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Getting a Classic PC Working After 25 Years?
tunersedge writes "Yesterday I dug out of my parents' basement a PC they had bought brand new in 1984: Epson Equity I personal computer; 512K RAM; 82-key keyboard; 2 (count 'em!, 2) 5.25" floppy disk drives; 13' RGB monitor (with contrast/brightness knobs); handy on/off switch; healthy 25-year-old yellowed plastic; absolutely no software. (My mom ran a pre-school, and they used it to keep records and payroll. I cut my programming teeth on this thing. GW-Basic was my friend. Kings Quest screens took 2 minutes to load when you walked into a new one.) When I resurrected this machine I pulled the case off, dusted out a little, and plugged it in. It actually fired up! I'm stoked, except the disks we had are missing. What I'm looking to do is either buy some old working disks with whatever I can find (MS-DOS 3.22, GW-Basic, whatever), or try and recreate some using a USB-based floppy drive and some modern software. Has anyone tried to resurrect a PC this old before?"
Ebay is your friend!
i found some old dos disks at a friend's house
Well it's not *that* old, it's not like anyone has or ever will need more than 512K of ram...
I've been wanting one of these for years... they need to make one that's compatible with all systems, not just IBM Compatible. I wonder if one of the numerous C64 floppy adapters (that uses parallel) would let you write to IBM format.
For DOS, I'm pretty sure FreeDOS would work.
FreeDOS probably would boot on this machine.
I actually know the machine you're talking about - except I had a HDD. I know for a fact the thing will run MS-DOS 5.0.x
I know that may be a joke to you but call up Epson or submit a ticket explaining to them your situation. Who knows? Maybe they have a storeroom with old floppies lying around so you can get the original software back? I imagine those disks wore out all the time. Just ask them if they have any of the original software for that model lying around. That would be amazing support if they did.
They do host the manual that indicates you have a parallel port and a RS-232C serial port to play with and also something that looks like expansion slots designed for peripherals. Good luck and have fun!
My work here is dung.
get yourself a FIRST POST! BOO YAH
Hello good sir, would you like a bucket of fail? No? *sighs*
Buckets of fail here, get your bucket of fail here.
Buckets of fail for sale.
Back on topic...I know the answer to the question I'm about to ask is going to be "because I can", but seriously, why bother with this? Not trolling, just asking a (in my mind) legit question. What could you do with this computer that would be worth it? Say you get it working, then what? Now you can point at it when someone comes over to your house and say "That computer is 25 years old!" They can say "so what can you do on it?" "Nothing".
Sent from your iPad.
Yesterday I dug out of my parents' basement a PC they had bought brand new in 1984: Epson Equity I personal computer
Just admit it, it was under your bed wasn't it? At least now it's on that thing you call a table.
"but money is the God of Algiers & Mahomet their prophet." - Rich. O'Bryen June 8th 1786
Perhaps using FreeDOS might help. You could create boot disks if you still have a 5 1/4" spare drive and put it in a modern computer. Good luck.
Thought they make them, they are probably all 1.2MB ones, which use a much smaller write head and might not be easily readable on the old 360KB drives. YMMV and it can't hurt to test. Good luck!
I've never tried to resurrect a "PC" that old. I did try to resurrect a 1981 Osborne 1, though, as well as an old Kaypro, both predating the "PC" by a yiddle. CP/M, yeah baby!
Liberal? Conservative? Compare perspectives at Left-Right
Replace the 5.25" floppy disk drives with 3 1/2 inch and download DOS from some site. As to what you can run on it, you may have better luck with one of the smaller Linux distros, like Damn Small Linux
davecb5620@gmail.com
Getting these things up and running is no surprise to me. It seems that they used quality stuff in them days. I have loads of these oldies that haven't been booted for 10+ years and upon plugging them in they start off as if nothing ever happened. Drives with a ST-506 interface in particular seem to be of an indistructible kind of quality-make. Feel free to contact me for disks, or as stated; check eBay of contact Bruce Damer of the DigiBarn [http://www.digibarn.com/].
Microsoft is claiming that Windows 7 will work on such a machine, if you can wait a little while.
Slap Vista on that baby and it'll run like a champ.
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has it's limits" - Albert Einstein
Cool, it is very educational to work with old computer's
Nice things to do: :)
- add extra ram by using an ISA memory expansion card (up to 2MB !!!), running windows 3.0 would then be possible !
- 200mb+ IDE/MFM drive (the latter where mostly smaller though and a bit hard to get)
- ISA VGA card
- ISA Soundblaster
- ISA ethernetcard
- run Arachne and surf the WEB !!!!!!!!!!!!, heheh yes you can this baby on slashdot
- a lot more upgrade options, FPU etc.. etc..
Greetings and Enjoy and good luck hunting down Dos software
There is a store called "Weird Stuff" in california that would probably have some old disks. They have literally hundreds and hundreds of old old stuff. I can't really explain it all here, but try googling the store, give them a call, and let 'em look for you.
A whopping 120 characters to take your mind off topic. Tested in MS Word.
My parents dug up an Amstrad PC1512 while tidying their house and called me up asking me what to do with it. I said throw it away. They said isn't it worth something? I laughed.
This might help with that part of the restoration (cheap and DIY)...
"Murphy was an optimist" - O'Toole's commentary on Murphy's Law
http://www.bootdisk.com/
Personally, I'm more impressed with the 13 foot monitor. I'm assuming its some sort of front projection device. Wonder what the resolution is? :)
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
I'm assuming this is either an 8088 or 8086 chip. Many people learned embedded programming on these chips, and there are probably millions of them in use in embedded systems around the world.
This sounds like a great opportunity to program your own embedded OS for the machine. Get a PROM burner and your favorite compatible compiler and have some fun! You're a programmer, and you cut your teeth on this PC. Learn another aspect of programming with it.
Nobodies Prefect
Tidbits for Techs Technology Blog
He could attempt to do something totally pointless with it and post to twitter from it! :D
- http://www.milkme.co.uk
I got a TRS-80 working but try to find the BIG floppies for it, and you're headed to eBay and similar places quite a bit.
stuff |
I am posting this from an older PC than that, you insensitive clod!
Also, first post. It took a long time to load the page over my 1200 baud modem.
It will probably be the best upgrade you have ever done!
FreeDOS has been discussed here before, at length. It should work on your machine well enough to get you started. There are a lot of resources available related the FreeDOS efforts; so, you may be able to find a lot of what you are looking for.
The USB drives likely won't work with this old machine -- but you now that are I'm assuming you're talking about creating the floppies. I haven't seen a 5 1/4" external for some time... You may need to put a 3 1/2" disk into the old machine initially.
I think they have been going for "funny", as in First Power-On Self Test.
But I agree with your "wtf is the point?", I can understand an older Amiga/Pentium system, 50/75/100MHz etc, they can actually do something, play media, file storage, work as an advanced router, etc or be "fun" enough for a kids (like 5-8 year old) PC.
I guess it must be the difference between ages that causes someone to think that a cruddy DOS machine is actually something worth bringing back up.
Me, I cut my teeth on Radio Shack Model 4 machines, quickly discovering how much more software I could run once I got Montezuma CP/M running on it and downloading public domain software from the local (multi-user) CP/M bulletin board system.
Once the actual PC came along, I think just about anyone who had run a CP/M system saw it for what it was: a crappy copy that took none of the good from CP/M and just about all of the bad, running on a machine that supported a bit more RAM (not 640K yet, RAM was way too expensive) and a slightly faster processor.
I'm sure users of any of several pre-PC architectures would feel the same way - that the PC came along and the party stopped, kind of like that kid everybody hated at school showing up to a (previously fun) private party with a few of his friends.
Hi!
What an awesome find! You can actually download all the software you'd ever want for the system here - http://www.vetusware.com/ - which is a website with hundreds of abandoned software titles for download free. They do have various versions of MS-DOS, which I'd suggest MS-DOS 5.0 or higher because I still have nightmares of edlin *cringe*. They do have MS-DOS 6.22 for download along with GWBasic, QBasic, Borland C++ for DOS, etc for development. I assume since you said the system is from 1984 that's it's an 8086 or 8088 which rules out Windows 3.x.
After years of using TRS-80 systems I moved to an 8088 XT clone in 1990 running MS-DOS 3.3, and as you that's where I really started learning to code with GWBasic. About 6 years ago I had some stuff in my closet shift one evening and that old system fell from the top shelf to the floor never to boot again. I wish I still had it, but a few years ago I did pull out an old 486SX system I picked up used in college (around 1996) and played with some of these old DOS languages and games.
Have fun though... so many people cast away these old systems as boat anchors, but they're awesome to work with if you have some patience.
Sweeeeeet.
http://www.epson.com/cgi-bin/Store/support/supDetail.jsp?oid=14213
Gotta hand it to Epson for their corporate memory and support abilities... Someone else mentioned contacting them to try and get your hands on some disks but now I'm thinking that might actually work...
I wonder what standard the internal HDD uses? I don't think ATA-1 showed up until '86 or 87... I was thinking you could pull the drive and plunk an image down onto it, but that might not be a viable option.
Find out if your epson's got DD or HD 5 1/4 drives, and don't mix the two ever! a disk formatted with a HD drive will never work right with a DD drive again!
