Monthly Archives: March 2013

The Ultimate Museum PC Update

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 … Continue reading

Posted in PC hardware | 21 Comments

The Oldest OS/2 Executable In the Wild

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 … Continue reading

Posted in DOS, Microsoft, OS/2 | 15 Comments

Virtualizing QNX 2

(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. … Continue reading

Posted in QNX, Virtualization | 13 Comments

Fixing Broken LINK4

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 … Continue reading

Posted in DOS, Microsoft | 5 Comments

Multitasking MS-DOS 4.0 Lives

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 … Continue reading

Posted in DOS, Microsoft | 39 Comments

The Ultimate Museum PC, Continued

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 … Continue reading

Posted in Intel, PC hardware | 12 Comments

OS/2 2.1 National Language Versions

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: … Continue reading

Posted in IBM, OS/2 | 7 Comments