Two Stop Bits | glhaynes's comments

glhaynes 562 days ago | parent | on: How Windows Generates 8.3 File Names from Long Fil...
IMO this is a good example of why Microsoft deserved a lot of their success with Windows 95.
I was a big OS/2 fan at the time, but this is the sort of thing IBM was institutionally incapable of coming up with. Sure, OS/2 supported long file names… if you were on an HPFS file system that (practically) only OS/2 could read. But I'd guess the significant majority of non-corporate OS/2 users dual-booted with DOS. And, IIRC, files with long names were totally invisible to the otherwise superb DOS emulation. And I feel like I even remember some OS/2 programs having trouble with long names because their authors were more likely than not on FAT file systems. So it always seemed more like a "theoretical feature".
glhaynes 567 days ago | parent | on: Happy Holidays Everyone!
Merry Christmas to you and happy holidays to all! I've had fun here and am glad this site exists.
glhaynes 581 days ago | parent | on: Welcome to the recovered visual6502.org Wiki!
Just curious: why does the main visual6502.org page work but not the wiki?
glhaynes 602 days ago | parent | on: The Win32s compatibility list
How successful was Win32s? Put another way: if Win32s hadn’t been a thing, how would that have impacted the (extremely successful) 3.1->95->NT transition that Microsoft pulled off?
I was a kid at the time and interested in operating systems, but it always seemed like Win32s was kind of confusing, starting with the name that totally seems like a pluralization.
glhaynes 613 days ago | parent | on: The making of RoadBlasters
If you have a Sega Mega Drive/Genesis, check out the port to it. Pretty similar hardware so it’s very close to the arcade. Would have been an instabuy for me back in the day if I’d have even known it existed!
glhaynes 627 days ago | parent | on: Atari Lynx: Caught in the crossfire of 90s magazin...
Every few months I go down a rabbit hole and lose a whole evening to The Cutting Room Floor: https://tcrf.net/The_Cutting_Room_Floor
- qingcharles 627 days ago
  That's a great site, thank you!
  Sometimes the features aren't locked-out, it's just that no-one ever figured out how to access them. I think it was an NBA or NFL game a few days ago that someone found two new characters that were playable the whole time?
glhaynes 634 days ago | parent | on: CP/M for the 6502
I believe it's higher level. Note that there's precedent: CP/M-86, a port to the Intel 8086, existed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP/M-86
- dfarquhar 633 days ago
  Also there was a port to the Motorola 68000, CP/M-68K.
glhaynes 636 days ago | parent | on: The History of OS/2
>There is a difference between the Microsoft and IBM versions of OS/2 that clearly stems from Bill Gates’ feelings about the 286. In the Microsoft release should the kernel detect an Intel 80386, MS-DOS real mode applications would run via instructions to switch modes between real and protected. In the IBM version this didn’t happen. IBM only implemented the method employed for the 80286 which was to triple fault the CPU, trigger a shutdown cycle, have the motherboard reset the CPU, and have BIOS skip post and jump to a specified memory address immediately following the return of CPU execution. For retro enthusiasts, try to find Microsoft’s OS/2 for your 386.
I was an OS/2 user back in the day and have never heard about this difference! I was under the impression that IBM OS/2 and MS OS/2 were functionally identical. I wonder what difference this made for users.
- CWuestefeld 636 days ago
  That is interesting. Although I only ever used the MS version on 286. This was the very first version of OS/2, the "text mode only" version mentioned in the article, when Presentation Manager (the windowing GUI) was a separate program.
  At the time, I worked on an office suite called Enable, which featured strong spreadsheet, word processing, and dbase-like database applications. Windows existed, but wasn't successful yet, and for some time we were explicitly testing for compatibility with OS/2.
  Later on, at the time OS/2 2 and Warp came out, I was working at IBM. The frustration there, among the people who cared at all, was palpable. They really believed they had a superior product, and largely blamed IBM management and marketing organizations for its failure.