Minor site updates and summer time

Summer is upon us, and as a consequence, site updates will be less frequent in the coming weeks.

Regular visitors may have noticed that after a long delay, the DOS history article on DOS 4 was finally published. Researching DOS 4 (apparently known as DOS 3.4 right up to the actual release) turned out to be surprisingly difficult… although “a lot of work” may be more accurate than “difficult”. DOS 4 was released at a time when the PC market was well established, with fully developed trade press. That meant there were lots of sources talking about DOS 4.

At the same time, DOS 4 was less than wildly popular and many authors more or less ignored it. That made finding accurate information about DOS 4 difficult, although there were certainly lots of dubious rumors floating around.

In other news, a PC UNIX history section has been added. Currently it only contains one entry, Solaris 2.1 for x86. This was a somewhat obscure release of one of the best known UNIX operating systems, a new breed of UNIX ported from workstations down to a PC. There are plans to extend the section with entries about later Solaris x86 releases, as well as information about XENIX and other commercial PC UNIX releases.

There are also tentative plans to cover Windows (16-bit) and Windows NT history, but nothing concrete as of yet. There is certainly much to research and write about—even PC history alone, for a long time a very small subset of computing history in general, is amazingly rich and often surprisingly poorly documented.