OS/2 Museum
OS/2, vintage PC computing, and random musings
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- 577 from 25 Jul 2010 to 16 Oct 2026
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- monthly (17 in the last year)
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2026 15
- ThinkPad I9990303 Error Catch-22
- The End of an Athlon
- Maximum Overkill
- Win16 Memory Management
- Learn Something Old Every Day, Part XXI: VGA Memory Access Is Complicated
- ICAT and Watcom
- When Networking Doesn’t Work
- Learn Something Old Every Day, Part XX: 8087 Emulation on 8086 Systems
- Learn Something Old Every Day, Part XIX: Athlon XP May Be Athlon MP
- Mystery CPUID Bit
- Learn Something Old Every Day, Part XVIII: How Does FPU Detection Work?
- Bitfield Pitfalls
- DOS Memory Management
- Cracking DXP and SXD
- A 100 Year Old Consul Typewriter?
2025 21
- NetWare Pure IP on DOS
- Wait here. No, wait here!
- The OS/2 Display Driver Zoo
- Messy Mastering
- 8×19 Text Mode Font Origins
- More than Two Hard Disks in DOS
- Learn Something Old Every Day, Part XVII: DHCP and ARP Don’t Mix in WSA SMP
- 1990 Networking: LAN Manager 2.0
- Learn Something Old Every Day, Part XVI: DOS 4.0 SELECT Is Too Clever
- Where Did CP852 Come From Again?
- Learn Something Old Every Day, Part XV: KEYB Is Half of Keyboard BIOS
- 1989 Networking: 3+Open LAN Manager 1.1
- AI Responses May Include Mistakes
- Compaq EXTDISK.SYS
- The Strange MS OS/2 1.21 Disk Driver
- ESDI Adventures
- Time Trouble
- Learn Something Old Every Day, Part XIV: read() Return Value May Surprise
- Learn Something Old Every Day, Part XIII: InDOS Is Not Enough
- Minor 387 Documentation Mystery
- The Other Three
2024 23
- I Thought I Found a Bug…
- DOS APPEND
- Stack Checking on OS/2
- Programming NetBIOS on OS/2
- OS/2 TCPBEUI Name Resolution
- IBM PC 5150 Model Numbers
- OS/2 2.0 Commitments
- OS/2 2.11 SMP Woes
- Digging Into OS/2 2.0
- Finally in Xsight
- Missing XENIX Disks
- 1989 Networking: NetWare 386
- More MS OS/2 2.0
- Who Knew What When
- Learn Something Old Every Day, Part XII: Strange File Resizing on DOS
- Learn Something Old Every Day, Part XI: DOS Directory Searches are Bizarre
- Learn Something Old Every Day, Part X: The VGA Attribute Controller Is Weird
- How Not To Release Historic Source Code
- The Future That Never Was
- Unlocking NetWare 2.0a
- Tarbell to Cromemco
- Misconceptions on Top of Misconceptions
- 86-DOS Revisited
2023 17
- From the Annals of Preprocessor Hackery
- VDS: Borne out of Necessity
- 386MAX and EISA DMA
- Learn Something Old Every Day, Part IX: AHA-154xB and ASPI4DOS.SYS
- Learn Something Old Every Day, Part VIII: RTFM
- This Code Smells of Desperation
- Retro-Porting to NT 3.1
- Retro-Porting to OS/2 1.0
- Failing to Fail
- Unintended Side Effects
- IDLE DR-DOS
- Tracking Down a Bug
- First ROM Shadowing
- A wunderBAR Story
- Hash Tables FTW
- Windows 3.x VDDVGA
- Learn Something Old Every Day, Part VII: 8087 Intricacies
2022 31
- A House of Cards
- Win16 Retro Development
- Undefined Isn’t Unpredictable
- Does (E)IP Wrap Around in 16-bit Segments?
- PC Disk Sector Sizes and Booting
- IBM AIX for IA64 (Itanium) aka Project Monterey Runs Again!
- Slovenian OS/2 Warp 4
- Antique Display Driving
- Learn Something Old Every Day, Part VI: Backward Buffer Overwrite
- Windows 9x Video Minidriver Source Code
- WordSet: Stolen Without Compensation
- Windows 9x Video Minidriver HD+
- Compaq EGA Technical Reference Guide
- NT video miniport UHD
- IDENTIFY ESDI DRIVE
- The Strange Case of GetEnvironmentStringsA
- 1989 Networking: OS/2 NetWare Requester 1.1
- Learn Something Old Every Day, Part V: Early IBM PS/2 Hard Disks
- OS/2 6.304: Finally Complete
- Page Too Big
- Xenix 2.2 vs. VGA
- Vague Standards are Trouble
- FantasyLand on VGA
- Reconstructing the EGA BIOS
- Learn Something Old Every Day, Part IV: Ctrl+Scroll Lock is Ctrl+Break
- KEYBCS2
- Where Did CP852 Come From?
