Category Archives: PC history

Seek and Ye Shall Find…

Posted on January 20, 2021 by Michal Necasek

…in the strangest places! Lately I’ve been digging up marketing materials related to Intel’s desktop boards (I’ve long been toying with the idea of writing up a brief history of the circa 10 years of Intel Extreme Series boards). There … Continue reading →

Posted in Archiving, Intel, PC hardware, PC history | 2 Comments

It’s In Style Now

Posted on January 10, 2021 by Michal Necasek

Retrocomputing has now made it to the Style section of the New York Times. There is nothing particularly new about the article, except where it appeared. I guess people have noticed that retrocomputing is a thing, and that old gear … Continue reading →

Posted in PC history, PC press | 10 Comments

The Answer To 0x49: Fujitsu FMR

Posted on December 11, 2020 by Michal Necasek

This is a guest post by A. N. Other. The following was originally intended as a comment to “Not MSX Either“, the 4th installment in the hunt for the mysterious 0x69 FAT VBR-start byte which was allowed in DOS. Due … Continue reading →

Posted in DOS, NT, PC hardware, PC history, Undocumented | 7 Comments

Decoding Seagate Date Codes

Posted on November 27, 2020 by Michal Necasek

More or less everyone knows that throughout the 1990s and 2000s, Seagate did not label their drives with a date of manufacture like everyone sane would do, but instead used a custom and somewhat mysterious/confusing “date code”. For reasons that … Continue reading →

Posted in PC history, Seagate, Storage | Leave a comment

Those Lot Numbers are Old

Posted on October 24, 2020 by Michal Necasek

The other day I was trying to decode the “lot numbers” printed on certain Seagate drives. In the meantime, I realized that those lot numbers have been in use for quite some time. They were in use around 2000, like … Continue reading →

Posted in PC history, Seagate | 11 Comments

Not MSX, Either

Posted on October 7, 2020 by Michal Necasek

Further examining the mystery of boot sectors supposedly starting with byte value 69h, I considered the possibility that the check could have been added for MSX machines. The MSX platform ticks a lot of boxes: It wasn’t 8086 (but rather … Continue reading →

Posted in IBM, Microsoft, PC history | 15 Comments

Really Atari ST?

Posted on September 21, 2020 by Michal Necasek

This blog has previously examined a very very strange code fragment in the BIOS module of DOS. To recap, when deciding whether a boot sector might have a valid BPB, DOS checks whether the first byte is a relative jump … Continue reading →

Posted in DOS, Microsoft, PC history | 18 Comments

Breaking Into ASOS

Posted on August 1, 2020 by Michal Necasek

The OS/2 Museum recently acquired a Quantum Bigfoot TS hard disk in mint condition. The Bigfoot drives, as some readers may remember, were rather oddball late-1990s 5.25″ IDE drives that were cheap, slow, and relatively big. There was a sticker … Continue reading →

Posted in Compaq, PC history, SCO | 4 Comments

Well Hello

Posted on July 14, 2020 by Michal Necasek

So after some furious disassembling, assembling, and linking, things got this far: It took longer than it ought to have because although IDA is great, I couldn’t figure out how to make it work with GW-BASIC’s bizarre segment usage. The … Continue reading →

Posted in Compaq, Microsoft, PC history, Source code | 7 Comments

How Old Is OMF?

Posted on July 9, 2020 by Michal Necasek

The Object Module Format (OMF), used by most DOS development tools, and eventually displaced by COFF/ELF in the 32-bit world, is quite old. It is a somewhat strange format because of its age, and it is quite complex, both because … Continue reading →

Posted in Development, Intel, Microsoft, PC history, x86 | 8 Comments