Monthly Archives: March 2014

386 ZIF Socket?

I have a problem: Anyone familiar with 386 LIF (Low Insertion Force) sockets knows that the trouble isn’t installing the processors—that indeed doesn’t require much force and is easy to do. The real problem is getting the processor out without … Continue reading

Posted in 386 | 18 Comments

MS-DOS 1.1, 2.0 Source Code Released

In cooperation with the excellent Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Microsoft released the source code to MS-DOS 1.1, MS-DOS 2.0, and Microsoft Word for Windows 1.1a. Here’s hoping that this is a sign of things to come and Microsoft … Continue reading

Posted in DOS, Microsoft, PC history | 53 Comments

IBM OS/2 1.0 in a VM

As previously mentioned, IBM’s OS/2 1.0 and 1.1 is extra unfriendly to modern hypervisors. To recap, there is a curious difference between IBM’s and Microsoft’s kernels in OS/2 1.0/1.1 with regard to mode switching. For reasons that aren’t very clear, … Continue reading

Posted in IBM, Microsoft, OS/2, VirtualBox, Virtualization | 36 Comments

What’s in a Name?

The following four processors are much more similar than one might think: 486 aficionados will recognize the processors made by IBM, ST Microelectronics, and Texas Instruments to be essentially one and the same model—Cyrix 486DX.

Posted in 486, Cyrix | 14 Comments

Surfing Modern Web With Ancient Browsers

(note this is a guest post by Tenox) UPDATE: there is a new version released as a Web Proxy service and available for both Mac OS X and Linux. Read on here… I spend a fair amount of time working … Continue reading

Posted in Networking | 4 Comments