OS/2 Chess 3.0

Sun, 08 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I was recently working with OS/2 Warp 4 (as one does) when I noticed that it includes a built-in chess game. I play chess from time to time and thought that this would be a great opportunity to teach “the machine” a lesson, especially with everything happening with AI right now. I mean, this game is literally 30 years old.

It did not go well. I played three games and I lost three games. It seems that “casual chess player” is no match for a 1996 chess game. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised: IBM (the company behind this game) went on to build Deep Blue and defeat the World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov the following year (1997).

SQL Server 1.0

Sat, 07 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

It’s 1989. dBASE IV was released last year and while its position in the market is declining, it still leads with a healthy 63% market share across PC and Macintosh. SQL is becoming a standard (SQL-89) and databases are moving to a client-server model. Microsoft, in a 3-way alliance with Sybase and Ashton-Tate (see more details here), just released SQL Server 1.0.

It’s 2026. And I want to take a look at what SQL Server 1.0 looked like. If you want to do it yourself:

Blog on Benjamin Pagani

OS/2 Chess 3.0

SQL Server 1.0