As far as images of disks and abandonware, google is your friend, I think you can *cough* still find images of boot disks for dos 5 and below just fine for the 5 1/4's (although there's nothing stopping you from running 6.22 on that machine)... The next thing you need to do is find out if you've got 360kb or 1.2mb floppy drives... Then find an older floppy cable that has the old edge style floppy connector and either pull one off the epson or find one elsewhere to attach to your PC and go into bios to see if it's an option (most likely 360kb). Then you'll need some blank 360k floppies.. I usually snag those at goodwills when I see them, but I am sure ebay is an option too..... if you want to go the 3 1/2 route though, find out if that sucker will support a 1.44mb drive, it's as easy as finding the drive, putting a newer style (or a double type) floppy cable in and setting it up...
HOWEVER if memory serves me, those epson's bios utility was on a floppy so your mileage may vary.
My 1979 TRS-80 model 1 still works. As does my '81 CoCo.
What you need to do is think old.
There are some 8 bit ISA network cards and 8 bit SCSI cards. Now to find an old SCSI hard drive (really old Macintosh). As for floppy drives, buy a 3.5" floppy (Fry's Electronics), a 5.25" to 3.5" adapter, and drop it in there.
Look around Goodwill or Salvation Army, they might have some stuff in there. Same with some older churches; they usually have shit sitting in a dark room gathering dust because some grandma willed it to the church.
As for the operating system, if you have an MSDN subscription, you can download DOS 6.22, or go FreeDOS.
After you get it working, you should definitely compare to a modern-day, name-brand computer! You can compare specs and then you can do a write up and then you can put it online and then you can post it to slashdot so we can all enjoy how clever and awesome you are!
I'm still looking for CP/M for my old Osborne 1.
I went to school for programming, and I've only been out for a year, so I'm still pretty new to all this. But what on Earth does "Cut your teeth" mean?
You need to upgrade the RAM to 640 KB. Generally Radio Shack has some SIPPs you can add to the motherboard to add the last 128 KB.
You will need to find a Double density 3.5 floppy drive with a Card edge adaptor. This will allow you to use double density 3.5 floppies in the computer. (High Density will not work.)
You can network this be getting an 8-bit NIC that has a BNC and AUI port, then adding an AUI to UTP tranciever, but you can't use DHCP with it. The WATTCP stack for Dos will require a static IP.
If the video card is in an ISA slot, (and some times even it it isn't.) get a 16 bit ISA Trident VGA Card. This will give you VGA, EGA and CGA support. You can then plug the Computer into a standard monitor.
An operating system should be like a light switch... simple, effective, easy to use, and designed for everyone.
I'd like my operating system to have more than two possible settings. Operating systems are complex because the world is complex.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Hi Try out ELKS http://elks.sourceforge.net/ and Movitz LISP kernel http://common-lisp.net/project/movitz/ on your machine. Both are excellent.
At work we have PC's much older than that, running manufacturing equipment. If any of them break down, I have a whole room full of old PC's that I could simply search for parts. Eventually we'll run out of parts (the equipment need ISA bus to operate), but at this rate, we're good for another 25 years or so.
http://www.vintagecomputing.com/forum/ These guys have a lot of experience with knowing where old stuff is today and keeping stuff like that working. One of thousands of places to check out online.
If you want to mock an actual comment from the almighty one, I prefer "What's a network?"
++ Say to Elrond "Hello.".
Elrond says "No.". Elrond gives you some lunch.
"I've said some stupid things and some wrong things, but not that. No one involved in computers would ever say that a certain amount of memory is enough for all time ... I keep bumping into that silly quotation attributed to me that says 640K of memory is enough. There's never a citation; the quotation just floats like a rumor, repeated again and again." http://groups.google.com/group/alt.folklore.computers/msg/99ce4b0555bf35f4?pli=1
and the boxes of software mean I can play Sim City although without the manual the ancient DRM causes my city to get destroy after 10 minutes.
Sad? No, actually it's annoying. Bill Gates never actually said what you think he said.
I have a number of old computers from days gone by, stashed in a closet here. Several of them still work fine. I especially enjoy firing up my 1992 Zeos 486 DX2-66 from time to time. This was my workhorse for years, came with Windows 3.1. I jacked up the RAM and HD, and it ran Windows 95 quite well. Built like a tank!
I also have an original Osborne 1, a 1989 Zenith SuperSport, a 1997 Micron 200 MHz Pentium MMX, an HP Pavilion PIII 500MHz, and a Vaio PIII 500MHz. The magic smoke leaked out of the Zenith long ago, and it doesn't work any more, and the Vaio boots maybe 50% of the time, but the rest of 'em still work as well as they ever did.
I think I'll fire up the Zeos this afternoon for old time's sake! If I do, I'll post a message from it...
and an XT clone isn't one of them.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
I know I will be modded troll or something but I was just amazed that you can find an actual manual by googling! It's probably useless but anyway, kudos to EPSON.
(USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
On an Abandonware site somewhere...
Sad that it's based on an actual comment from the almighty one in Microsoft
Actually, Gates never said that. http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/1997/01/1484
First, ignore all of the 'why' and 'useless' remarks. It's obvious that, for whatever reason, you've decided to have fun with your antique computer. As an Apple II collector, I sure as hell sympathize.
Second, your best bet is to purchase some manner of system disks from eBay. You probably even have ISA slots that could host an IDE controller so you could load a big ole 100-megabyte hard drive full of Sierra warez and maybe even make your own creations with Borland Turbo C. Have patience. Getting all the necessary tools to get antiques running again can take months. But make no mistake, you can get that thing on the Internet and/or running tons of warez off your local network with enough time and elbow grease.
Enjoy the computing that makes you happy, and remember that Lotus 123 on that beast will probably recalculate a spreadsheet just as fast, if not faster, than Excel running on the very latest dual-Xeon beast.
Well, an Equity I+, anyway. I don't remember what the "+" means. I know mine has the Hercules card and high res mono monitor. Probably dead.
Issues you'll run into:
360k floppies can't be written on a 1.2MB floppy drive and then read in a 360k drive, generally. You're best bet to write floppies that can be read by the 360k drive is to move the drive to a newer PC (something with an ISA bus probably has 5.25" floppy connectors) and image them there.
Floppy disks don't last very long, so any stashes you might locate are unlikely to be readable. Maybe if they've been stored under ideal conditions the whole time.
I tried to archive the contents of my old floppies associated with this machine 10-15 years ago, and I couldn't scrape all the bits off. I lost the WordStar executable, sadly. (I may have gotten good OS install floppy images, though.)
I don't know if the BIOS can handle newer hardware, like a 720k or 1.2MB floppy drive, or an IDE controller. If you have the MFM controller, you could transplant that into a newer ISA machine and image the hard drive from there.
I would be willing to sell you mine if it would help, but the machine is worthless. Unless a museum is willing to pay you to assemble and ship it to them, I would leave it on ice for another decade or two. (I guess that's what I'm doing, although more out of laziness than planning.)
If you do get the machine running, you can set the MS-DOS console to the serial port. Then if you can find an ancient Kermit or something you can transfer files to a real computer without trying to find an Ethernet card and drivers.
I have a few old computers... and let me tell you one thing : IT ONLY TAKE SPACES IN YOUR HOUSE lol.. I'm about to dump them all lol or sell it via ebay... BUT
You have a few choices : /S or SYS C: you know... (If my memory is good lol) (Ex: http://freepctech.com/pc/002/files010.shtml ... if you have an HD lol
1- Sell it
2- Search for someone who have msdos installation disk (I have thoses... even win3.1 and they still works)
3a- Search for an old floppy drive... they're a few adaptor to plug them into your USB drive... cost ~20-30 bucks (Ex: http://techgage.com/article/vantec_sataide_to_usb_adapter/ )
3b- Download an MS-DOS boot disk... you only need to format C:
Have fun
I can't call that English
http://www.vintage-computer.com/vcforum/ is your friend. Plenty of help there for old machines. And if you can't or don't want to get it working, I'm sure someone there will be happy to take it off your hands.
I've done it with an Olivetti philos colo 45, It's a notebook quite aged, I've installed Slackware without graphical interface and it runs quite good, look for an old version of slackware, like slack 7 that's still on diskettes, I've had some trouble installing, but with a few googling you can find you way, by the way I have to say there were win95 on the machine and it ran quite good even with that. Anyway I think it's always astonishing resurrecting an old machine, good work man!
What's really sad is that many of us had RAM-hungry applications *at the time* and were waiting for small computer systems to catch up to the problems we *already had*.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
It's not that old. It's still a pc for gosh sake. I have Atari's and Commodores and more that have longer beards and still work fine.
Is it PC-Compatible? You can probably download floppy images of DOS 3.3 and use rawrite to make bootable disks. All you'll need to do is find a "modern" PC that has a traditional floppy controller, and a 5.25" drive. Chances are, the physical interfaces are the same, so you can use the 5.25" drives from the Epson in your "modern" PC.
I used this technique 10 years ago when I had access to some ancient TRS-80s in high school. I hopped onto the internet with my speedy 28.8K modem, downloaded some floppy images of games, and used rawrite to make the disks.
A little bit of Googling brings up some clues, but if you get stuck, there's always FreeDOS.
No, I will not work for your startup
I did this a while back and after spending countless hours messing with it and finally getting it to work I asked myself "now what?" and put it back in the box!
The only possible reason is personal nostalgia. I can understand resurrecting computers that meant something significant in the history of computing like an original Apple II, or a TRS-80 or something of that nature. However, the machine he's talking about is not particularly historically interesting other than in his own personal life. So he can resurrect it for his own personal nostalgia, that's fine, but he shouldn't expect anyone to be impressed if he wants to show it to people later on or anything.
Actually trying to use the machine is not likely to make him happy, either. When I've messed around with older nostalgic machines from my childhood, it was cool for the first 10 minutes until the nostalgia wore off and I started to see how painfully slow and primitive they are. These things were great in their time, but they don't age well.
