Category Archives: PC history

Yep, Norton Did It

Posted on January 12, 2019 by Michal Necasek

Some time ago, the question of the oldest executable compression tool came up. EXEPACK was identified as a widespread and unexpectedly troublemaking specimen, but Realia SpaceMaker was reportedly older. Only initially no one could come up with surviving executables compressed … Continue reading →

Posted in Compression, PC history | 10 Comments

My Second AMD

Posted on December 13, 2018 by Michal Necasek

A few weeks ago I became a happy owner of a ThinkPad A485, the first ThinkPad (together with the E485 and related variants) to use an AMD CPU. History buffs will know that it’s far from the first ThinkPad with … Continue reading →

Posted in AMD, PC history, ThinkPad | 40 Comments

A Piece of History

Posted on November 21, 2018 by Michal Necasek

A few months ago I received a well-used but not abused copy of Rakesh K. Agarwal’s book 80×86 Architecture and Programming (Volume II): Architecture Reference, published by Prentice Hall in 1991. This is an unusually well-informed book, no doubt because … Continue reading →

Posted in 386, Books, Cyrix, Intel, PC architecture, PC history | 6 Comments

The History of a Security Hole

Posted on August 31, 2018 by Michal Necasek

Warning: If you do not care for the finer points of x86 architecture, please stop reading right now—in the interest of your own sanity. A while ago I was made aware of a strange problem causing a normal user process … Continue reading →

Posted in 386, BSD, Bugs, Documentation, PC history | 44 Comments

A Sound Card Before Its Time

Posted on August 15, 2018 by Michal Necasek

A mysterious full-length sound card recently arrived at the OS/2 Museum. It was clearly manufactured by IBM in 1985, and sports a 20 MHz Texas Instrument TMS32010 DSP (the DSP is the large black DIP chip near the lower left … Continue reading →

Posted in IBM, PC history, Sound | 20 Comments

OS/2 2.0, Spring ’91 Edition

Posted on July 10, 2018 by Michal Necasek

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 | 35 Comments

A Brief History of Unreal Mode

Posted on June 15, 2018 by Michal Necasek

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 | 58 Comments

USB 0.9

Posted on June 2, 2018 by Michal Necasek

A couple of months ago I lamented the fact that historic USB documentation appears to have vanished from the face of the Earth. Today I finally found one such document, the USB 0.9 specification from April 13, 1995, published almost … Continue reading →

Posted in Documentation, PC history, USB | 32 Comments

Troubled Time

Posted on May 30, 2018 by Michal Necasek

This is not an article about current affairs Over the last few weeks, I had several interesting run-ins with time, specifically how time is represented and processed by computers. Deep down it’s really all about a clash of human culture … Continue reading →

Posted in Bugs, PC history, Random Thoughts | 19 Comments

A Word on the CALL 5 Spell

Posted on May 26, 2018 by Michal Necasek

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