- XMVM Surgery
- Another Trip to Drive Geometry Hell
- Another Myth Busted
- Unidentified PC DOS 1.1 Boot Sector Junk Identified
2021 45
- First Dual-Channel IDE?
- LAN Manager 2.1/2.2 Registration
- The Secret History of ATAPI
- Looking for High Sierra
- Deeper Into ATA History
- Weird Tales
- DOS 2.11 From Scratch
- PC DOS 1.1 From Scratch
- Learn Something Old Every Day, Part III: Why MASM Behaves Oddly
- PC-86-DOS
- The Dual-Drive IDE Hell
- Drive Price Mystery
- How Not to Erase Data
- The IBM PC, 41 Years Ago
- IDENTIFY Ancient DRIVE
- Learn Something Old Every Day, Part II: ST-506 Drives Need Correct Jumpers
- Learn Something Old Every Day, Part I: ST-506 Drives Have Programmable Step Rate
- Dirty Work
- Centaur Close-ups
- Recalibration Needed
- Can This Conner Talk?
- OS/2 6.304: Who Has More?
- EISA Specification 3.1
- WD1007V Commands
- Whence IDENTIFY DRIVE?
- OS/2 1.2 EE DAP
- Like New
- Archival Puzzles
- DOS SMB Client Performance
- It Was a Problem Back in the Day
- Installing IBM OS/2 1.0 in a VirtualBox VM
- Nobody Expects…
- Was the NE2000 Really That Bad?
- MS LAN Manager NDDK Anyone?
- 8237A DMA Page Fun
- Fake vs. Real
- Diskette Puzzle
- Complications, Complications
- SCSI HBA Recycling?
- Nehalem and 4 Gbit DDR3
- The Phantom Intel GM47 Chipset
- DDR2 4GB DIMMs
- Booting Windows XP, Or Not
- Seek and Ye Shall Find…
- It’s In Style Now
2020 30
- Disabling Quick Edit Mode
- The Answer To 0x49: Fujitsu FMR
- Every Bit Matters
- Decoding Seagate Date Codes
- Percussive Maintenance
- Those Lot Numbers are Old
- Not MSX, Either
- Return to Stormville
- Really Atari ST?
- Seagate Serial Talk
- Breaking Into ASOS
- X7DBE WTF
- Well Hello
- How Old Is OMF?
- GW-BASIC Source Notes
- PCLP CSD Hunt
- Those Win9x Crashes on Fast Machines…
- Seagate Cheetah Date of Manufacture
- ThinkPad Audio PnP Hell
- Memory Trouble in Stormville
- 386 Cache Coherency
- Linux 2.4 APIC Hang
- OS/2 1.3 on a “Large” Disk
- EMM386 and VDS: Not Quite Working
- A Brief Visit to Disk Geometry Hell
- Emulating EtherLink
- 1987 Networking: ELS NetWare 286 Level I 2.0a
- Another Strange 286 Board
- More Fun with ISA DMA
- MS OS/2 SDK Document Dump
2019 40
- The Cape Cod Disaster
- DOS Wireless Networking, Continued
- The Danger of Datasheets
- Power Trouble
- Wireless Networking in DOS
- More on NX Insanity
- The Sad End of Intel Desktop Boards
- The i860 Conspiracy
- More About That Strange Pentium 4
- It’s Zen Time
- Synology Strikes Again
- PC Keyboard: The First Five Years
- How Not to Buy a Computer
- Where’s Intel When You Need Them?
- LAN Manager Product Specification, 1987
- PC-NFS 3.0.1
- SCO UNIX 3.2.0f, Limping Along
- PC-NFS 3.0 Anyone?
- OS/2 + WebExplorer does Gmail
- Taking WebExplorer for a spin in 2019
- PowerPC Archival
- MacBook Memory Upgrade Hell
- Same Old Disk Bug
- Microsoft OS/2 Programmer’s Guide
- 1988 Networking: 386 XENIX
- Will This Last?
- Why Does Windows Really Use Backslash as Path Separator?
- Developer Connection 9/11/12 Anyone?
- Pointedly Confusing
- 1988 Networking: NetWare OS/2 Requester
- NetWare 2.x Notes
- LAN Manager 2.0 Primary Domain Controller
- Kryofluxing PC Floppies
- Small World
- Reading From Void
- Ancient NetWare OS/2 Requesters?