Since the machine is so generic and non-interesting, he may have a harder time finding any sort of enthusiast group for it, but the Internet is vast, so who knows what he could find if he spent enough time digging.
A cool guy named Bill Degnan (who runs vintagecomputer.net ) teaches a class at University of Delaware sometimes called "History of Microcomputing", where students learn about microcomputing from the TX-0 up to modern-ish computers. The "textbook" for the class when I took it was Hackers by Steven Levy, which was a pretty good chronicle of how personal computing was built up from a bunch of "hackers". Our class project was to fix and program on a really old computer, and make a presentation about it. In previous years, I have heard of serious hardware modifications being performed on the old systems, like adding the ability to read fat16 to a really old IBM PC. I personally had the ATT 3b1 ( ATT Unix PC with a bigger harddrive, http://vintagecomputer.net/att/3B1/ ), which was the first unix computer he had ever assigned (at my request). The class was pretty awesome.
Actually not that long ago, i dug out my old Apple IIe and got it to boot up. I found some tutorials online (and a YouTube vid or two) and now it's running Gentoo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0EAYmlVWHNs
Given that people will pretty much give you their old P4 boxes nowadays, I don't think I'll ever go through this exercise again (I still have the machine btw).
Turned to usenet - comp.sys.apple2 - to beg for someone to mail me a DOS3.3 disk. Someone did send me a floppy over the mail. That was all I needed, I could then use an Ap2PC cable to move images back onto floppies. Maybe a slashdotter in your hometown can make you one.
Okay, this may not help but then again it might...
I dug up an old Laser 128 (Apple II compatible) with no working software and was able to get it working using the following method. I don't know if your machine has a compatible feature, though.
http://adtpro.sourceforge.net/bootstrap.html#Starting_from_bare_metal
In short: using a second machine (In my case, running Win98) and a homebrew serial cable, configure the machine to be revived to treat serial port input as keyboard input, then keyboard input direct into memory (like a DEBUG prompt) - If you can do that then the rest of the procedure might actually work with compatible software.
The support machine "types" the software directly into the host machine's memory and executes it. In the link above, you start with a ProDOS image which then gets written to disk so you can boot the machine normally.
=Smidge=
> 13' RGB monitor
Oof... they sure made monitors big back then.
I grew up on a Epson Equity too. (I think we had the "I+", not just the "I". Maybe the "+" was that it came with a hard drive? 20 megabytes, bitches.)
My parents sold it when we got a new 386, though, so no chance of digging it out of their basement for me.
I wish you luck. As others have said, the Epson site still has the manuals, which I've found on other occasions.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
Use the case for a retro mod. 1) Pop in a top notch main board / graphics and set the start up sound to the 5 1/4 seek and read. 2) Take it to a LAN party and make some wagers. 3) Profit Be sure to wear a pocket protector and high waters or they will see right through you.
You can do everything you would have done with the computer 25 years ago. Believe it or not, people did real work on their computers back then. Yes, anything you can do with this PC you can do with your gigahertz XP box, but that's not the point. It's more fun to use a machine that doesn't have layers and layers and layers of abstraction between you and the hardware.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
This looks like a more or less standard boring old IBM PC compatible computer. There are truckloads of great old DOS programs floating around out there if you look around (although sadly most people only feel inclined to preserve games, not utilities and such)
Probably the easiest thing to do is connect a 360k drive to a somewhat more "modern" networked computer that has an internal floppy disk controller, and write disk images or files directly to it. One hint though, do not write 360k floppies with a 1.2mb 5.25" drive, they usually won't work due to differences in the size of the magnetic track written. If you need 5.25 floppy disks, you can usually find them on eBay - heck there are still 8" disks and punch cards floating around!
That system might be able to run up to MS/PC DOS 6.22 or perhaps even FreeDOS, but if there is no hard drive you probably would be best served with DOS 2.x or 3.x, they take up less disk space and memory.
There are various other OSes for 8088/8086 IBM PC compatibles (CP/M 86, and Xenix come to mind) as well as GUI shells (Visi-On, GEM, GEOS, and Windows 1.0 through 3.0) but most of the useful stuff for that class of machine is for plain old DOS.
If you are looking to add hardware, there is also plenty of old ISA stuff floating around on eBay. You might be able to add a 720k 3.5" floppy drive (check the physical bay size and connector compatibility) or a 1.4mb drive using an ISA controller card with a BIOS. 8-bit MFM/RLL hard drives and controllers, I'm sure I have even seen 8-bit IDE controllers before. There are ISA VGA cards that will work in 8 bit ISA systems (often they look like 16-bit cards but will still fit and operate in an 8-bit slot)
Anyway, lots of options but not as unique as TI-99/4a, Apple II, TRS-80 or such.
The other day I found my mom & daughter laughing and playing Yahtzee on an old McIntosh circa 1989. She's a retired school teacher and it seems anyone who wanted were given them back in the day. She still has it plugged in & hooked up to a dot matrix printer.
It still has a start up disk. God forbid the disk ever gets corrupted? Where will she ever find another one?
You could calculate neutron flux in nuclear power plants, do aerodynamics and stress calculations for aeronautics, run a mission to the moon, calculate stresses in hydro power dams etc.
All these things were done on computers with far less processing power and memory. He's got the equivalent of a few old mainframe computers there!
In the end, the biggest limitation is often the ability of the user, not the computer.
Some fellow geeks and I are working on a *new* 8 bit ISA IDE controller for vintage machines just like yours. :)
Details are here: http://wiki.vintage-computer.com/index.php?title=XTIDE_project/
It will be available toward the end of the summer, hopefully, and will allow you to install HDD's up to 137G!
D-D-D-D-Don't copy that floopy.
Word to your motherboard.
I'm outta here.
Don't rush me, Sonny. You rush a miracle man, you get rotten miracles.
http://elks.sourceforge.net/
No, it isn't. Gates was wrong about some things (notably the Internet), but he never said the "640 k should be enough for anyone", no matter how many people put it in their sigs. Never an actual citation of when and where he is supposed to have said this.
Is the actual computer worth the effort, or are you just going for a retro look and feel? If it's the latter, gut it and shoehorn in a modern microATX board and ATX power supply. If the power switch is a pushbutton "memory" type, then it uses a paperclip-like wire to "remember" whether it should be on or off. Just remove this wire and it will become a momentary pushbutton, which will function perfectly as an ATX power button. (Sure it's overkill to use a 240V 15A switch as a momentary pushbutton, but what else are you going to use it for?) I'm sure you can figure out how to attach a hard drive to some surface, and hack the back panel to match the motherboard and power supply.
For the monitor, you could find a SVGA CRT monitor and swap the shells -- if you consider this important enough. Otherwise, just get some old CRT from the thrift store and clean it up. Chances are nobody other than a fellow geek would notice the anachronism.
The keyboard is likely hardwired for XT keystrokes, but if it has an XT/AT switch somewhere, you can stick an AT-PS2 adapter on it and keep using it.
The floppy drives can be connected to a modern PC's floppy controller with the original cable. The floppy controller spec has not changed in at least a decade, and support for 360k floppies was never dropped. Since floppies (even the 1.44 MB variety) are almost useless, there is no point in improving the existing drives. Just make them work if you are so inclined. You may want to sacrifice one to free up a bay for an optical drive anyway.
If you decided you really wanted to run software of the appropriate age, you still could -- just fire up DOSbox.
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
As long as you don't use scp to transfer files, a 486 makes a handy file server or print server.
I started into Linux with Debian 1.3 on a 386-25 with 8 megs of RAM and a 20 meg hard drive back in 1997. By 1998 had graduated up to Debian 2.0 on a 486-33 with 16 megs of RAM and a 50 meg hard drive.
Wouldn't it be a trip to take your 486 and put an older version of Linux on it, and use it for a print server?
and an XT clone isn't one of them.
This cuts to the heart of the matter more effectively and more succinctly than I could have managed. Nice work.
Bow-ties are cool.
"Parents" basement, suuuuure.
Did they tell you that at the Church Of Bill? or just hypnotize you? :)
This would be an incredible teaching aid. Students could be shown (not just told) how technology has advanced over 25 years. Real, side-by-side comparisons could be demonstrated using simple programs designed to run on both the new and old systems (first-hand demonstration of backwards compatibility, performance comparisons, etc). This could be an excellent system to teach the importance of efficiency in programming.
When my son is old enough to have an actual computer, I plan on giving him a system that has limited capabilities so I can teach him on a system that doesn't provide built-in distractions (I'll probably pick something newer than 25 years though). Of course, I'll teach him BASIC first, then maybe COBOL and some other simple languages before introducing him to modern languages and objects.
"Lame" - Galaxar
The "Retr0brite" method discovered last year could restore the case to its original color. It counters the bromides and other additives that actually cause the yellowing. It uses hydrogen peroxide with Oxiclean-type stuff, an extra booster if desired, and UV rays as a catalyst.
http://retr0bright.wikispaces.com/
Why bother with the PC is was rubbish at the time - Get an amiga...
Sad? No, actually it's annoying. Bill Gates never actually said what you think he said.
Evidence to back up your claims?
I, for one, refuse to accept that 1984 was 25 years ago. I was a teenager in 1984 and I'm pretty sure I still am.
So... You might as well forget about the hot new computer you just found. Without the ability to read a calendar or do basic math, you're not ready for a machine that powerful.
Did you hear that Michael Jackson is already in the studio recording a follow up for "Thriller?" I hear it's gonna be totally Bad, to the max!
