You had to add a “DEVICE=” line in CONFIG.SYS to load HIMEM.SYS after that, so it was hardly “built in”. It was indeed a separate driver. EMS was handled through EMM386.EXE.
4 Likes
To paraphrase Lovecraft: “That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even DOS may die.”
6 Likes
I still own an X40. I don’t know why I still keep it, as I’ve cycled through enough laptops now to be able to use a much newer one as my SSH-client machine. I think there’s something about the tactility of it. Hard to explain.
1 Like
“Built in” as in it was included with DOS. (I remember having to configure that crap by hand. Damn am I glad those days are long over). From around 1991 on, it was included in the box, no need to go ferreting out a separate download.
Easier than manually configuring what followed (and there are times when that becomes necessary when troubleshooting). I remember the usual DOS CONFIG.SYS settings well - around '95, we (DEC) were supporting DOS, Win 3.1, WfW 3.11 and Win95 as a Microsoft outsource.
Funny logic you have there. If you can replace it with another file, perhaps 3rd party, then it isn’t built-in.
1 Like
I instantly recognised it as a 600 series.
I also had a 600X, which survived being in a car crash that totalled the car. It was on the passenger seat when a Volvo pulled out of a side street right into the path of my first car, a Fiat Punto.
The Thinkpad bounced off the dashboard and ended up behind the back seats. It survived without a scratch. The Punto was another story, the collision with the Volvo practically vaporised it.
2 Likes
probably built for the college market. Space is at a premium in most dorms.
That why you need a PCMCIA hardware dvd decoder. 
I used to have one…
I recall there being “drivers” for certain pieces of hardware that you had to load into memory BEFORE you loaded your game or app. your autoexec.bat, config.sys, and himem.sys would all be tweaked out with mouse, graphics, and sound executable or sys files to get everything working together if you were lucky…
you had to typically manually run a “driver” for even something as simple as a mouse. Basically if you wanted support for any piece of hardware you added you would need to run something to make it usable, aka a driver, DOS had almost nothing like that baked in and very little was standardized.
In fact you can still get the DOS Sound Blaster drivers here.
oh wow, trip down memory lane, i had ALMOST forgotten about WFW… 
2 Likes
I still have one of these in my closet, I hung onto it for so long because my older scanner wouldn’t work with my Mac (so I’d pull them both out, scan images, shuffle onto a thumb drive.) Of course I took it out recently and it was completely dead, wouldn’t boot up, so it might be time to move on and get a new scanner.
I think that accurately describes windows 10 in 2017…
You’re working on that very important document i notice. Well fuck you, i’m restarting haha…
2 Likes
Thanks to Windows 10, little has changed on that front. 
I still have a T22 and a T30 collecting dust… but the T61 is still usable with an SSD and the Middleton BIOS hack (to give 3 Gb/s SATA that was gimped to 1.5 by the stock BIOS). My latest daily-driver laptop is an X201 Tablet (with an i7), and even though it’s over eight years old (bought used for $cheap), is still a very nice system. The pen-based tablet mode doesn’t do much for me, but I’ve found it useful on occasion.
yeah, i think it was a huge mistake when OSX, er MacOS, completely dropped all built in TWAIN support, same time they added code signing. means suddenly 80-90% of scanners don’t work on OSX without new signed drivers. funny thing is they all work fine out of the box with windoze. hurray apple.
I have a really nice scanner that i have to keep a windows laptop to run. a USB TWAIN scanner is a perfectly usable piece of hardware that is now rendered mostly useless for Mac users. Cannon ported a few of their scanner drivers to the new OS, but most are now dead.
Unless space is a premium, aren’t you better off getting a desktop? Sure, laptops have made tremendous strides in the past few years, but let’s face it-- most people interested in old machines are in interested in games. And laptops rarely have the power to play games at their best. Laptop screens were inferior to CRTs. Laptop graphics were cut down enormously from desktop equivalents. The sound chip sets couldn’t match a card of that vintage.
If it’s a collectible laptop (Powerbook 100, etc) that’s valuable in spite of it’s inferior specs to contemporary desktops, sure, go ahead. But a quite ordinary laptop?
Yes, they do. In many cases, hardware cards (especially sound cards) came with their own device driver files - .SYS (usually) files that were loaded and initialized at boot time by being included in CONFIG.SYS.
The hardware could use the upper 384k of address space (above 640k) to address its own built-in RAM or ROM, and could install memory-resident code that hooked into system calls, so that application programs could use the new hardware by making standard system calls.
This was not the same as a TSR.
TSRs were conventional applications (.EXE, or, more commonly, .COM) that could leave chunks of memory-resident code hooked into the system interrupt calls, much like a device driver, using the standard “Terminate and Stay Resident” system call, but had to use undocumented tricks to avoid re-entering non-reentrant system calls when triggered by interrupts.
(DOS had no native provision for multitasking, but included a multitasking print spooler that used those undocumented hacks to prevent problems. We all learned how to make TSRs by disassembling the print spooler and figuring out its tricks.)
There’s some overlap - some devices used TSRs as device drivers, and some device drivers were .EXE files, but device driver files for specific add-on hardware devices were quite common.
1 Like
according to this:
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Problem_with_broken_sound_on_some_ThinkPads
the 600x can emulate a Soundblaster Pro in DOS.
In March 2001 drkoop.com laid me off and a Latitude CS was more or less part of my severance package. In 2005 I gave it (plus a PCMCIA WiFi card) to a friend. At that point I had an external optical drive for it, but there was a hardware defect between the drive and the laptop itself, so I couldn’t upgrade it to XP via the normal route at the time.
I feel like I remember trying to put the hard drive in an external controller and ghost XP onto it, but this may be something I tried with a different machine in 2006. Wondering if there was a way to upgrade the Latitude in 2005 without an optical drive?
Some n00bs don’t know the struggle of tweaking config.sys to get enough memory free for the games. Ever deal with a mouse driver? cdrom driver? scanner driver? probably didn’t even use token ring networks or coax ethernet
3 Likes
Ahh the good old days… I don’t miss that shit at all.
True fun story… hey my caps lock and ctrl keys are being screwy. hmm not the keyboard. not the system board… office mates machine is working fine… oh this config.sys line needs to be before the other ones.
Not even documented at the vendor… yet.
Though it did save me headache a year later when I was doing dos server and desktop support at Boeing.
[b]$20 for one of the best laptops money could buy 20 years ago: is it worth it?[/b]
I checked the specs on C|NET – you pbly want to budget for a battery:
Recharge Time 3 hour(s) ... Run Time (Up To) 3 sec
On the plus side there’s no camera, so you don’t have to spend $10 or more in a gizmo to block it.
(But really, Rob – every $20 you spend on stuff like this is just another $20 that’s not going toward a good stereo system! ; -)
