There have been several attempts to make an unencumbered version of Windows. ReactOS is perhaps the best-known, although you could argue Wine and its progeny, while not operating systems in the strictest sense of the word, might be the most successful. Joining the fray is Free95, a GPL-3.0 system that, currently, can run simple Windows […]
Over the course of the 1990s we saw huge developments in the world of PC graphics cards, going from little more than the original IBM VGA standard through super VGA and then so-called “Windows accelerator” cards which brought the kind of hardware acceleration the console and 16 bit home computer users had been used to […]
Should you be able to brick a keyboard just by writing a driver to flash the lights on it? We don’t think so either. [TheNotary] got quite the shock when embarking on a seemingly straightforward project to learn C++ on the x86-64 architecture with Windows and sent it straight to Silicon Heaven with only a […]
We no longer use floppy disks on the vast majority of computers, but a recent Old New Thing blog post from Microsoft sheds light on one of their possible unexpected legacies. It seems Windows disk cache items expire after two seconds, and as the post explains this has its origin in the development of MS-DOS […]
Not every piece of technology or software can succeed, even with virtually unlimited funding and marketing. About the same number of people are still playing Virtual Boys as are using Google Plus, for example. In recent memory, the Windows Phone occupies the same space as these infamous failures, potentially because it was late to the […]
Windows 10 — the operating system people love to hate or hate to love. Even if you’re a Linux die-hard, it is a fair bet that your workplace uses it and that you have friends and family members that need help forcing you to use Windows at least some times. If you prefer a command […]
The humble serial interface has been around for a very long time, and will stay with us in one form or other for the foreseeable future. It was easy enough to keep track of back in the days when a computer only had one, or perhaps two COM ports. However, in this day and age […]
Microsoft has released the code for the Calculator app. This move is the latest in Microsoft’s efforts to capitalize on the Open Source community. Previous efforts have been the Open Sourcing of an extremely old version of DOS, and shoehorning Linux into Windows somehow in a way that’s marginally more user-friendly than spinning up a […]