About the best use for that old machine would be a dumb terminal for to attach to a unix/linux box or for electronics projects host.
ebay craigslist are so so.
resale shops, garage sales, and swap meets might be a better way to go. you might be surprised to find that many other people have some of those old relics also. Just ask around. Freedos and using 3 1/2 inch drives might be the way to do. you can use dhcp with wattcp. I have used it many times for ghost software clients.
Minix might work on that old machine.
I had on old 386sx (didn't belong to me originally). I decided to try to make something out of it. I maxed out the ram, which meant buying VERY expensive cache chips (total cost >$80). At the end of the day, I had a very nice, very slow machine. The Oak video on it could do 800x600 at 256 colors, but that was all. Granted, for that time period, it was typical, but not something I would have purchased.
Given that people will pretty much give you their old P4 boxes nowadays, I don't think I'll ever go through this exercise again (I still have the machine btw).
I've been down this road many times before, myself...
I guess my favorite instance of this was an Everex 386-25 that I got in the mid 90s and used to play games from the early 90s. The thing had been stripped of its cache memory so I had to replace that - the fun thing about the machine was it had an 8-character alphanumeric display on the front of the machine... A little research and I found out how to write text to it.
It was fun but after a while it just starts to seem like a huge waste of time, money, and storage space. Consider: there's other old machines that actually offer unique experiences. Emulation can reproduce these machines but the effect isn't perfect. (For instance, emulation of the Commodore 64's sound chip is pretty good, but it's not quite like the real thing...) An old PC on the other hand... is pretty much just an old PC. There's not really anything you can get an old PC to do that you can't get a new PC to do for the same effect.
Bow-ties are cool.
Never seen the point in old PCs myself since they're just wimpy Intel systems... but I do a lot with old Amiga, Commodore, Atari and other machines. Disks - you can find cheap newly made floppies in older formats (5.15" or 3.5" in double or single density). Search around or ask on http://www.vintage-computer.com/ forums or some of the good Amiga oriented web forums, you'll get a ton of sources depending on where you live. Many sources in the US and Europe. Avoid buying old/reused floppies if possible, and copy as much of your old disks to new disks as you can. You can probably find an old IDE controller for it easily too. Remember old hard drives are less reliable so do backups often. OS - you can find old MSDOS disks on ebay I'm sure. You may also want to consider the free clone FreeDOS. Yellowing - there's some peroxide based cream someone came up with to restore color to yellowed plastic. See http://retr0bright.wikispaces.com/
http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/1997/01/1484
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
Check the site www.vetusware.com -- It's a site dedicated to archiving "abandonware," software from companies which either no longer exist or have long since discontinued a given product.
There's another site at www.bitsavers.org -- they may be of help as well, even if they don't have what you need listed. Drop 'em a note if they don't.
Happy resurrecting.
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
Sad? No, actually it's annoying. Bill Gates never actually said what you think he said.
Not to mention, he misquoted the misquote.
I have a couple of boxes of these that have never been opened. I rescued them from a recycling effort at goodwill. They are not on e-bay. Contact me, or tell me how to contact you.
---- Don't be irreplaceable. If you can't be replaced, you can't be promoted.
but there is NO USB PORT ON THIS BOX!!!!!! And since it's an 8-bit machine, it only has 8-bit ISA ports.
Deja vu...
There are plenty of online communities devoted to restoring and operating vintage machines. The formats vary - the top two that I know of are Vintage-computer.com and the ClassicCmp mailing list.
Mike
Try a local computer club. They tend to be filled with crazy old packrats who talk a lot but don't really know much for all their years, and have all kinds of stuff dating back to the 80s piled ceiling-high. Plus, no lives, so they have time to talk about it or go hunting through their stuff for obscure parts you might need. They're basically the Slashdot forums of real life *rimshot*
This sort of thing goes to show that regular off-the-shelf x86es basically are rubbish. I've got a Sharp PC-1403 Pocket Computer, pretty much from the same period. I use it to this very day - also because it comes with a full-blown scientific calculator - and it still runs software I built 20 years ago. It's got Sharps Basic and a feature rich ROM with all kinds of neat things hardwired into it, starts in nano-seconds and runs 300+ hours of the grid on two buttoncells.
I bet you could observe the very same thing with 'desktops' and portables from Commodore, Atary or Sinclair. PCs scale easy, but they still are quite junky till this very day. Just discovered that once again yesterday when charsets and keyboard signals wouldn't match in a virtual Linux desktop enviroment.
Outside of a thriving eco-system of competition and many people basing their stuff of simular standards regular PCs fall short of delivering their promise. When things get tough, I'll take any old Tandy Portable over an PC Laptop any time. And not only because it runs on regular batteries if it needs to.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
That monitor must be huge! Why are they so small now?
I don't think the answer is "because I can" at all. That's a possible answer to any question and a valid answer to none ("why cut off your legs?").
I think the answer is because it's interesting and you learn a lot. But more importantly, it's fun. You get some experience in how to deal with arbitrary limitations and obstacles that you're imposing on yourself for no practical reason. Does that sound like anything familiar to you? To me it does - it sounds like virtually any video game (or other games you play solo). Why try to finish Jet Set Willy or Ghosts 'n' Goblins? Because it's fun. The fun is in the challenge and the satisfaction of overcoming that challenge.
--
Hi Larryish,
:)
Actually I used this old 486 as a dial-up server running one of the older versions of Red Hat, and it worked like a champ for my parents to get online before broadband was in their area. I even had Caller ID configured so it'd only answer when they called, all from a 486DX 50Mhz system
I'd love to see distros of Linux catered around the older processors, even going back to the 8088, because Linux is robust and can breath life back into these older systems. But anymore even Ubuntu wants a very robust system to run.
Sam
I have a running Compaq "Lunchbox" style portable computer. It orignially came with a 286 processor, 640K of RAM and a 30 Mb hard drive. It also has a parallel port, RGB monitor port, a monochrome (red) monitor and serial port.
It was my first. I still love her.
I wrote a Symantec Q&A program for my father's business which they used for years. I originally kept the computer running to access his archives. We migrated to Access in the 90's. Now I just run it once in a while to remember the days. Also have commodore 64 where I force my kids to play loderunner, donkey kong, and hunchback at the olympics with me.
There are a lot of computer 'museums' on the net that can help with acquiring working copies of older software.
True.
And what Rumsfeld said about "known unknowns" was logical (albeit paraphrased in a place where the original quote would have been better.)
And Al Gore didn't claim to have "invented" the internet; he said he "took the initative in creating the internet", which given how you would expect a Congreeman to take initative (recognizing a good program, giving it attention and money) is true.
And Sarah Palin's speech was actually coherent, not beautiful but coherent, if you read it.
And Quayle's spelling of potato isn't the most common, but is technically a valid alternative. (Although the potato incident was dumb for other reasons.)
People who you dislike rarely say the dumb things you think they did, as you'll address a quote out of context (or misrepresentation of that quote) from someone you like, but not from someone you don't. You're more than happy to assume people you don't like are retarded.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
I tried to get my old system running, but, quickly realized that for some reason my dad threw my old IBM PC Jr. out with the trash a few years ago :*(
I found an identical model at work about 15 yeas ago when clearing up. It came supplied with MS-DOS 2.x, a bus mouse, and some strange GUI software called Epson Taxi. If I recall correctly the floppy drives uses non-standard connectors, so it wasn't possible to fit anything of a larger capacity. I'm also certain that the second floppy drive wasn't working.
It was possible to get the thing onto our LAN using a boot floppy and an ARCNET card, but even that was tricky as it took some effort getting both DOS and the LAN software onto a 360K floppy.
Eventually I located a suitable 8-bit ISA hard disk controller and hard drive from elsewhere in the building.
Your son might find object oriented programming a lot easier if he hasn't been taught BASIC or COBOL beforehand. It is, after all, a much more natural way of thinking about things.
cat.sleep(all day);
cat.eat();
cat.purr();
Also, look at Turtle Java:
http://www.philocomp.net/programming/turtlejava
PocketGamer.org - For the gamer on the go!
But a "13' RGB monitor"...I didn't know anyone made anything big...let alone in 1984, Ray Bradbury eat your heart out...we've had wall tv's for over 25 years.
Maybe that should be a 13" RGB monitor
Yeah man I feel ya, Ubuntu is getting a little bloated.
8.04 seems to do pretty well, haven't had much experience with 9.04 since both my graphical machines use onboard Intel gfx.
I would go back to Debian but when I evangelize Ubuntu to Windows users they always ask if I run it myself and if I say "no, I run Debian" it makes them a little wary.
Still run Debian on the file server and the print server though. Ubuntu as a server didn't really feel right.
I know you can actually find the audio of this out on the Internet. I have a copy and I think the whole thing (speech) is about an hour long. Anyway, here's the quote he said.
I have to say that in 1981, making those decisions, I felt like I was providing enough freedom for 10 years. That is, a move from 64k to 640k felt like something that would last a great deal of time. Well, it didnt - it took about only 6 years before people started to see that as a real problem.
So, maybe "640k out to be enough for anybody for an entire decade!" would be little more accurate.
13' RGB monitor
I didn't know that there were 13 feet wide monitors 25 years ago!
You should be mod'ed up. The lack of OOP back in the days of lore is the major drawback to teaching the youngs today on those machines, because it's neither useful nor enlightening to type 1K+ lines of ancillary code where the true logic of your application can stay within 10 lines.
ORG 0100H
DB '....'
There's no educative value in that at a beginner's level. It can be important later on, if you devote your interests to extreme performance programming for embeded systems.
