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Category Archives: Microsoft
Pointedly Confusing
While working on an unrelated problem, I stumbled across very surprising (to me) behavior of a C compiler. My code was the equivalent of the following: #include <stdio.h>int arr[42];int main( void ) { printf( “%u\n”, sizeof( &arr ) ); return( … Continue reading
Posted in C, Microsoft
9 Comments
LAN Manager 2.0 Primary Domain Controller
While messing around with late 1980s and early 1990s networking software, I had the need to switch a LAN Manager 2.0 server to the primary domain controller role, so that it could run the Netlogon service and I could use … Continue reading
Posted in LAN Manager, Microsoft, Networking
3 Comments
FasterModeSwitch: Is It Really?
Short answer: Yes. Before launching into the long answer, let’s recap what it even is. FasterModeSwitch is a SYSTEM.INI setting in Windows 3.1 which applies only to Standard (286) mode and can therefore be found in the [standard] section of … Continue reading
Posted in 286, BIOS, Microsoft, Windows
10 Comments
Crazy World
After I successfully upgraded two Windows 10 VMs to the 1809 release at the beginning of October, I tried to do the same with more VMs and an actual laptop this week. But I couldn’t, no update was offered. While … Continue reading
Posted in Bugs, Microsoft, Random Thoughts, Windows
9 Comments
Three Weeks
I happen to own several old laptops, now about 10 years old, that had the misfortune of being delivered with a Windows Vista license and matching Windows Vista OEM installations on their recovery partitions/media. About a year ago, I noticed … Continue reading
Posted in Bugs, Microsoft, Windows
27 Comments
OS/2 2.0, Spring ’91 Edition
Thanks to a generous reader, a curiously nondescript box labeled “OS/2 32-Bit Pre-release” recently turned up at the OS/2 Museum. The box looks very much like retail IBM products from the early 1990s, but has no identifying description except for … Continue reading
Posted in IBM, Microsoft, OS/2, PC history, Pre-release
34 Comments
A Brief History of Unreal Mode
After a run-in with a particularly crazy manifestation of unreal mode (Flat Assembler, or fasm), I decided to dig deeper into the history of this undocumented yet very widely used feature of 32-bit x86 processors. For the purposes of this … Continue reading
Posted in 386, Corrections, Microsoft, PC history, Undocumented
47 Comments
A Word on the CALL 5 Spell
After years of searching for some reasonably widespread DOS application which used the CP/M-style CALL 5 interface and coming up with absolutely nothing, Jeff Parsons of pcjs.org found one: None other than Microsoft Word, specifically the spell checker in the … Continue reading
Posted in DOS, Microsoft, PC history
10 Comments
The A20-Gate Fallout
A recent post explored the motivation (i.e. backwards compatibility) to implement the A20 gate in the IBM PC/AT. To recap, the problem IBM solved was the fact that 1MB address wrap-around was an inherent feature of the Intel 8086/8088 CPU, … Continue reading
Posted in IBM, Microsoft, PC architecture, PC history
93 Comments
EXEPACK and the A20-Gate
In 1991, DOS 5.0 brought about what’s perhaps the most common manifestation of A20 control trouble… Packed file is corrupt Microsoft published a KB article about this infamous error, but its author clearly did not understand the true cause of the … Continue reading
Posted in Bugs, Microsoft, PC history
19 Comments