Monthly Archives: August 2012

IBM PS/2 Model 50 Keyboard Controller

Thanks to John Elliott, a ROM dump of the PS/2 Model 50 keyboard controller (an 8742 chip) is now available. The IBM PC/AT keyboard controller (KBC) ROM has been analyzed earlier. So what exactly changed between the PC/AT and the … Continue reading

Posted in IBM, PC architecture | 1 Comment

Book Review: Developing Applications Using DOS

A Few Decades Late Book Reviews Developing Applications Using DOS, by Ken W. Christopher, Jr., Barry A. Feigenbaum, and Shon O. Saliga John Wiley & Sons, February 1990; 573 pages, ISBN 0-471-52231-7; $24.95 Developing Applications Using DOS is a surprisingly obscure … Continue reading

Posted in Books, DOS, IBM | 1 Comment

Why does Apple hate RSS?

Last week I was setting up a new Mac and obviously the first thing I did was to upgrade the OS to Mountain Lion. No problems there. As one of the follow-up steps of the setup process, I tried to … Continue reading

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86-DOS Was an Original

In case it wasn’t sufficiently obvious already: A forensic expert now confirmed that 86-DOS, née QDOS, and (by extension) MS-DOS were not copies of CP/M, either on source or binary level. This comes hardly as a surprise, despite years (nay, … Continue reading

Posted in DOS, Microsoft, PC history | 6 Comments

Another witness against WordStar

Previous posts examined the question why IBM implemented the A20 hardware in the PC/AT, causing endless headaches to future PC hardware and software developers. WordStar emerged as a possible culprit, but no one would quite point the finger at it. … Continue reading

Posted in DOS, PC history, WordStar | 17 Comments