There is a group who found a way to easily restore that ageing yellow plastic. I think the use hydrogen peroxide. I'm too lazy to Google it right now, but if you are interested in a full resotration this is possible.
Participatory Governance : The only feasible option for a real democracy, where everyone really does have a say.
A 13 Foot monitor? What a great find!
1;
I'd argue that a second reason is for the challenge of it. It's been a while, but several years ago, I got ahold of a couple really old PCs (original IBM AT) and decided to see how much useful stuff could still be accomplished with one. (I had a female friend in a college dorm who didn't have a computer at all, and she was happy to use one of these if it could connect to the Internet and let her check her email and so forth.)
It was an interesting little project, actually. I wound up using a copy of the old "PFS First Choice" menu software, so it booted to a user-friendly and decent-looking "launcher" menu, where I created sub-menus for things like "Games", "Internet", and "Applications". I was able to find an IRC client for MS-DOS, as well as a suite of DOS-based programs for things like ftp, email and old Internet search tools like Archie and Veronica. I found a DOS port of the Lynx text-based web browser, but with a VGA video card upgrade in the machine, was able to use the Arachne browser too. (http://articles.techrepublic.com.com/5100-10878_11-1047073.html)
No doubt, it's EASIER to just use a more modern PC. But there's some reward in knowing you gave one of these old systems a new lease on life and saved it from the scrap heap. To me, the bigger reward was just in trying to solve the "puzzle" of how to get it to do tasks we expect of our computers today.
I do like Ubuntu 9.04, but I've only used it through VirtualBox since my work desktop is Windows and laptop is OSX. My server at home is however running Ubuntu 8.10 server which I love!
As for advocating Ubuntu, I'm there with you because I push Ubuntu every chance I get yet I don't run it as my primary desktop. I'm saving-up for a System76 Laptop now, which hopefully I'll be able to get by end of the year, but who knows. For now I'm trying to get back into the GUI side of Linux through VirtualBox which has been awesome.
i heard of this other guy that pulled something like that off once, but i can't seem to remember his name... was it Jacob? Jessie? Justin? not sure... anyway i think he died a while ago, but i think he left some notes in this book his dad supposedly wrote, though it was published anonymously, so no one's really sure.
weinersmith
I dug up my Radio Shack Color Computer 3 a couple months ago, everything still worked. I miss the 8-bit days when you could actually Grok the whole machine.
I'm sure users of any of several pre-PC architectures would feel the same way - that the PC came along and the party stopped, kind of like that kid everybody hated at school showing up to a (previously fun) private party with a few of his friends.
Yes, that was about as close to a Matrix-like time-blip as I've ever experienced. (Of course, I was young and it didn't take much to surprise me).
But there was this really neat period where Commodore in particular was doing some really interesting things. Then suddenly the universe went entirely PC. --It really came home when Lucasarts released the very first X-Wing simulator exclusively for PC. I knew several people who radically changed their lives around so as to play that game, one of whom dropped a couple thousand on a top-end (386?) and never looked back. That was also around the time when Commodore began its terminal nose-dive. (I remember reading long ago, but simply cannot find any breath of it now, that a handful of ex-government spooks got involved in Commodore shortly before the whole shop crashed and the next Amiga hit the skids before release. I'd love to know the full story on that someday!)
The biggest shift I noticed, almost immediately, was that hardware development rocketed forward while "cleverness" began to lag. --That is, with a machine like an old Tandy Color Computer, the time between hardware updates was so long and the state of the hardware that everybody used was so uniform and stable that in order to gain an increase in performance, people had to really work to understand their system. As a result, every year saw faster and more brilliant bits of software emerge for essentially the same machine. By the end of the product cycle on any of these closed systems, like the Color Computer or the Amiga, the performance being squeezed out of them was really amazing. --I mean, humans are really awesome that way; when given limitations and a desire to surpass them, they really begin to glow. Heck, some of those computers had very limited color pallets, and yet through interlacing schemes and such, extra colors were brought into being. I read how another guy on an old Apple ][ system had managed to double the absolute and finite resolution of certain screen graphics using some clever trick, eliciting ooohs and ahhhs from the industry.
With the shift to PCs and the endless hardware upgrade, I feel as though programmers have never really been able to settle down and really grow powerful in their craft. When you look at the demo scene, at what kinds of astonishing things can be achieved in as little as 4Kb on a modern machine, I sometimes wish that hardware development would completely halt for ten years or so just to see how far we could actually take these computers of ours.
-FL
Dude, get DRDOS... maybe try bootdisk.com
>>Has anyone tried to resurrect a PC this old before?
I'm currently resurrecting a 1971 DEC PDP-8 minicomputer, and I'm not the first one to do so. This is after years of bringing back old micros from the brink of doom. So yes, unequivocally, you *can* restore a system of this age. Even the same standards are still in use!
-- "Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all."
But then he'll find procedural programming more difficult.
The idea is to teach the ability to learn, not a specific paradigm. I cut my teeth in VB5, with no help - horrible, horrible stuff came from that. I'm now working mainly in PHP/Javascript, with Python(Django) on the side. I've progressed through VB, C, C#, VB.NET, PHP, Perl, Python, Lisp, Scheme, and LUA. Each one of those became progressively easier to learn, even when there was a complete shift in thought pattern, as Perl->Python->Lisp.
Learn about Photography Basics.
So I went digging around in the garage and found my IBM-PC (8088 64K RAM - Green Screen two 360K floppies ) and I figured I would see if the damn thing would even power on. Un-boxed it, hooked up the original keyboard and display plugged in the power cord for the cpu and display and thought for a minute... Hit the monitor power switch and after a few seconds or static crackle I saw a raster line. Then I hit the power for the CPU. The fan started to whir, the drives looked for disks sequentially, then up popped ROM basic!
Fine little machine that IBM-PC
Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!
I still have my Commodore Computers. I fired them up about 5 years ago, and I can STILL read my floppy disks from ages ago even with the 1541 (1 or 2) 5-1/4" disk drives that are suppose to be prone to head-alignment issues (I keep them stored with the head-protectors in place and I try to keep the disks away from magnetic sources.)
I bought some Apple ]['s in the past 10 years, so I can see my assembly language programs. (remember call -768 or call -936, or in#6 or pr#6?)
If I could, I'd get an Amiga today. The reason why you don't see new Amigas around is because Bill Gates made sure the Amiga market would die by 1995 and REMAIN dead. Because he wanted to make sure he could get Windows 95 out to the masses, unchallenged, because Windows 95 could easily be overthrown and outperformed. Bill Gates and company did not make anything better than what was already out, so he had to KILL the competition through blackmail, covert backdoor deals, encourage dishonesty in competitor companies, and litigate companies and products out of existence. In retrospect, it wasn't until Windows XP that Microsoft and PC suppliers could almost "catch up" to the Amiga. So with the Amiga gone and unable to be redeveloped effectively (still to this day), Bill Gates leveled (ie: demolished in a very unethical and lawless way - but you pay off your Congressmen, and your wishes become the law) the existing playing field and rebuilt the playing field around Microsoft. The Amiga, by 1990, had VGA graphics, a sound synthesizer chip, an IDE hard drive interface, a hard drive, modular memory, a 32-bit True Pre-emptive Multi-tasking operating system, a Graphics User Interface, and the most popular accessory that sold very well for it was the Video Toaster. By 1995, most PCs had these basic features (Microsoft was still struggling with the OS, it was not true pre-emptive nor true 32-bit. Some parts are still not 32-bit until Windows 7 - It takes this long for a company like Microsoft to implement 1990 technology?) And, about 5 years ago, well after the demise of the Amiga, someone hooked up an IOMEGA SCSI ZIP disk to it, and guess what. because SCSI was an established standard and the specs were open, the Amiga could implement and use the ZIP disk to the fullest extent, even though the ZIP disk was created well after development and production stopped on the Amiga. Now that is a powerful computer. try developing the computer now. The technology is still around. But you can't because all the parts that make up the Amiga were carefully and strategically divided amongst various companies that are indirectly paid off to KEEP it divided so that IT WILL NEVER be developed AGAIN! All this evil done onto the people of the world by Microsoft.
If you can get to a DOS prompt don't forget about the old trusty program called laplink. You can transfer files via serial or parallel port and you only need to have the laplink program on the one computer to get started but you gotta have da DOS first.
P.S. You gotta get a hard drive... you'll go mad with floppies very quickly.. remember 512MB is the limit for IDE without using the umm overlay ummm I've forgot what it was called... o well nothing of value was lost...
What? He never said it? Really?
No shit sherlock. That's the joke...and you just fell for the trap. It's an industry wide inside joke. I think we all get it.
Here you go-
http://www.info.apple.com/support/oldersoftwarelist.html#system
I still have my MS-DOS 3.3 diskettes (and GWBasic 3.22), MS-DOS 5, MS-DOS 6.22, Windows 3.11 for Workgroups, Windows 95 upgrade, Windows 98 upgrade, Windows ME upgrade, and Windows 2000 upgrade.
Why do I keep all of this? So I can install XP upgrade and have a qualifying product... Sucks having to install WFW311 in order to get to XP, but hey...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I want to see this 13-foot monitor!
But, I wanted socialized health insurance!
Has anyone tried to resurrect a computer that old???? That computer is positively modern compared to some that a lot of us use. There are computers in commercial and government use that are far older than that! Personally my oldest is from '72. Even my Commodore 64 is older, and it has been modified to have 4GB Compact Flash, Ethernet, and other enhancements.
