Monthly Archives: May 2017

PC DOS 1.0, But Not Quite

Last week a most interesting image of a 160K disk arrived at the OS/2 Museum. The files on the disk image are rather old. When the disk boots up (not trivial, see below), the following message appears: Astute readers will … Continue reading

Posted in DOS, IBM, Microsoft, PC history, Pre-release | 47 Comments

How Many Gravis UltraSounds?

The question came up a while ago. Just how commercially unsuccessful was the Gravis UltraSound? There appears to be no public information about the sales volume of the UltraSound. But now, looking at a sample of 3 (three) classic GUS … Continue reading

Posted in PC history, Sound, UltraSound | 51 Comments

VME Broken on AMD Ryzen

That’s VME as in Virtual-8086 Mode Enhancements, introduced in the Intel Pentium Processor, and initially documented in the infamous NDA-only Appendix H. Almost immediately since the Ryzen CPUs became available in March 2017, there have been various complaints about problems … Continue reading

Posted in AMD, Bugs | 36 Comments

SGDT/SIDT Fiction and Reality

PSA: Actual hardware behavior takes precedence over vendor documentation. Or, as they say… trust but verify. A reader recently complained how Intel and AMD do not implement the SGDT and SIDT instructions the same way. AMD documentation states that these … Continue reading

Posted in 286, 386, AMD, Documentation, Intel | 39 Comments