Category Archives: Corrections

A wunderBAR Story

Or, what should be broken became solid, and what should be solid became broken. While searching for something completely different, I came across a fascinating story of the “wunderBAR”. Since the story is very short, I’ll quote it here in … Continue reading

Posted in Computing History, Corrections | 21 Comments

The Danger of Datasheets

A few days age I came across an article about the 8237 DMA controller in an old German computing magazine (DOS Extra, issue 1 ’87/88, page 123, Schnelle Speicherverwaltung mit dem DMA-Controller, or Fast memory management with the DMA controller). … Continue reading

Posted in Corrections, PC hardware, PC press | 29 Comments

A Brief History of Unreal Mode

After a run-in with a particularly crazy manifestation of unreal mode (Flat Assembler, or fasm), I decided to dig deeper into the history of this undocumented yet very widely used feature of 32-bit x86 processors. For the purposes of this … Continue reading

Posted in 386, Corrections, Microsoft, PC history, Undocumented | 47 Comments

Pascal Out Of Memory

Suppose you want to run the original 1981 vintage IBM Pascal 1.0 (supplied by Microsoft) on a PC that is less than 30 years old. Upon execution, PAS1.EXE may well fail with the following error: Error: Compiler Out Of Memory … Continue reading

Posted in Bugs, Corrections, IBM, Microsoft, PC history | 40 Comments

Frequently Given Misleading Answers

The other day I came across this FGA item describing how to detect virtualized environments. It includes interesting comments which make Microsoft, Intel, and AMD sound stupid, but perhaps only reflect on the author being either deliberately misleading, or trying … Continue reading

Posted in Corrections, Documentation, Virtualization | 9 Comments