- Historical ATA Standard Drafts
- NetWare 3.12 vs. Large IDE Disks
- Fox in the Crypt
- Yep, Norton Did It
2018 37
- My Second AMD
- A Piece of History
- DiskOnChip
- FasterModeSwitch: Is It Really?
- Didn’t Expect That to Work
- Crazy World
- ThinkPad Fan
- The History of a Security Hole
- A Sound Card Before Its Time
- Three Weeks
- How Fast Is a PS/2 Keyboard?
- OS/2 2.0, Spring ’91 Edition
- ANOMALY: meaningless REX prefix used
- A Brief History of Unreal Mode
- USB 0.9
- Troubled Time
- A Word on the CALL 5 Spell
- ICEBP Finally Documented
- SpaceMaker Update
- Realia SpaceMaker
- Undocumented RDTSC
- The A20-Gate Fallout
- Any Readers in Central Italy?
- Windows 10 ARM64 on QEMU
- EXEPACK and the A20-Gate
- The A20-Gate: It Wasn’t WordStar
- Microsoft Editor
- Making The Simpsons Sing
- Pascal Out Of Memory
- Frequently Given Misleading Answers
- Wanted: Console Text Editor for Windows
- Dumping Ensoniq Soundscape ROMs
- WordStar Again
- DOS 5: TMI
- About That Warranty…
- How to Void Your Valuable Warranty
- There’s Another Possibility
2017 42
- AMD64 APM Archive Online
- Undocumented 8086 Opcodes, Part I
- How Fast Again?
- AMD64 Manual Vol. 3 Rev. 3.24 Anyone?
- How Apple Created Hackintosh, Part II
- HTT Means Hyper-Threading, Right?
- How Apple Created Hackintosh, Part I
- MS KB Articles
- PC-MOS/386 Source Code
- Audio Frequency Data Acquisition
- Slow Season Again
- SYSENTER, Where Are You?
- Of G-Men and Farmers
- Would You Believe It?
- Brightening Up
- VME Fixed on AMD Ryzen
- Rich Heimlich’s Patch Set Overview
- PC DOS 1.0, But Not Quite
- How Many Gravis UltraSounds?
- VME Broken on AMD Ryzen
- SGDT/SIDT Fiction and Reality
- OS/2 2.0, Xmas ’91 Edition
- CF/IDE/SCSI Benchmark Update
- How the PC Industry Screws Things Up
- OS/2 2.0, Summer ’91 Edition
- OS/2 2.0 at 25
- Something New Every Day…
- There’s More to the 286 XENIX Story
- PCI Corner Case
- IBM XENIX: Two Steps Forward
- Tales From the Xenix Crypt
- What a Coincidence
- Oldest Surviving 386 PC OS?
- More Data on CF to IDE to SCSI
- Resetting Disks Is Hard
- Booting Is Hard
- Spot the Fakes
- IBM XENIX 1.0 Incompatibility Details
- Top of the Class 478
- More Peripherals
- Shiniest x86 Chip
- Finally Free
2016 44
- Gravis Ultras
- Getting Organized, Finally
- Tahiti + Rio = Monterey
- Mystery NetBurst
- Alt Insanity
- Capacitors, Ugh
- Fun with AGP
- More on DXP44Q
- Intel OverDrive Part III: Pentium II OverDrive
- Bad NTAS ISO
- More on CF Cards
- Removable CF Card, or Not
- Deskpro 386 at 30
- E-mu SoundEngine
- More Wobbles
- Synology DSM 6 and Vintage Clients
- Windows 3.1 Standard Mode Crash with APM
- Wobbly Floppy Drive?
- Intel OverDrive Part II: Pentium OverDrive
- Better Late Than Never
- Updating Windows
- What’s the Point…
- Any Soundscape VIVO fans here?
- The Wave Blaster II Does Talk!
- Deeper Into Wave Blaster
- Zapping the SVP on a T42p
- Can a DB-50XG Talk?
- Solaris 7 Boot Panic
- IBM OS/2 1.x Programming Documentation Added
- PCI Voodoo
- Children of the Bus Wars
- Fixing a Graphics Ultra Pro
- Seagate ST-225: Just Wow
- Periscope Manuals
- Fixing an LAPC-I
- Playing Football
- ThinkPad PC Card Boot?
- So This Actually Works…
- Basement Finds
- Before OS/2 Was OS/2
- More CPUs in NT 3.x Workstation
- Windows NT 3.1 (and OS/2) Memory Detection
- NT 3.1 SMP
- 386 LOADALL
2015 43
- Missing Intel SDM Documents
- Lies, Damn Lies, and Wikipedia
- Intel OverDrive Part I: 486 OverDrive
- Intel 486 Errata?
