Category Archives: Microsoft

Installing Oct ’91 NT from CD

Posted on December 15, 2013 by Michal Necasek

With VirtualBox 4.3, it is possible to install the oldest known pre-release of Windows NT directly from CD, the way Microsoft intended. This is the Fall ’91 Comdex preview which only supported the x86 architecture and a very short list … Continue reading →

Posted in Microsoft, NT, SCSI | 35 Comments

Fantasy History at Ars Technica

Posted on November 26, 2013 by Michal Necasek

Ars Technica today published an article titled “Half an operating system: The triumph and tragedy of OS/2“. Although very interesting, unfortunately the article to a significant extent engages in what can best be called fantasy history, which causes the text … Continue reading →

Posted in IBM, Microsoft, OS/2 | 52 Comments

More on LOADALL and OS/2

Posted on October 27, 2013 by Michal Necasek

As previously mentioned, IBM’s OS/2 1.0 and 1.1 used the 286 LOADALL instruction, even on 386 and later processors which do not support it. This was typically solved by BIOS emulation. Now there’s more information about how OS/2 uses LOADALL. … Continue reading →

Posted in IBM, Intel, Microsoft | 31 Comments

LOADALL Strikes Again

Posted on October 18, 2013 by Michal Necasek

A minor mystery recently popped up while running IBM’s OS/2 1.1 (1988), the first OS/2 version with the Presentation Manager GUI. While Microsoft’s and IBM’s releases of OS/2 were fully compatible from application perspective, there were differences in the drivers … Continue reading →

Posted in IBM, Intel, Microsoft, OS/2, x86 | 13 Comments

Ctrl-Alt-Del Myths

Posted on October 4, 2013 by Michal Necasek

In a recent interview at Harvard University, Bill Gates claimed (around 16:35 mark) that Windows uses Ctrl-Alt-Del as a logon key combination because “IBM didn’t want to give [Microsoft] a single button”. This statement is curious because it takes several facts … Continue reading →

Posted in Microsoft, PC hardware | 8 Comments

Twenty Years Ago Today…

Posted on July 24, 2013 by Michal Necasek

On July 24th 1993, Microsoft finalized the first release of Windows NT, labeled version 3.1 “to avoid confusion”. This was a big day for Microsoft, although the practical impact on the computer industry was not particularly big, at least not … Continue reading →

Posted in Microsoft, NT | 6 Comments

The Oldest OS/2 Executable In the Wild

Posted on March 22, 2013 by Michal Necasek

While researching the history of Microsoft’s segmented-executable linker originally called LINK4.EXE, I came across an OS/2 executable that was publicly released almost a year before the first OS/2 SDK was shipped, and many months before OS/2 was even announced. In … Continue reading →

Posted in DOS, Microsoft, OS/2 | 16 Comments

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

Master Builders of OS/2

Posted on December 9, 2012 by Michal Necasek

The MS OS/2 videos exhibit has now been completed with the addition of two PDF documents. These are scans of two fat three-ring binders that were handed out to attendees of the Microsoft OS/2 Developer’s Conference in New York City … Continue reading →

Posted in Development, Microsoft, OS/2 | 11 Comments