Author Archives: Michal Necasek

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 | 10 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

OS/2 Beta CDs (1994 and later)

Posted on February 15, 2013 by Michal Necasek

Over time, IBM released its share of OS/2 betas. In the early days, betas were distributed on floppies, but by the time OS/2 Warp was in development, things had shifted towards CDs. After all, the choice was between one or … Continue reading →

Posted in OS/2 | 6 Comments

OS/2 Easter Eggs

Posted on February 10, 2013 by Michal Necasek

The 32-bit version 2.0 of OS/2 contained a hidden Easter egg with a flamingo, a boat, and development team credits. The Easter egg could be invoked by selecting the desktop (either the background or a folder) and pressing Ctrl+Alt+Shift+O. This … Continue reading →

Posted in OS/2 | 11 Comments

UnixWare 1.0 Personal Edition

Posted on February 1, 2013 by Michal Necasek

Let’s begin with the following: First there’s the splash screen… followed by OS installation…

Posted in UnixWare | 12 Comments

UNIX on the PC, 1989

Posted on January 31, 2013 by Michal Necasek

For anyone interested in the history of UNIX on PCs, an article rather appropriately called UNIX Packages For The PC on page 40 of the Nov-Dec 1989 issue (#50) of Micro Cornucopia ought to be interesting. Now available in PDF on … Continue reading →

Posted in 386, UNIX | 5 Comments

SCO UNIX 3.2v4.0 vs. IA-32 Semantics Changes

Posted on January 25, 2013 by Michal Necasek

People noticed a long time ago that SCO UNIX 3.2v4.0 won’t boot on anything resembling modern hardware, and it won’t boot in a VM either. In a VM the results may be inconsistent across implementations, but on a physical machine … Continue reading →

Posted in 386, Intel | 6 Comments