Vintage Computer Info Site & Blog

As you know for sure, LBA (logical block addressing) comes in two flavors, the early 28bit LBA implementation and the later LBA 48bit.LBA is not implemented for early PCs (but approx. since Intel 80386 CPU PCs raised), and unfortunately also later sold PCs have often only 28bit BIOS support.This is also mentioned on several web […]

Ontrack Disk Manager can be used with hard disk vendor branding, but it doesn’t matter if you own a drive from this vendor. E.g. if you find >a version 6.03 with „Conner Peripherals“ branding<, it can be used with a Seagate drive 😉 This is the main menu: And this happens after pressing return: Remember, […]

All big numbers are „Bytes“. Nothing else loaded, no keyboard driver a.s.o. MS-DOS 1.25 : 642784 english MS-DOS 2.00 : 628688 english MS-DOS 2.11 : 630784 english MS-DOS 3.00 : 616720 english MS-DOS 3.10 : 616800 english MS-DOS 3.20 : 609984 english MS-DOS 3.30 : 600368 english MS-DOS 3.31 : 599488 english (Compaq DOS, first […]

Because I was still searching for a small hard disk imaging software which can run on a IBM PC/XT also (no need for EMS or XMS, no need for a better processor than 8088), and can be used with a parallel ZIP drive (e.g. with PalmZIP for PC/XTs), but not finding anything useful, I developed […]

To have some new examples for x86 assembler programming, I’ve created also one sample with a small benchmark program, which should work with old PCs like the IBM PC/XT. This program, created with an assembler source for MASM 5.10, will measure basically for a defined period of time (5 seconds, or in 1/18.2 sec ticks […]

Most of you know „Norton Ghost“, even more often known as „Symantec Ghost“. But it wasn’t published by Symantec first. Binary Research started to sell Version 1.0 (1.1) in 1996, followed by Version 2.0 (2.07) and Version 3.0 (3.1) – latest minor version in brackets. The first 2 versions runs even with an IBM XT […]

I just want to point out that there is a site and blog you must visit: The „Computer History Museum“ logo: The blog is still actualized regularly, and points out many historical facts beside of other more ore less computer related facts but also opinions. The site itself does NOT only shows vintage computer technology, […]

Full with additional links and infos, more than just a vintage computer museum entry: http://retrocomputing.altervista.org/m20/m20.html http://www.retrocomputing.tk/olivettim20.html To get an impression from what I’m talking – here’s an image from an M20 machine, running CP/M-8000: The machine was selled in 1982 with PCOS (that’s an operating system with cryptic commands, even more cryptic than CP/M was)… […]

Not really bad for 1991, this notebook with a monochrome LCD VGA display has a 130MB hard disk drive and 8 MBytes RAM. The build in video graphics adapter is a Cirrus Logic GD610. It has 2 serial interface ports, 1 parallel port and one external keyboard socket/connector – but no PCMCIA or even USB […]