OS/2 Museum

The Tualatin Story

Posted on April 6, 2013 by Michal Necasek

While researching the Ultimate Museum PC it was hard to avoid the Tualatin, the final 0.13-micron incarnation of the Pentium III. With speeds up to 1.4GHz and 512KB on-chip L2 cache, a pair of PIII-S Tualatins should provide decent oomph. There’s just one problem—there doesn’t seem to be any Intel chipset which would support dual Tualatin processors.

Motherboards with dual Tualatin support do exist, but nearly all of them have either ServerWorks or VIA chipsets. While it is possible to run a Tualatin with an Intel 440BX/GX chipset, this requires an adapter or a modified processor. The 440BX/GX chipset is (in theory) fundamentally incompatible with Tualatin processors due to a difference in signaling voltage levels (AGTL vs. AGTL+).

Ironically, Intel itself sold server boards (SDS2, SAI2) with dual Tualatin support… boards built around chipsets from ServerWorks (the ServerSet III). This inevitably led to a few conspiracy theories. Continue reading →

Posted in Intel, PC hardware | 15 Comments

The Ultimate Museum PC Update

Posted on March 28, 2013 by Michal Necasek

A quick update on the Ultimate Museum PC (should it be called simply the UMPC?). The system is currently using a Supermicro P6DBE board with 2x Pentium 850MHz (Coppermine, 100MHz FSB) processors, 1GB RAM, a 120GB IDE disk, an ATAPI DVD-ROM drive, a SoundBlaster AWE32 PnP, a 3Com 100Mbps Ethernet controller. The graphics question has not been entirely settled yet; see below for more.

The system has been very stable so far. Perhaps unsurprisingly—nothing is overclocked and all components are on the higher end of the quality spectrum (if a decade-plus old). The disk was moved from the older BP6-based system and already contained DOS, OS/2, and Windows XP. Continue reading →

Posted in PC hardware | 22 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 fact the executable was likely released before the name “OS/2” even existed.

The file is EXEHDR.EXE, dated June 11, 1986 (size 32,896 bytes). It was shipped in the Microsoft Windows 1.03 SDK and then again unchanged in the Windows 1.04 SDK. For reference, OS/2 was announced on April 2, 1987 and the first OS/2 SDK was shipped around May 1987. Continue reading →

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

Virtualizing QNX 2

Posted on March 20, 2013 by tenox

(Note: This is a guest post from Tenox)

Enter 1988… around that time Microsoft just released MS-DOS 4.01 and IBM shipped OS/2 1.1. Compare to the others, this OS was years ahead of its time pretty much on every aspect. Now some 25 years later QNX2 is still found running industrial machinery, clean rooms, avionics and military hardware. Some people report systems up and running non stop for 15 years and longer!

It took me similar amount of time to find and acquire a usable media set. QNX2 never seen life on a desktop machine, so finding these was rather hard and expensive adventure. Fortunately I can finally let it see some daylight. Let’s examine how the system will install on a modern hardware under VMware Workstation.

The install is rather straight forward. Floppy boot comes with a login prompt.

Continue reading →

Posted in QNX, Virtualization | 13 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 Microsoft’s linker for the “new executable” format (NE) shared with minor modifications by DOS 4, 16-bit Windows, and 16-bit OS/2.

Now the problem with the LINK4.EXE on the multitasking DOS 4 disks was that the linker didn’t seem to work at all. Simply running LINK4 produced no output, although pressing Enter twice terminated the program. Yet on closer examination, it became apparent that feeding object files to the linker produced sane-looking executables and map files.

The initial suspicion was naturally a corrupted file—hardly a surprise on 25+ year old disks. Yet the reality turned out to be much more interesting. 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 so on. Continue reading →

Posted in DOS, Microsoft | 40 Comments

The Ultimate Museum PC, Continued

Posted on March 9, 2013 by Michal Necasek

Two weeks after discussing the Ultimate Museum PC, the first “new” hardware components arrived (nearly all on the same day). Chief among these are two motherboards: Supermicro P6DBE and ASUS P2B-DS. The boards are very similar, yet quite different. Just like the old BP6, they’re dual-processor boards built around the Intel 440BX chipset, using many of the same hardware components.

Before discussing the boards further, a quick refresher on Pentium II/III class processors; the various models are typically referred to by their codename, since Intel’s designations leave out far too much crucial detail. Only desktop models are mentioned here: Continue reading →

Posted in Intel, PC hardware | 12 Comments

OS/2 2.1 National Language Versions

Posted on March 1, 2013 by Michal Necasek

IBM’s OS/2 2.1 (1993) was shipped in a number of national language versions (NLVs). At the time, the US version of OS/2 was the “master copy” and all NLVs were derived from it. There were two major classes of NLVs: SBCS and DBCS. SBCS (Single-Byte Character Set) versions covered all but the Far East, which was served by DBCS (Double-Byte Character Set) versions.

The DBCS NLVs had their own hierarchy: Japanese OS/2 (also known as OS/2 J2.1) was derived from the US version, and other DBCS versions were in turn derived from OS/2 J2.1. The DBCS versions were noticeably different, with support for special hardware and in some cases requiring different device drivers (noticeably printer and video).

Continue reading →

Posted in IBM, OS/2 | 7 Comments

The Ultimate Museum PC

Posted on February 27, 2013 by Michal Necasek

While the OS/2 Museum employs modern computers and virtualization heavily, sometimes there is a need for good old hardware—emphasis on good and old. A virtual machine won’t read 5¼” floppies and there’s no way to plug in a real Sound Blaster AWE32 or an Adaptec 1540CF.

There is a definite need for an old system, yet at the same time the system should not be too slow and too limited. Indeed there are conflicting requirements: The system should be fast, have lots of RAM, a big disk, yet needs to support ISA slots and 5¼” floppy drives. An AGP slot is a must. The system should also be maximally stable and compatible. If at all possible, the system should support SMP (likely a dual-processor system).

The stability and compatibility requirement favors an Intel CPU and an Intel chipset. The objective is not the best bang for the buck (any hardware that old is likely to be cheap, if not free), the objective is a system that works. Continue reading →

Posted in Intel, PC hardware | 31 Comments

OS/2 Beta CDs (1994 and later)

Posted on February 15, 2013 by Michal Necasek

Over time, IBM released its share of OS/2 betas. In the early days, betas were distributed on floppies, but by the time OS/2 Warp was in development, things had shifted towards CDs. After all, the choice was between one or two CDs and a large pile of floppies.

IBM did not use the Internet for distributing OS/2 betas, since commonly available bandwidth could not keep up with the size of OS/2 releases in the 1990s and the beginning of the 2000s (even in 2000, downloading ~600MB over the Internet would have been impractical for the vast majority of users). However, IBM did distribute beta versions of OS/2 software such as Netscape Navigator or Java over the Internet. Continue reading →

Posted in OS/2 | 6 Comments