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Category Archives: PC history
IDENTIFY Ancient DRIVE
This article will attempt to collect IDENTIFY DRIVE dumps from antique IDE drives, with running commentary. For the purposes of this list, “antique” is defined as a drive model released in 1990 or earlier, typically with the drive itself also … Continue reading
Posted in IDE, PC hardware, PC history, Storage
9 Comments
Learn Something Old Every Day, Part II
The ultimate reason why I pulled out the old Seagate ST-225 drive was because I wanted to try connecting it to the Western Digital WD1003-IWH board that I recently acquired. The WD1003-IWH is a curious evolutionary half-step between ST506 interface … Continue reading
Posted in IDE, PC hardware, PC history, Storage
11 Comments
Learn Something Old Every Day
More or less by accident I found myself writing a very basic DOS utility to read data off of an IDE drive. It started out by just issuing the IDENTIFY DRIVE command and capturing the data, but adding the ability … Continue reading
Posted in Documentation, PC hardware, PC history, Seagate, Storage
3 Comments
Centaur Close-ups
Readers have expressed interest in seeing what exactly a Western Digital ‘Centaur’ drive looked like. I took a few photos of a WD95044-A drive, the larger capacity (40 MB) and newer variant of the WD Centaur family. Some photos were … Continue reading
Posted in PC hardware, PC history, Storage, Western Digital
3 Comments
Whence IDENTIFY DRIVE?
As most everyone knows, the AT Attachment standard (informally known as IDE) started by literally bolting the previously standalone AT disk controller onto a MFM drive with a ST506 interface and connecting the assembly to the host system with a … Continue reading
Posted in Compaq, Documentation, IDE, PC hardware, PC history, Storage
36 Comments
OS/2 1.2 EE DAP
That same shoebox I mentioned the other day also contained three plain cardboard 3.5″ floppy boxes with a set of disks that look like this: Once again, despite the plain-looking labels, these are mass-duplicated floppies, which is handy because Kryoflux … Continue reading
Posted in Archiving, IBM, Kryoflux, OS/2, PC history
2 Comments
Was the NE2000 Really That Bad?
Over the last few months I have been on and off digging into the history of early PC networking products, especially Ethernet-based ones. In that context, it is impossible to miss the classic NE2000 adapter with all its offshoots and … Continue reading
Posted in 3Com, Ethernet, Networking, Novell, PC history
15 Comments
8237A DMA Page Fun
The other day I was trying to fill a couple of gaps in my understanding of the Intel 8237A DMA controller documentation. I wrote a small testcase that performed a dummy transfer and modified the base address and count registers … Continue reading
Posted in Intel, PC architecture, PC history
5 Comments
Nehalem and 4 Gbit DDR3
While discussing Intel desktops with DDR2 memory using 2 Gbit technology (4 GB UDIMMs), the question of Intel’s next generation and 4 Gbit DDR3 (8 GB UDIMMs) came up. It’s more or less the next iteration of exactly the same … Continue reading
Posted in Intel, PC hardware, PC history
8 Comments
The Phantom Intel GM47 Chipset
I spent a bit of time recently putting together technical documentation for Intel’s 4-series chipsets, partly motivated by research into Intel’s support of 4 GB DDR2 memory modules, partly driven by idle curiosity about one of Intel’s many hyped up … Continue reading
Posted in Intel, PC history, PC press
7 Comments