Someone asked me if I could describe how to perform DOS memory allocation. It's not the first time, either. It's a nearly lost art. To try to illustrate that it's a non-trivial job, I decided to do something simpler: describe how DOS allocates drive letters ( Read more... )

My previous post was an improvised and unplanned comment. I could have structured it better, and it caused some confusion on https://lobste.rs/Read more... )

Windows NT was allegedly partly developed on OS/2. Many MSers loved OS/2 at the time -- they had co-developed it, after all. But there was more to it than that.

Windows NT was partly based on OS/2. There were 3 branches of the OS/2 codebase:

[a] OS/2 1.x - at IBM’s insistence, for the 80286. The mistake that doomed OS/2 and IBM’s presence in the PC ( Read more... )