Nina Kalinina has been on an absolute roll lately, diving deep into VisiOn, uncovering Bellcore MGR, installing Linux on a PC-98 machine, and much more. This time, she’s ported Windows 2 to run on a machine it was never supposed to run on.
I bought my first Apricot PC about three years ago, when I realised I wanted an 8086-based computer. At the time, I knew nothing about it and simply bought it because it looked rad and the price was low. I had no idea that it was not IBM PC-compatible, and that there were very few programs available for it.
I have been on a quest to get a modern-ish word processor and spreadsheet program for it ever since. Which eventually made me “port” Windows 2 on it. In this post, I will tell you the story of this port.
↫ Nina Kalinina
To get Windows 2 working on the Apricot, Kalinina had to create basic video, keyboard, and mouse drivers, allowing Windows 2 to boot into text mode. I wasn’t aware of this, but Windows 2 in text mode is funky: it’s rendering all the text you would see in a full Windows 2 user interface, just without any of the user interface elements. Further developing the video driver from scratch turned out to be too big of an undertaking for now, so she opted to extract the video driver from Windows 1 instead – which required a whole other unique approach. The keyboard and mouse drivers were extracted from Windows 1 in the same way.
The end result is a fully working copy of Windows 2, including things like Word and Excel, which was the original goal in the first place. There aren’t many people around doing stuff like this, and it’s great to see such very peculiar, unique itches being scratched. Even if this is only relevant for exactly one person, it’s still been worth it.
