Author Archives: Michal Necasek

IBM PC 5150 Model Numbers

Posted on September 24, 2024 by Michal Necasek

Recently I came across a minor mystery—the model numbers of the original IBM PC. For such a pivotal product, there is remarkably little detailed original information from the early days. When IBM started selling the PC, it used two methods … Continue reading →

Posted in IBM, PC hardware, PC history | 23 Comments

OS/2 2.0 Commitments

Posted on September 23, 2024 by Michal Necasek

Last week the OS/2 Museum received a rather interesting donation: a thick spiral bound document titled Third party commitment to IBM’s OS/2 Version 2.0, and labeled IBM COMDEX/SPRING ’92. The binder is a collection of about 250 press releases that … Continue reading →

Posted in IBM, Marketing, OS/2, PC history | 7 Comments

OS/2 2.11 SMP Woes

Posted on September 8, 2024 by Michal Necasek

IBM OS/2 V2.11 for Symmetric Multiprocessing (OS/2 2.11 SMP) was released in mid-1994 in response to Windows NT and its SMP support. The package was nothing more (and nothing less) than OS/2 V2.11 with support for SMP hardware. It was … Continue reading →

Posted in IBM, OS/2, PC history, SMP | 27 Comments

Digging Into OS/2 2.0

Posted on September 8, 2024 by Michal Necasek

The other day I had a “pressing” need to obtain the list of modules loaded in an OS/2 VM by examining the VM’s memory and CPU state. I was able to use existing code that worked on OS/2 V3.0 (Warp) … Continue reading →

Posted in Debugging, Documentation, IBM, OS/2 | 21 Comments

Finally in Xsight

Posted on August 15, 2024 by Michal Necasek

For a long time, I have tried to find a GUI environment running on SCO XENIX (because, honestly, what could be more useless?). Back in the day, meaning late 1980s and early 1990s, SCO sold Xsight, which was an adaptation … Continue reading →

Posted in SCO, X11, Xenix | 20 Comments

Missing XENIX Disks

Posted on July 22, 2024 by Michal Necasek

The previously mentioned warez mega dump contains disk images of SCO 286 XENIX 2.1.0. The release appears to be from February 1986. It is the oldest SCO 286 XENIX release that I know of. But there’s a hitch. The warez … Continue reading →

Posted in 286, Archiving, SCO, Xenix | 33 Comments

1989 Networking: NetWare 386

Posted on July 20, 2024 by Michal Necasek

Thanks to the recent warez mega dump, another long lost gem has come to light: NetWare 386, also known as NetWare 3.0. In September 1989, Novell released NetWare 386 V3.0, the first in a long line of 32-bit network operating … Continue reading →

Posted in 386, NetWare, Networking, Novell, PC history | 59 Comments

More MS OS/2 2.0

Posted on June 30, 2024 by Michal Necasek

Over the last few weeks, two “new” pre-releases of OS/2 2.0 have been found in ancient warez archives. The first is OS/2 2.0 build 6.64, released in early April 1990: In general, this build is not substantially different from the … Continue reading →

Posted in IBM, Microsoft, OS/2, Pre-release | 5 Comments

Who Knew What When

Posted on June 28, 2024 by Michal Necasek

When Microsoft released the unique early beta build of Multitasking DOS 4, I quickly found out that it does not run in VirtualBox: This was a bit of a surprise, because the more-or-less released versions of Multitasking DOS 4 from … Continue reading →

Posted in 286, DOS, IBM, Microsoft, PC architecture, PC history, VirtualBox | 30 Comments

Learn Something Old Every Day, Part XII: Strange File Resizing on DOS

Posted on June 7, 2024 by Michal Necasek

Someone recently asked an interesting question: Why do Microsoft C and compatible DOS compilers have no truncate() and/or ftruncate() library functions? And how does one resize files on DOS? OK, that’s actually two questions. The first one is easy enough … Continue reading →

Posted in Computing History, CP/M, Development, Documentation, DOS, Microsoft | 29 Comments