If you can find old copies of QNX2 around, it would run on this machine - with multiple virtual consoles and almost unix-y shell, a C compiler and up to around 64 processes(tasks).
I had, IIRC, an Equity II. It had (again IIRC) an 8086 and a 20 meg drive and not quite the same OS as IBM. It was a great machine in its day, but it's not the model you have.
The Equity I, I believe had an 8088 and was closer to an original PC in architecture.
I would take the "B" 5 1/4 inch floppy drive and its cable temporarily out of the Epson and plug it into a modern machine (which I assume does not have a floppy of its own, but a header for it on the motherboard and a compatible free power connector). Boot up the modern machine with some 16-bit DOS variant. Insert a fresh floppy disk into the transplanted drive and FORMAT A: /S (which writes the two system files needed to boot) and then copy COMMAND.COM to the floppy. Then see if the Epson will boot off of this floppy from its A drive. If so, power down and return the B drive to the Epson, and from there you should be able to run DOS software that you find.
It doesn't always go like that.
I plugged in my Acorn A3000 (From around 1989) in the other day and was pleasantly surprised.
Instant boot (OS in rom chips), easy to use and consistent desktop and applications, and being able to run a DOS session at the same time on the inbuilt x86 PC card is pretty neat.
I thought it would be slower and clunkier after not using it for about five years, but it still felt quite quick. The only things that dated it were the refresh rate of the monitor and... well that's about all.
Not much has really changed over the last 20 years in the graphical desktop. In another 100 years, things will have changed so much that people probably won't be able to tell two old desktops like Acorn RISCOS or Microsoft Vista apart. (Apart from that the RISCOS has more chance of still working.)
Evidence to back up your claims?
There's this thing called the Internet right? And then there's another thing called the World Wide Web that runs on it. Still with me? Well, there are websites called "search engines". Can you guess what they do? That's right - you can search for references.
Fuckwit.
In a time when every kilowatt counts, I think your time and energy is wasted on this "project". It can easily be done, but the energy to computing output ratio is boned.
Unless the system has some funky ROM (like Tandy used that locked in a specific OS) there's no reason not to use a modern DOS. I still have a working XT and 286, and they both run M$DOS 6.00 -- it's MUCH faster than the older versions and a lot more capable, and is extremely stable (my very busy 286 routinely ran for up to *two years* between reboots). M$DOS7 from Win9x is the same as M$DOS6 but adds FAT32 support, and would work just as well. I presume one of the free DOS replacements, like FreeDOS, would also work.
The standard MSCDEX and Mouse drivers (v8.20 is best) should also work. You can get USB-to-some-other-port gadgets -- try cablenbits.com or tekgems.com, both are reliable vendors and carry all manner of oddball connectors and adapters.
What was the question again? :)
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
When I went to college at Virginia Tech in 1986 the college of engineering required all students to have their own PC. I bought the venerable IBM PC Portable. It was "portable" only in the crudest sense of the word. The specs are: 8086 processor w/ 8088 math coprocessor, 640K RAM, no hard drive, 2 5 1/4" floppies, 9 inch amber monitor, and a flip down keyboard. All of this packed into the svelte case about 16" W x 10" H x 20" D and weighing in at a feather-light 45 pounds! I used to lug it home on every school break and my siblings loved playing games on it. Miraculously, I've been able to keep it running all these years. I still have the disks for MS-DOS 6, a FORTRAN compiler, the word processor called Volkswriter 3, and this incredible golf game that provided way too many hours of entertainment late into the night in my dorm room. I actually pulled it out the other day and showed it to my kids and they both got a big kick out of the golf game.
I'm sure you could find a version of http://www.forth.org/ to work on this machine. I recently (re)discovered this nice little language/environment and one of my summer projects is to learn more... Forth traditionally lives on a floppy, merging code and data in a way similar to Smalltalk images.
It's an efficient language, and pretty fast -- sometimes faster than C. It's essentially a "different" way to write structured assembly from what C is...
You might even be able to port openfirmware to you platform, and, with a bit of work, run forth directly from BIOS!
As others have suggested, being able to load code from the serial or parallel port might be the way to go... or you might be able to get an old harddrive to work?
See also: http://www.classiccmp.org/dunfield/img/index.htm
Good luck!
It has been a quest for a lot of people for some time now. USB 3.5" floppy drives are a dime a dozen but I haven't found a manufacturer for USB 5.25 floppy drives yet.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
It certainly isn't for the machine, and I don't think it is for most people either.
When I learned programming back in highschool, they tried to each us both C++ and pascal. I found pascal much easier, and so did most of the class. I also got into embedding bits of assembly in my pascal code, and I think that was one of the most useful things I learned.
I think it's far better to learn from the machine level up, and the machine likes procedural.
That said, BASIC is not a really good language. learn a bit of assembly (enough to understand how it works, not write big projects in it), and then learn C. I prefer pascal, myself, but it's pretty much dead now. C is more useful.
There's a similar machine sitting in my parents' basement, almost spec for spec identical to the one in the summary. Far as I know, it still works.
I'd get in touch with the people at FreeDOS (www.freedos.org) and see if they have floppy images you can use. Or see if you can find a copy of DOS 3.1 on eBay.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DR-DOS
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphical_Environment_Manager
What did he say? ....."resistance is futile"?
I am reading slashdot on the same machine!
When I got into computers, that sort of scrounge-and-upgrade was challenging and very worthwhile. Now P4s rain from the sky...
But my XT still works, while I've had 4 or 5 P4s die on me. Says something about disposable construction vs value, eh? :(
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Windows 3.0 runs just fine in real mode on an 8088/8086 with around 512k RAM as long as it has at least CGA or Hercules graphics. I "ran" it on an IBM PC Convertible with 512k and something approaching CGA graphics. It was pretty slow and looked terrible, but it was good enough to pull up Notepad and Solitaire. Windows 3.1 and later dropped support for real mode and required a 286 or higher (with WFW stropping standard mode and requiring a 386)
Well, it *was* identical spec when new. The case has been missing since the late '90's, the 8088 is now a NEC V20, the clock speed is now ~17MHz, and the parallel port has a resistor based DAC free-soldered onto it, but it still runs. I use a single density 3 1/2 floppy to boot FreeDOS and then run a terminal emulator, though it has also run Minix, Xenix and Linux over the years.
If you have trouble getting FreeDOS to run, I still have the original EPSON DOS disk images somewhere.
.sig: Now legally binding!
I've got a DEC MicroVAX running OpenBSD
I still use It everyday.
Now get off my lawn!
Yesterday I dug out of my parents' basement a "computer" they had bought brand new in 1980s: Timex Sinclair 1000 personal computer; 2K RAM with 16K external RAM expansion pack; 40-key membrane keyboard; 1 (count 'em!, 1) external audio cassette data storage drive (user-provided); Variable-diagonal composite monitor (conforms precisely to your TV's tube size); handy on/off power supply plug; healthy 25-year-old oxidized black plastic; absolutely no software. (My mom ran like crazy to pay for our after-school daycare, and this used to be all we could afford. I cut my programming teeth on this thing. Basic was my friend. Basic programs took 10 minutes to load when you loaded a new cassette.) When I resurrected this machine I pulled the case off, dusted out a little, and plugged it in. It actually fired up! I'm stoked, except the tapes we had are missing. What I'm looking to do is either buy some old working tapes with whatever I can find (Missile Command, Ator the ABC Gator, whatever), or try and recreate some using a memory port-based floppy drive and some modern software. Has anyone tried to resurrect a "computer" this old before?
You can try formatting it in linux!
In Linux (or at least in some older distros (maybe try knoppix!)), you can format the floppy in different formats by using a different device file.
e.g. "fdformat /dev/fd0*360" (sorry, I can't remember the exact file name)"
Tom's root-boot (rtbt) disk (http://www.toms.net/rb/) uses this technique to get about 1.7MB onto a 1.44MB floppy. You can go downwards as well.
Perhaps doing this a few times (or using it at that size) would help it work better?
If you have a 5.25" drive, there's a good chance you can hook it up to even a new system, if you have the right cables.
However, I agree that it's probably best to format it on the old system if possible (or on whichever side has the more finnicky FDD) - that should ensure the best compatibility on that side.
I don't know why, but it seems that we all need it whether we realise it or not.
You could try contiki.
http://www.sics.se/contiki/
Computer Science is all about trying to find the right wrench to bang in the right screw. -T.Cumbo?
It would be a head of monumental proportions, but Contiki ( http://www.sics.se/contiki/ ) could probably be made to run on it. It would give you a gui interface of sorts and ipv6 support, though I doubt you could use that part.
Restore the madness of youth's lechery
I had a bunch of ISA memory cards that expanded the memory to 4MB (no, not GB kids, and had to binary step the 8-bit DIP switches, given that I had no documentation, in order to get them all to sequential memory ranges and get detected) and an ESDI controller with a *massive* (for the time) 380MB hard drive. I put Slackware on that thing and had the time of my life using Term to get WWW in Mosaic through my dial-up university shell account. A little later I got it a Tseng Labs accelerated SVGA card and one of those "upgrade" 486 processors from Cyrix that fit in a 386 societ (Cx486DX) and a Cyrix math co-processor (there used to be a Linux kernel patch necessary to enable the cache on the former and to see the latter at all) and I thought I had the biggest, kickin'est system around. :-D
Nice memories, first Unix at home. I really loved those days of installing Linux from 120 floppy disks and hounding around Usenet for spare parts to hot-rod the (still very valuable at the time) 386 hardware platforms as later processors emerged.
Just before that I actually had Minix running on an old IBM 5150 XT with a 10MB hard drive, but Minix was never more than a toy.
