Category Archives: IBM

Like New

About twenty years ago, I bought a used IBM Model M keyboard with a PS/2 connector. I believe it cost me around $5-$10 plus shipping at the time. A good investment, given that this sort of keyboard is probably worth … Continue reading

Posted in IBM, Keyboard, PC hardware | 5 Comments

Archival Puzzles

Every now and then I attack the large amount of floppy disks in my basement and run a bunch of them through Kryoflux. This time it was a shoebox full of OS/2 related floppies. Among them was a very incomplete … Continue reading

Posted in Archiving, IBM, Kryoflux, OS/2, Pre-release | 30 Comments

DOS SMB Client Performance

Recently I had the need to use several different DOS VMs that all used a SMB network client. Although I did not use networking heavily, I noticed that there are massive differences in performance between the VMs. Copying a circa … Continue reading

Posted in DOS, IBM, Microsoft, Networking | 15 Comments

Not MSX, Either

Further examining the mystery of boot sectors supposedly starting with byte value 69h, I considered the possibility that the check could have been added for MSX machines. The MSX platform ticks a lot of boxes: It wasn’t 8086 (but rather … Continue reading

Posted in IBM, Microsoft, PC history | 15 Comments

PCLP CSD Hunt

Not long ago the OS/2 Museum acquired a boxed copy of the IBM PC LAN Program (PCLP) version 1.3 (1988) on 3.5″ floppies. The IBM PC Network Program (1985), later renamed to the IBM LAN Program, was IBM’s first PC … Continue reading

Posted in Archiving, IBM, Networking, PC history | 9 Comments

ThinkPad Audio PnP Hell

The other day I pulled an old ThinkPad 770X (300 MHz Pentium II, good old 440BX chipset, released in late 1998) out of the closet to see if it still works. It does, but I had the terrible idea to … Continue reading

Posted in Crystal Semi, IBM, Sound, ThinkPad | 14 Comments

A Brief Visit to Disk Geometry Hell

Several weeks ago I thought I’d install NetWare 3.12 in a virtual machine using the BusLogic SCSI controller emulation. While configuring a 1.5 GB virtual drive, I thought I should be safe and not run into any trouble with a … Continue reading

Posted in BusLogic, IBM, NetWare, PC architecture, Storage | 32 Comments

PC Keyboard: The First Five Years

The vast majority of PC users today have no memory of what PC keyboards looked like before the standard 101/102-key layout arrived, even though various OEMs do their best to mangle the standard layout in order to minimize usability, especially … Continue reading

Posted in IBM, Keyboard, PC hardware, PC history | 19 Comments

PowerPC Archival

For the 0.7 persons out there who have a working IBM Power Series desktop but not OS/2, here’s the first and final release of OS/2 for the PowerPC, from December 1995, as well as a beta plus cross-development SDK from … Continue reading

Posted in Archiving, IBM, OS/2, PowerPC | 2 Comments

Why Does Windows Really Use Backslash as Path Separator?

More or less anyone using modern PCs has to wonder: Why does Windows use backslash as a path separator when the rest of the world uses forward slash? The clear intermediate answer is “because DOS and OS/2 used backslash”. Both … Continue reading

Posted in DEC, DOS, IBM, Microsoft, PC history | 41 Comments