- MS C 4.0 Documentation Added
- More on the C&T Super386
- The Forgotten 386
- More ISA VGA Benchmarks
- About Those Trident VGAs…
- Fast Unaccelerated VGA?
- The Nearly Ultimate 386 Board
- This Is How to Feed It
- The Vanishing Dream
- How To Feed This Board?
- 386 ZIF Socket Adapter
- Upcoming Fun
- Something Happened
- OPL3 Copies
- Summer Slowdown
- UINT32_C Macro Considered Harmful
- Broken Spigot
- 44-Voice MIDI on Yamaha OPL4
- Bad Month for Laptop Disks
- Do You Know This Sound Card?
- Sound Blaster 1.0 or 1.5?
- Intel 420TX Chipset
- Sound Blaster: The French Connection
- Sound Blaster DIAGNOSE and Disabled MPU-401
- sips To the Rescue
- OS/2 on ThinkPad T23 and T30
- SC-8820 Gripes
- IBM XENIX: One Step Forward, One Step Back
- The DOS 4.0 Shell Mouse Mystery
- Do You Know These Peripherals?
- What Is DXP44Q?
- Solaris 2.6, 7, and 8 Crashes on Pentium 4 and Later
- Digressions
- ThinkPad 701 Restore Using CF Media
- Demented Board
- Windows 3.0 DR 1.14, February 1989
- mtswslnk
- OS/2 Technical Library Scans
- Book Review: Inside Windows NT
2014 49
- Ladders and Dragons
- Curious Instructions
- Windows 8.1 Startup Bugcheck 0xC4
- ThinkPad 850 Hardware Maintenance Manual
- A Tale of Two Displays
- Original CEMM Unearthed
- Site Update
- Book Review: Unauthorized Windows 95
- Installing Windows 95 on SCSI in a VM
- Forward Compatibility, Landmines
- 386 Memory Managers and DMA
- Floating-Point Exceptions and DOS Extenders
- OS/2 Kernel Debugger and MVDM Interrupts
- IBM Blue Lightning: World’s Fastest 386?
- Semantic Differences, Microsoft v. Microsoft
- NT Video Miniport for VirtualBox, With Source Code
- Windows Presentation Manager Documentation
- OS/2 Programmer’s Toolkit
- Weekend Reading, OS/2 and Windows
- Careful with that Buffer…
- S3 Fraternal Twins
- Intel 287XL… From 1986? Or 1996?
- Floppy Capacity Math
- The IBM PC BIOS and Intel ISIS-II
- PC Tech Journal
- IBM Power Series Exotica
- Timing In Software Is Too Hard?
- Microsoft OS/2 1.3… But Which One?
- Have You Seen This Board?
- From the Annals of Branding
- OEM MS OS/2: 1987-1990
- Multitasking MS-DOS 4.0, Goupil OEM
- The ISA OSC Mystery
- 386 ZIF Socket?
- MS-DOS 1.1, 2.0 Source Code Released
- IBM OS/2 1.0 in a VM
- What’s in a Name?
- Surfing Modern Web With Ancient Browsers
- Kids These Days, Continued
- Soyo SY-4SAW2 Notes
- Untested Error Paths
- Soyo 4SAW2: Why So Slow?
- Butterfly Conservation
- Have You Ever Used One of These?
- Early PCI Board
- Two More TIGAs
- Another Vermont Microsystems Board
- Have You Seen These Cards?
- Apologies for the outage
2013 55
- Undocumented 8086 Opcodes
- Installing Oct ’91 NT from CD
- SMD Fun
- Fantasy History at Ars Technica
- IBM ThinkPad 755CD
- Dongle Bungle
- Cracking a ThinkPad 755C
- Don’t Let This Happen to You
- More on LOADALL and OS/2
- The Carolina Mystery
- LOADALL Strikes Again
- IBM ThinkPad Power Series 850
- Ctrl-Alt-Del Myths
- Taking Screenshots of OS/2 on ThinkPad 850
- OS/2 on ThinkPad 850
- The Central Point Backup Floppy Format
- Kids these days…
- The XDF Diskette Format
- Why Won’t IBM’s MSPS201.SYS Load?
- Detecting Floppy Drives and Media
- Detecting an Empty Drive… Or Not
- OS/2 2.0 LA and “Large” IDE Disks
- Twenty Years Ago Today…
- UNIX Alphabet Soup
- Preserving Floppies
- ATI mach8/mach32/early mach64 Documentation?
