Monthly Archives: June 2014

Careful with that Buffer…

Last week I was sorting through several sets of Microsoft C 5.1 disks from 1988  (more about that later). While I was comparing the disk images to see whether the disks were the same or not, despite different labels and part … Continue reading

Posted in Microsoft, Security | 13 Comments

S3 Fraternal Twins

Sometimes identifying old hardware is a bit tricky. Consider these two graphics cards: The PCB is the same, the BIOS chips look the same, the DAC is slightly different but an 80 MHz part in both cases, memory is the … Continue reading

Posted in Graphics, PC hardware, S3 | 5 Comments

Intel 287XL… From 1986? Or 1996?

Many or most readers of this site probably know that most chips (and PCBs) have the date of manufacture stamped on them, almost always indicating the year and week (usually not the actual date) they were made. Especially with PCBs, … Continue reading

Posted in Intel, PC history | 11 Comments

Floppy Capacity Math

After more or less accidentally coming across a BBS listing of various high-capacity floppy formatting programs, I began wondering: How much data can really be stored on a diskette in a PC floppy drive? And what’s the relationship between formatted … Continue reading

Posted in Floppies, PC hardware | 38 Comments