Comments

Fantasy History at Ars Technica

Posted on November 26, 2013 by Michal Necasek

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 | 52 Comments

IBM ThinkPad 755CD

Posted on November 16, 2013 by Michal Necasek

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 | 12 Comments

Dongle Bungle

Posted on November 12, 2013 by Michal Necasek

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