- BSD Buglets
- PC DOS Retro
- If you ENTER, you might not LEAVE
- Why I Don’t Want a Laptop with a Glued-In Battery
- DOS Goodies at bitsavers.org
- ISA bus 8514/A?
- The XGA Graphics Chip
- S3 Graphics Accelerators and the 8514/A
- The 8514/A Graphics Accelerator
- VIA Apollo vs. AGP 4x
- The Pin N33 Mystery and the History of Slockets
- R360 Correction
- The Tualatin Story
- The Ultimate Museum PC Update
- The Oldest OS/2 Executable In the Wild
- Virtualizing QNX 2
- Fixing Broken LINK4
- Multitasking MS-DOS 4.0 Lives
- The Ultimate Museum PC, Continued
- OS/2 2.1 National Language Versions
- The Ultimate Museum PC
- OS/2 Beta CDs (1994 and later)
- OS/2 Easter Eggs
- UnixWare 1.0 Personal Edition
- UNIX on the PC, 1989
- SCO UNIX 3.2v4.0 vs. IA-32 Semantics Changes
- The XENIX 2.2.3 Mystery, Continued
- Book Review: Linkers & Loaders
- The XENIX 386 2.2.3 Mystery
2012 45
- Master Builders of OS/2
- OS/2 for PowerPC Tidbits
- Windows NT BSOD Aclock Port
- Microsoft’s 1987 OS/2 Videos
- OS/2 1.0 Availability Announced 25 Years Ago
- IBM PC XENIX
- No comments in source code? Really?
- Why Windows NT from October 1992 refuses to install on modern CPUs
- Windows Update Fail
- OS/2 Library Expansion
- Book Review: DOS Internals
- IBM PS/2 Model 50 Keyboard Controller
- Book Review: Developing Applications Using DOS
- Why does Apple hate RSS?
- 86-DOS Was an Original
- Another witness against WordStar
- Book Review: Inside OS/2
- Phantom 3.0
- MacBook Pro with Retina display: What a letdown
- On a dark, rainy night in April 1985…
- Minor site updates and summer time
- Redirectors and DOS 3.0
- MS-DOS OAKs
- Early Microsoft Networks
- An old idea: x86 hardware virtualization
- Watcom Win386
- DOS boot hang update
- Solaris 2.5.1 and 2.6 crashes on modern Intel CPUs
- DOS 4.0, bum rap, and mismatched expectations
- NetWare for OS/2
- From a Feature to a Bug
- Operating System/2 announced 25 years ago
- 64-bit trouble with Solaris 10 U4 and earlier
- Video trouble with Solaris 10 GA and U1
- Lotus 1-2-3 R3 copy protection
- NT video miniport HD
- AVX support disrupts WoW64 debugging
- LAN Manager vs. Windows 7
- Undocumented VflatD
- Kernel Debugging with VirtualBox
- How to please WDCTRL
- Retro development with aclock
- What’s in a name… OS/2 or DOS?
- How to make sure your program doesn’t run on Windows 95
- DOS/V graphics text modes and scrolling
2011 34
- Jumpy PS/2 mouse in Enhanced mode Windows 3.x
- Simple Windows NT video miniport for VirtualBox
- Microsoft OS/2 1.0 user documentation
- Converting NT DDK/SDK PostScript documents to PDF
- OS/2 Warp installation pitfalls
- Is it so hard to document things?
- Running 1-2-3 R3 in a VM
- Need for Speed SE video glitch
- WordStar needs address wraparound?
- Who needs the address wraparound, anyway?
- IBM DOS 5.0 QBASIC hangs on non-IBM systems
- Hang with early DOS boot sector
- Happy 30th Birthday!
- The Danger of Knowing Too Much
- IBM PC/AT 8042 Keyboard Controller Commands
- Detecting floppy drive presence and type
- DOS boot sector, BPB, and the media descriptor byte
- Windows/386 2.01
- DOS Memory, Managers & Extenders, Part I
- The IHC Damage
- Interrupt 68h and EMM386
- Researching the history of PC computing
- OS/2 2.0 Comdex Fall ’91
- The floppy controller evolution
- Xenix 286 in a VM
- Installing OS/2 1.x in a VirtualBox VM
- The Fixed Disk Parameter Table
- Geometry Problems
- The PC floppy subsystem
- HIMEM.SYS, unreal mode, and LOADALL
- Will the real Real Mode please stand up?
- Display Drivers, NT and NeXTSTEP
- Display Drivers, OS/2 and 16-bit Windows
- Windows Presentation Manager