Category Archives: Microsoft

The A20-Gate: It Wasn’t WordStar

Posted on March 16, 2018 by Michal Necasek

Although WordStar was long suspected to be the reason (or at least one of the major reasons) for implementing the A20 gate hardware on the PC/AT and all the associated problems later on, it is now all but certain that … Continue reading →

Posted in 286, IBM, Microsoft, PC history, WordStar | 37 Comments

Microsoft Editor

Posted on March 11, 2018 by tenox

(This is a guest post by Antoni Sawicki aka Tenox) In a recent blog post I lamented the lack of a good console/cmd/PowerShell text editor for Windows. During the process I made a rather interesting discovery, that in a fact … Continue reading →

Posted in Development, DOS, Editors, Microsoft, NT, OS/2, Source code, Uncategorized | 23 Comments

Pascal Out Of Memory

Posted on February 23, 2018 by Michal Necasek

Suppose you want to run the original 1981 vintage IBM Pascal 1.0 (supplied by Microsoft) on a PC that is less than 30 years old. Upon execution, PAS1.EXE may well fail with the following error: Error: Compiler Out Of Memory … Continue reading →

Posted in Bugs, Corrections, IBM, Microsoft, PC history | 40 Comments

Wanted: Console Text Editor for Windows

Posted on February 16, 2018 by tenox

(This is a guest post by Antoni Sawicki aka Tenox) Since 2012 or so Microsoft is pushing concept of running Windows Server headless without GUI and administering everything through PowerShell. I remember sitting through countless TechEd / Ignite sessions year … Continue reading →

Posted in Editors, Microsoft, NT, Watcom | 15 Comments

About That Warranty…

Posted on January 19, 2018 by Michal Necasek

Readers have been wondering what kind of valuable warranty users of Microsoft’s Quick Pascal 1.0 (and other products) might be voiding by running it on top of DR DOS 3.3x or 3.40. I don’t have the original Quick Pascal 1.0 … Continue reading →

Posted in Digital Research, Microsoft, PC history, Undocumented | 16 Comments

How to Void Your Valuable Warranty

Posted on January 12, 2018 by Michal Necasek

Try installing Quick Pascal 1.0 on DR DOS 3.40: What is going on there? It’s a long story… In 1988, Microsoft became increasingly worried by a new upstart OS from an old rival, DR DOS. Over the years, Digital Research … Continue reading →

Posted in Digital Research, DOS, Microsoft | 40 Comments

MS KB Articles

Posted on October 17, 2017 by Michal Necasek

A recent blog post over at pcjs.org explores some of the mysteries surrounding information that at one point or another was published as a Microsoft KnowledgeBase article (or a KB article for short). It’s not entirely clear where the KB … Continue reading →

Posted in Documentation, Microsoft, PC history | 17 Comments

PC DOS 1.0, But Not Quite

Posted on May 26, 2017 by Michal Necasek

Last week a most interesting image of a 160K disk arrived at the OS/2 Museum. The files on the disk image are rather old. When the disk boots up (not trivial, see below), the following message appears: Astute readers will … Continue reading →

Posted in DOS, IBM, Microsoft, PC history, Pre-release | 47 Comments

How the PC Industry Screws Things Up

Posted on April 7, 2017 by Michal Necasek

I was recently involved in investigating a problem that turns out to be a complete SNAFU which nicely illustrates the chaos that is the PC platform. It’s about the NX/XD bit. Let’s start with a bit of history. It turns … Continue reading →

Posted in AMD, Intel, Microsoft | 37 Comments

OS/2 2.0 at 25

Posted on March 31, 2017 by Michal Necasek

Twenty-five years ago, on March 31st, 1992, IBM released OS/2 2.0, the first mass-market 32-bit PC operating system. The road to OS/2 2.0 was quite long and winding, and the OS was a proud member of the vaporware club (just like, … Continue reading →

Posted in 386, IBM, Microsoft, OS/2 | 34 Comments