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Category Archives: Microsoft
Win16 Retro Development
Several months ago I had a go at producing a high resolution 256-color driver for Windows 3.1. The effort was successful but is not yet complete. Along the way I re-learned many things I had forgotten, and learned several new … Continue reading
Posted in Debugging, Development, Microsoft, Windows
27 Comments
Antique Display Driving
Here’s a preview of something I’ve been slowly working on, bit by bit: That screenshot surely looks a little funny. That’s because it is Windows 1.04 running with a heavily modified 256-color Windows 3.x display driver, using resources from a … Continue reading
Posted in Development, Microsoft, Windows
36 Comments
Where Did CP852 Come From?
In the 1990s, a lot of my documents were written in code page 852 (CP852), also known as PC Latin 2. This code page is sometimes called “Eastern European”, which is a bit misleading, given that it does not cover … Continue reading
Posted in DOS, I18N, IBM, Microsoft, OS/2, PC history
47 Comments
LAN Manager 2.1/2.2 Registration
Anyone who spent a bit of time archiving software distributed on floppies probably knows this situation: There’s only one disk set of a given software release known to exist, and it’s not clean. That is, it’s been previously used to … Continue reading
Posted in Archiving, Debugging, Microsoft, Software Hacks
18 Comments
Weird Tales
While researching various aspects of the history of computing, sometimes I come across what can best be described as “weird tales” — unsourced claims that sound interesting but are either provably wrong or there’s no evidence to support them. In … Continue reading
Posted in IBM, Microsoft, PC history, PC press
22 Comments
DOS 2.11 From Scratch
Warning: Long post! After having good luck with rebuilding core PC DOS 1.1 from source code, I thought I’d do the same with the DOS 2.11 source code released by the CHM. What follows is largely a collection of notes … Continue reading
Posted in Development, DOS, Microsoft, PC history
42 Comments
PC DOS 1.1 From Scratch
A number of years ago, the Computer History Museum together with Microsoft released the source code for MS-DOS 1.25 (very close to PC DOS 1.1) and MS-DOS 2.11. I never did anything with it beyond glancing at the code, in … Continue reading
Posted in Development, DOS, Microsoft, PC history
24 Comments
Learn Something Old Every Day, Part III
As part of a hobby project, I set out to reconstruct assembly source code that should be built with an old version of MASM and exactly match an existing old binary. In the process I learned how old MASM versions … Continue reading
Posted in Assembler, Development, Microsoft, PC history
11 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
Nobody Expects…
…the Spanish Inquisition! Well, that too, but also nobody expects that a bland, run-of-the mill Novell NE2000 NDIS driver would crash/hang just because it runs on 486 or later CPUs. I wanted to try the “basic” DOS redirector shipped with … Continue reading
Posted in 486, Bugs, Intel, Microsoft
7 Comments