I might be able to help... maybe... if no one else can.
I remember archiving a bunch of floppy images onto CDs when I got rid of the original floppies a while ago... including, IIRC DOS 3.3, and possibly GWBASIC.
What I likely don't have are drives to read them.
Also, finding those CDs might be a bit of a struggle, but I'd be willing to look.
In Liberty, Rene
No mention of George W. Bush speech ?
Well, I'll assume he really was saying dumb things then !
Ok, I have somewhere at home, DOS 3.3 on a 720K floppy (And on the hard drive). AND --- AND ----- a working external 360K floppy on the same machine. This is an old Toshiba T1200, running an 8088 with 640K. I think I might have some old 360K garbage floppies around too, though I would have to look for them. I fire this beast up once a year or so, because it still does one thing the newer machines can't....RAW editting of a file on the disk hex bit by hex bit - the really old Norton Utilities....
Got this old machine new in 1988, then got a $100 class action suite return on it YEARS later.
And yes, I would like to see a 5.25" USB floppy somewhere too, just for grins and for a couple of old programs.
I also still have another machine that has a 1/2 height dual drive (5.25" 1.2 MB and 3.5" 1.4MB drive) and a tape drive and a CD drive..... And it is on my home LAN, so I can acces sit from the other machines.
I have some dos 3.x on 5.25 floppy in my workshop, err dungeon thats it dungeon , I also have a rather large box 12/14/6 of 5.25 with various programs and games id be glad to send out. I just hate to throw away good floppy's.
"Better to be an open sinner than a false saint"
Here's a free MS-DOS clone.
http://www.freedos.org/
And when somebody tried to explain what an object is like that I didn't get it. After some time I got it: an object is the same as a "record" in Pascal/Delphi, the only difference is that it has functions and procedures in addition to variables.
No, it isn't. Are you trolling, or just never botherd to listen to it? If you had listened to it, you 'd have to admit HE DOES NOT say "640 k should be enough for anyone".
The only part you could be referring to is:
Which if YOU READ THE FUCKING THING, is him speaking in 1989, years after the design was set (1980 or 81), saying that 640k was certainly not enough.
You found a paragraph where Bill Gates mentions "640 k". Unfortunately, it's not remotely close to the "quote".
I actually liked the "known unknowns" vs. "unknown unknowns" speech. It made perfect sense to me, and I can think of a lot of stuff in my work that it applies to.
For example:
Setting up the test environment is a "known known"-- I know it needs to be done, and I know exactly how long it'll take.
Implementing my project is a "known unknown"-- I know it needs to be done, but I don't know how long exactly it will take.
On the other hand, a scope change from the client is an "unknown unknown"-- I don't know if it will happen or not, so I don't even know if I need to worry about it, much less how long it'll take.
I dunno, maybe I'm a freak, but it all makes sense to me.
Comment of the year
So really what is a network?
Interesting project!
Based on what information I could gather about your system in it's current configuration, here are some notes.
- The internal Floppy Drive Controller is going to be a major problem
- Based on the manual, your floppy drive controller can not be disabled by DIP switches (no mention of jumpers though)
- Therefore here are your remaining options;
+ Find diskette (reliable) media & drive (if necessary) which are compatible with the double sided, double density floppy controller card
+ Find an MFM/RLL hard drive & controller (if necessary) (the drives are likely all dust by now if the controller cards, cables and terminators aren't)
+ Find an 8 bit ISA based hard disk card (a hard drive mounted directly on an ISA expansion card, rare but handy gems)
+ Find an 8 bit ISA network interface card with a programmable EEPROM chip and flashing (if it survives it) a basic operating system onto it using a machine with ISA slots.
This my dear friend is a fine example of a crippled motherboard.
If the internal floppy controller could be disabled you would have all sorts of options from there.
Should you have no more use for the hardware otherwise, try installing a high density floppy drive controller card into the ISA expansion slots.
Disable the old drives (unplug power & data), enable the 3 1/2" high density floppy drive on the high density floppy controller card.
Even though both the internal and external floppy controllers are mapped to the same IO ports and IRQs, it may still work if no drives are connected to the internal floppy controller.
This may however lock up the system if the interrupt requests fall into a race condition, either way you should know immediately at boot-up.
When you boot the system, it will either work, fail with a message or freeze up, possibly spinning the high density drive indefinitely.
All the best,
ASA
Well said! What a happier place the world would be if more people would follow your example and stop blindly believing that "their side" can do no wrong and the "other side" is comprised entirely of hypocritical morons. Neither is true.
Kudos to you for having a TRULY open mind!
It's not that it's not a valid observation. It's that he was using "unknown unknowns" as an excuse for not having done due diligence.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Try DubLi's shopping mall, you should be able to find what you need there, and the prices are guaranteed to be the lowest on the internet, so you won't have anything to lose!
The lowest you'd be able to go would be a 386sx - previous x86 machines didn't have a 32-bit protected mode. There's some other unix-like systems that you might be able to get running on older gear but there's going to be limited software availability.
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
... Minix?
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
People who you dislike rarely say the dumb things you think they did
Noted.. I won't get fooled again!
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Hm. I've got an Equity I and I+ (with HD!). Maybe we should start a group...
Much like you said, I've got collections of old systems myself, and while some are significant in a universal way - an Osborne portable, for example - most are only significant to me.
The Equity I+ has actually seen some use, along with a Tandy almost-PC-compatible that my kids used to play Wheel of Fortune on a couple years ago. While they're nothing special, they are the oldest PC systems I have in working order, and I never had much PC experience until Win95 days. The PC XT and Dell XT clone I have were both given to me already pulled for parts, and I haven't scrounged up the stuff to make them whole again, although they are the more "important" systems.
So far just about every generic 2/3/486 I've come across has gone off for scrap, though.
What's a network?
13' RGB monitor (with contrast/brightness knobs)
13 feet? Wow. I know computers were big in the stoneage...errrr....eighties, but monitors too?
Now that you mention it, one of us here on /. should have given him the link already.
http://www.vintage-computer.com/vcforum/forumdisplay.php?f=22
Think about how easy it would be to misinterpret it if you wanted to. "...640k felt like something that would last a great deal of time."
Digging through an old story here on /.:
Do a Usenet search on the phrase. Though usually dated 1981 or thereabouts, the first time it appears on the record is August 1992 (in a Mac newsgroup). Never has anyone cited the circumstances, the place and exact date, he's suposed to have said this.
-----
Quite so. The actual remark was made by Steve Jobs to Steve Wozniak regarding building a card to expand the Apple II's memory from the max possible on the motherboard of 48K to a full 64K (the "language card"). Jobs' statement "Who would ever want more than 48K?" has been misattributed and misquoted for years, as have many statements made by some that sound so much better coming from someone else. The answer was, almost everybody. When the IIe came out it had 64K on the board and could accept a second 64K card. The IIc came with two full 64K banks installed.
Jobs was frequently at odds with Wozniak over technical issues. Jobs wanted no more than 2 slots in the Apple II. Woz wanted 8 and put them in. Jobs argued against color. Woz put it in, first in blocky lo-res, then in an awesome hack that resulted in 16 color (including two blacks and two whites) hi-res. Other examples exist, but these two illustrate Jobs' penchant for one-upsmanship: When he built the first Mac, it had no color and no slots.
Jobs' quote was in many MOTD files during the late 70's and early 80's, until the misattributed Gates quote started replacing it.
(The part in your post starts at around 22 minutes in case anyone else is reading this and doesn't want to sit through the whole 1.5 hours.)
A few decades ago, I succeeded in getting Desqview to run on a modified XT with an NEC-V20 processor and 8087 co-processor. I think it ran for a few minutes before crashing. It was a fun challenge though.
But it's not like he had much of a choice in the matter. Using the 8088, he still had an upper 1MB barrier to deal with. And since I/O ports were no longer the "feature" they were a decade previous (too slow), you needed some space for memory-mapped I/O.
I suppose he could have pressured IBM to go with the Motorola 68000 (flat 32-bit address space), but that would have screwed with the "cheap" design philosophy of the IBM PC (that's why they used the 8088 instead of the 8086). Also, it would have prevented any kind of easy migration from 8080 CP/M to DOS (see the TRANS command blurb on this page). Given the situation, they made the best decision they could.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
Bush phrased a lot of things poorly, but most people attribute misspeaking to him: incorrect conjugation ("is our children learning"), applying multiple prefixes incorrectly ("misunderestimate"), generic malapropism (calling himself "authoritarian" instead of "authoritative"... I suppose some attribute it to a Freudian slip instead of malapropism).
They often came out poorly, but he was over-criticised for them. Some are merely sentences that can be parsed in two ways, with one obviously what he intended: "Too many OB-GYNs aren't able to practice their love with women all across this country"; "I want to thank you for taking time out of your day to come and witness my [portrait's] hanging". Some are merely sentences that are marginally counterintuitive: "I've abandoned free market principles to save the free market system." Some are merely wording that some would consider strange, but seems okay: "I know the human being and fish can coexist peacefully."
But the content of a "Bushism" is rarely thought of as stupid... usually its a phrasing/grammar issue.
Not to minimize phrasing or grammar, but if you harp on that, you're implictly stating that is the biggest issue you have.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
I understand what you're saying, but I disagree.
I had a hard time switching from procedural to object oriented programming. It turns out that I needed the right teacher. My brain just works differently. My mother says that my son does many of the same things that I did.
Because I know how I learned it, I can transfer that knowledge in the way it was given to me.
