I just realized I got some valid win9x discs laying about. Not that I could patch the system but it would be fun to see if I could load it up on my currently running linux machine. Probably too new for that but I don’t have an XP disc in my stash.
Nice story! I keep a copy of a book, “Undocumented DOS: Programmer’s Guide to Reserved MS-DOS Functions and Data Structures” (Andrew Schulman and friends). It’s a fascinating resource for beautifully arcane and presently useless information.
The 600 keyboard is one of the best ever to appear on any laptop. However, if I was buying a vintage ThinkPad now I’d get a 701c. (I replaced a 701 with a 560 - which I still l have, and still boots - but the 701c was far cooler.)
Operating systems can be… fun. I recall getting involved with a Warp Server case that was as wonky as anything I’ve seen.
Groupe Desjardins in Montreal bought a bunch of ProLiant ML370 G1 servers to try out - they were an IBM shop, but the IT boys wanted to get out of lock-in to a single vendor. They ran OS/2 Warp Server on their systems, and I don’t doubt they were seeing the writing on the wall. Naturally enough, they ran French Warp Server.
Problem was, when they went to use the OS/2 utility to make their recovery floppies (yes, this was in the first years of the millennium), the 370s would lock up tighter than a drum. Not something you’d expect from a relatively simple disk utility on a fairly solid server model running a protected mode O/S. (The ML370s were really the next generation of 1600s, and 1600s were probably the best workhorses we made back then.)
The case gets booted up to my department, because front line support and field service are having no luck at all. There were three of us in the Hull office, and because it was close to home, so to speak, we got the case rather than Houston (same team, two locations, handling all of North America). Unfortunately for Desjardins, they got the BS artist. He sets up one of our office 370s with Warp Server, gets to the same patch levels (I forget IBMspeak for that), and can’t duplicate the problem. He does the same thing with a captured server from the customer, so essentially tells the customer to update everything, which they’ve already done…
Desjardins starts to get antsy. The IT boys there want to pitch our servers to management, but can’t very well while this problem is hanging fire, and they are having absolutely no difficulty locking up their systems at will: it happens every time they use the utility. The case gets booted to me. I get them to send me their media. I can duplicate the problem on the captured server; I can duplicate it on our own server. The difference? Our copy of Warp was English. The English version never freezes.
Clean boot? No difference, so I start swapping out French system files for English. This is easier to do with Warp than an NT-based O/S - the configuration files are all text, so you get an easily perused list of drivers and so forth. Eventually I get a French-localised setup where all of the system files are from the English distro - kernel, drivers, everything. Boots up and works fine… until I run the wretched floppy utility (which I also swapped). I’m tearing out my hair. I even end up heading to Complexe Desjardins to see if I can get some clues from the lads there. Nice visit to my old hometown, but I really didn’t have much opportunity to paint the town red.
Eventually IBM put out a patch roll-up, and our firmware engineers put out an updated BIOS at roughly the same time, and the combination of the two “automagically” fixed the problem. That’s the kicker - you needed both to fix the problem, and I know damned well that neither Big Blue nor Houston were looking at fixing an obscure problem involving the floppy utility in a specific localisation of Warp Server on this particular server. IBM wasn’t about to worry about French Warp Server on a non-Blue model, Houston wasn’t going to worry particularly about French Warp (which was a real niche market by then), and neither patch fixed the problem on its own anyway.
I wrote up an advisory.
As for the customer, they were happy enough - the G2 model came out while this was going on, and it had no problem whatsoever… <sigh>
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For American software, it always works in English locales.
That’s why certain customer bases almost always buy from local vendors, even though the local vendor’s products are built on insanely dumb tech. I honestly can’t blame them; you look at their downtime, and it works out in their favor hedging their bets that way. You’d think American software companies would learn.
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Yeah, but this failed and was fixed in the most head-scratching fashion. I was booted the case not just because I can speak French, but because I was our group’s operating system specialist. I used to get booted the Netware and Red Hat cases as well. (Linux server distros were just starting to make a dent in the market.)
A problem with a stack overrun that was being revealed by localisation strings? Possibly, but the damned server needed the BIOS update as much as the Warp roll-up. Other servers? Absolutely no problem with French Warp at the customer’s patch level. And, as I say, I was eventually running bog-standard English Warp in all but name and localisation (but English Warp out of the box had no problem).
That case dwelt in some really obscure intersection of the hardware and software.
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I love stuff like this.
I don’t like actually doing it mind you, because it’s typically painful. I’ve got a IIGS with a failed monitor I’m trying to restore, and I’m not sure I’m going to be able to restore the monitor. IIGS works like a champ, though.
(Now if I could only get the Pineapple clone to work…)
Getting 32-bit builds isn’t terribly tricky; but if you don’t have a CPU with PAE support you may have an unpleasant time of it. PAE itself isn’t too useful on a device that has no possible way of having more than 4GBs of RAM installed; but pretty much all the recent 32 bit kernels expect the CPU to support it.
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That’s what BSD is for. I found a G3 Macbook on the street in very good condition and OpenBSD was the only distro I could find that still has official support for that architecture. A lot of ports won’t compile for it any more — it’s near-useless as a general-purpose laptop, but for a lot of specific use cases it does just fine. I imagine they’ll hang on to 32-bit x86 support even longer than old PowerPC.
Used one of those at work years ago. Looked up the invoice: they paid $10k for it (Canadian).
I’ve still got a p2 Tecra that works fine. It is astonishingly robust.
To any fans of old Thinkpads: I love the T530. Its the last one before they went to that heinous Mac style touchpad (so close and yet so far). I get them on ebay off lease in the $250 range. I absolutley love them, and for that price I can get one for each place I need one. I’m typing on one now from Ubuntu, but it works well with Win7 too.
Forget the stereo system; it could have gone toward finally getting that safe opened!
Oh well, at least we’ll always have Rob Ford. 
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Debian developer here. The upcoming stable release (Debian 9 “stretch”) will still run on any 686-class processor; no PAE required. (We finally dropped support for 586-class processors.) We don’t have any plans to drop 32-bit support.
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