Author Archives: Michal Necasek

The Pin N33 Mystery and the History of Slockets

Posted on April 21, 2013 by Michal Necasek

The Ultimate Museum PC (UMPC) is a dual Slot 1 based system. Fast Slot 1 based Pentium III processors turned out to be extremely difficult to find (especially at non-ridiculous prices like $200 per CPU). The current 850MHz processors are … Continue reading →

Posted in Intel, PC hardware | 4 Comments

R360 Correction

Posted on April 16, 2013 by Michal Necasek

In a previous post, I wrote that a Radeon 9800 XT can’t be used with a 440BX chipset because it’s based on a R360 chip, newer than the R350 used in Radeon 9800 Pros. The reality turns out to be … Continue reading →

Posted in ATi, PC hardware | 2 Comments

The Tualatin Story

Posted on April 6, 2013 by Michal Necasek

While researching the Ultimate Museum PC it was hard to avoid the Tualatin, the final 0.13-micron incarnation of the Pentium III. With speeds up to 1.4GHz and 512KB on-chip L2 cache, a pair of PIII-S Tualatins should provide decent oomph. … Continue reading →

Posted in Intel, PC hardware | 15 Comments

The Ultimate Museum PC Update

Posted on March 28, 2013 by Michal Necasek

A quick update on the Ultimate Museum PC (should it be called simply the UMPC?). The system is currently using a Supermicro P6DBE board with 2x Pentium 850MHz (Coppermine, 100MHz FSB) processors, 1GB RAM, a 120GB IDE disk, an ATAPI … Continue reading →

Posted in PC hardware | 22 Comments

The Oldest OS/2 Executable In the Wild

Posted on March 22, 2013 by Michal Necasek

While researching the history of Microsoft’s segmented-executable linker originally called LINK4.EXE, I came across an OS/2 executable that was publicly released almost a year before the first OS/2 SDK was shipped, and many months before OS/2 was even announced. In … Continue reading →

Posted in DOS, Microsoft, OS/2 | 16 Comments

Fixing Broken LINK4

Posted on March 15, 2013 by Michal Necasek

The recently-mentioned multitasking DOS 4 disk images came with a linker called LINK4.EXE. The ‘4’ in fact stands for ‘DOS 4’, although most people who used LINK4 never saw multitasking DOS 4 (LINK4 was shipped with 16-bit Windows SDKs). LINK4 was … Continue reading →

Posted in DOS, Microsoft | 5 Comments

Multitasking MS-DOS 4.0 Lives

Posted on March 11, 2013 by Michal Necasek

Something rather unexpected happened over the weekend: disk images of the near-mythical multitasking DOS 4 suddenly popped up. This is “MS-DOS Version 4.00”—from 1985. It looks almost exactly like MS-DOS 3.0, with COMMAND.COM, FORMAT, SYS, FDISK, JOIN, SUBST, ATTRIB, and … Continue reading →

Posted in DOS, Microsoft | 40 Comments

The Ultimate Museum PC, Continued

Posted on March 9, 2013 by Michal Necasek

Two weeks after discussing the Ultimate Museum PC, the first “new” hardware components arrived (nearly all on the same day). Chief among these are two motherboards: Supermicro P6DBE and ASUS P2B-DS. The boards are very similar, yet quite different. Just … Continue reading →

Posted in Intel, PC hardware | 12 Comments

OS/2 2.1 National Language Versions

Posted on March 1, 2013 by Michal Necasek

IBM’s OS/2 2.1 (1993) was shipped in a number of national language versions (NLVs). At the time, the US version of OS/2 was the “master copy” and all NLVs were derived from it.  There were two major classes of NLVs: … Continue reading →

Posted in IBM, OS/2 | 7 Comments

The Ultimate Museum PC

Posted on February 27, 2013 by Michal Necasek

While the OS/2 Museum employs modern computers and virtualization heavily, sometimes there is a need for good old hardware—emphasis on good and old. A virtual machine won’t read 5¼” floppies and there’s no way to plug in a real Sound … Continue reading →

Posted in Intel, PC hardware | 31 Comments