Monthly Archives: April 2012

DOS boot hang update

Additional information came to light regarding the hangs with DOS 2.x/3.x when booting from a disk with large number of sectors per track. The problem appears to have been noticed sometime in 1987—perhaps. The MS-DOS OEM Adaptation Kit (OAK) for … Continue reading

Posted in DOS, IBM, Microsoft | 4 Comments

Solaris 2.5.1 and 2.6 crashes on modern Intel CPUs

I recently found that Solaris 2.6 and 2.5.1 does not work when run in a VM on a modern Intel CPU (Sandy Bridge generation Core i7), or to be exact fails most of the time (about nine times out of … Continue reading

Posted in Solaris, VirtualBox, Virtualization, x86 | 27 Comments

DOS 4.0, bum rap, and mismatched expectations

While researching the history of DOS extenders, I came across an article written in 1991 and explaining why OS/2 2.0 was going to be horribly incompatible with Windows 3.x. To support the argument, the following statement was used: “When IBM … Continue reading

Posted in IBM, PC press | 13 Comments

NetWare for OS/2

NetWare for OS/2 was one of the most technically interesting products of the mid-1990s. Novell’s NetWare was long established as a file server for LANs; since NetWare/386, Novell’s NOS ran as a dedicated server which was loaded from DOS but … Continue reading

Posted in NetWare, Networking, OS/2 | 2 Comments

From a Feature to a Bug

Sometimes the quest for backwards compatibility has unintended consequences. In some cases, the presumably beneficial backwards compatibility turns into a source of problems. The costs end up far outweighing the benefits, yet the “feature” may be difficult to get rid … Continue reading

Posted in DOS, PC history, Windows | 13 Comments

Operating System/2 announced 25 years ago

On April 2nd of 1987 (not April 1st, that wouldn’t do!), IBM and Microsoft jointly announced Operating System/2, the long-awaited protected-mode version of DOS. However, OS/2 was not the only product announced on that day. OS/2 was merely one part … Continue reading

Posted in IBM, Microsoft, OS/2, PC history | 27 Comments