Remember, there are some languages and systems that don't offer objects. I believe that to have a true understanding, one must understand history. Procedures came before objects.
"Lame" - Galaxar
The Epson QX-10, QX-16 and Equity computers were standard issue for Drew University (drew.edu) undergrads starting in 1984. They've got to have a box of old disks in a dark corner of the computer center.
I ran Windows 3.0 on a IBM PCjr too, but like you said, it was good to run notepad, solitaire, and the clock.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
Actually, one might be able to recover some old letters or records or interesting company or family history if one can access early data formats.
Well, While that particular model isn't really amazing or special, it is as good a representation of that class of machine as any other (though an actual IBM PC would have a bit more 'merit').
And Quayle's spelling of potato isn't the most common, but is technically a valid alternative. (Although the potato incident was dumb for other reasons.)
[citation needed]
My usual dictionary certainly doesn't have an entry for that spelling. I think you've picked the exception to your rule here.
The graphics issues with 9.04 have been fixed for many Intel chips... my 965 works great now. Give it a look.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
until the nostalgia wore off and I started to see how painfully slow and primitive they are. These things were great in their time, but they don't age well.
I agree as long as we're talking strictly hardware.
The software is pretty darn clever and compact. When teaching kids, I like to open by referencing time-motion studies done during the industrial-age to make workers efficient. For just that reason, I like to keep one 80386 box booting on DOS, with POST (Power-On Self Test) routines turned-off. I demonstrate just how much faster it is to do routine tasks, like getting three levels down a menu-tree by typing '427' on the numeric keypad (~1 sec) vs (~5 secs) of wading through 'dynamic menus') on much faster hardware.
No hunting around through changing, delayed fade-in, multi-layered start-button menus...merely type "word memo.doc" wherever the cursor sits. (just don't exceed an 8 character name)
I like watching kid's expressions when I show them the "~1 second power-down procedure." (flip the big red paddle-switch, and the CRT, also connected to the same power supply, shuts off at the same time)
Ah...those were days. The rock beaches were also quite solid, none of this new-fangled "sand" constantly shifting its structure...
Point well taken. Apparently it went out of style in the 20th century (citation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potato_(word)#Spelling ) and is currently incorrect. Whether it was when Quayle used it or not I don't know.
Regardless, he corrected a little girl in a spelling bee, so it was wrong to use even if his version was technically acceptable at the time.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
in Python, http://docs.python.org/library/turtle.html, which is a much nicer first language than basic, .... or java
the GP should be noted funny, not insightful
aurelien
Got a list of supported cards?
Moved one of the desktop machines to 9.04 a few months ago and it looked promising, but the gfx were so slow it forced me back to 8.04
If 9.04 supports the 810 Intel chip I am SO there.
Are you saying you've got other PC's with more than 512K RAM memory in them? Oh, but that's impossible.
BASIC, I utterly failed my first year of high school computer science because I couldn't wrap my brain around any programming language that didn't use line numbers. Seems kind of pathetic looking back, but all I had to work with prior to that was an Aquarius computer from Mattel and the good old Commodore Vic 20
Bushisms are overrated. I wrote a long response to the first person to mention them.
I couldn't watch the video... the laughtrack made that impossible.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
You're probably right about the nostalgia thing, especially since this Epson thing is really just a clone box.
Having said that though, over the last few years I've pieced together a working Commodore 64 system with all the fixings (I even have a tape drive, lol). It was the first computer system I ever owned. Nostalgia, definitely, but I gotta say, after all these years, some of those games are still fun as hell. Remember stuff like Jumpman? Or Raid on Bungling Bay? Great stuff.
When I'm playing around with the thing in the shop, my 8 year old kid is completely entranced by those primitive games. Even more interesting, he was fascinated by me using Buttermon to enter in machine code instructions to make a little program to put a bunch of dots on the screen. Maybe these old machines with their simple operating environments could find new life teaching kids stuff about the insides of the computers they take for granted these days.
Bibo Ergo Sum.
Give me the 13' monitor, and I'll hook you up with whatever 360K floppy disks you want. I've got PC-DOS 3.3 (two disks), GWBASIC, WordWriter, Lotus 123, UED, PC Tools, XTetris, and Caddiehack Golf CGA Tour. Oh, and I've got a 5.25" floppy drive that'll work with your modern PC, so you can create your own disks from downloaded images using dd or rawrite or whatever. You can have it all in exchange for the thirteen-foot monitor.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
"I'll teach him BASIC first, then COBOL...."
Child abuse x 2!
You should be ashamed, sir or madam.
13' RGB monitor (with contrast/brightness knobs);
Holy shit! My big screen LCD isn't even that big. How expensive was THAT?
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. -- Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
people who laugh at old systems do not understand that old machines are very useful to teach children. BASIC is by far the best and easiest language to teach, though structured programming etc., may not be available in some software. Sequence, selection and loop concepts, arrays etc., are easily taught and when the student graduate teach him or her COBOL which will not die for many many years. Type declaration, objects and other feature based systems still have the basic -sequence, selection and loop concepts within their modules. That part of procedure will still be there. Your idea is worth preserving. Keep up your vision.
Of course; that's how misattributions start. Though in this case, it was floating around before the talk in question (in 1989), so it can't be the source of the line. When it is given a date at all it's usually 1981.
And this is an admission of him being surprised by the speed of developments, it's very different to the short-sighted arrogance of "640k should be enough for anyone". The line stuck because Gates is often a supremely arrogant prick after all.
This would be an incredible teaching aid. Students could be shown (not just told) how technology has advanced over 25 years. Real, side-by-side comparisons could be demonstrated using simple programs designed to run on both the new and old systems (first-hand demonstration of backwards compatibility, performance comparisons, etc). This could be an excellent system to teach the importance of efficiency in programming.
When my son is old enough to have an actual computer, I plan on giving him a system that has limited capabilities so I can teach him on a system that doesn't provide built-in distractions (I'll probably pick something newer than 25 years though). Of course, I'll teach him BASIC first, then maybe COBOL and some other simple languages before introducing him to modern languages and objects.
You, good sir, are incredibly cruel. COBOL is useless for programming for fun. Throw Slackware on there and teach the kid that alongside Perl, bash, and C++.
Give him something useful.
Awesome, so I'm not the only one! I recently decided to resurrect my 25yo Atari 2600 games console and my 20yo C-64... both *still work*! Amazing. Fair dinkum, do you think today's technology would fair as well? If you stuck a PS3 in a cupboard for 20 years, or your hopped up games PC? Most of my early burnt CDs and many of my original IBM 1.2/1.44MB PC floppy disks died a long time ago. But those sweet low density ~354K C-64 floppy disks are still going strong. Ahh nostalgia, they don't make them like they used to!
How many other slashdotters still have their original computers from the 80's they cut their teeth on (I'm angling to the 30+ age audience here)? I'd always meant to have a retro gaming gig, and now that its my 100000th birthday (oh yes, its binary) the stars are correctly aligned to make it happen. Ahh yes so lame, yet so cool. :)
Interesting. Sarah Palin's speech was coherent? Which speech was that again? Not sure what you mean with your list of examples, but I can say that Palin's interview with Katie Couric revealed that she possessed a very poor grasp of multiple areas that would be very important were she to be elected. That was the problem. And that was what the public grasped immediately. So, say all you want about quotes being taken out of context but Palin's responses during the course of that interview made things very clear to the American public.
What, like it doesn't FEEL like an eternity?
=)P
Stacks of 360k floppy drives... check. Hundreds of floppies from the DOS days... check. Couple of spare 486 boxen (and even a 386)... check. (I still have an original IBM XT too, just in case it becomes a valuable collectible.)
I'd probably put an ISA IDE adapter in it (have some of those? check) and an IDE-CF adapter, and use a CF card for a hard drive. A machine like that doesn't know what to do with even one full gigabyte. :-) I remember a buddy had bought a 300 meg drive back in the day, when most folks had Seagate 40 meggers, and had to make a bazillion 32meg partitions because that's all DOS could handle. Different programs went on different drive letters, and he had a long printout to keep track of it all. :-)
The old stuff was better made, of course. Nowadays you're lucky to get the electrolytic caps on your mobo to last more than 2-3 years.
I just got another Zip drive on ebay because mine had died and I wanted to recover some data from the old disks, and guess what? I managed to read every last byte off every one of them, all in an evening. Now I can bulk-erase the disks and put the whole pile on ebay again.
So, basically Bill Gates said "I never said that 640k thing that people ridicule me with."
Well, that's good enough for me! After all, he couldn't possibly have gotten where he is today without being a very honest man!
If you want to use it on the net I might suggest Arachne a browser which runs on early DOS versions.
does it run linux ?!?
I have Windows 2.1 on about 25 3.25" floppies for an Amstrad system of similar age and spec. I don't think Windows 3.0 was out for a while yet. I have no idea whether the disks still read, but they did about twelve years ago when I got the thing to run. I am sure we could copy that to you, if it did not bring down the Wrath of Miscosoft.
If you really want to go Old-School, I have CP/M on 8" floppies also from MIcrosoft. We don't have the machine that ran those any longer, but they did work.
Excuse me, but are you trying to kill your son?
Wrong. He *stated* that he never actually said it. Which is quite a different thing.
Or do you believe Bill Gates on that one? ^^
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
"I've said some stupid things and some wrong things, but not that. No one involved in computers would ever say that a certain amount of memory is enough for all time ... I keep bumping into that silly quotation attributed to me that says 640K of memory is enough. There's never a citation; the quotation just floats like a rumor, repeated again and again."
There! He said it! (Emphasis mine.)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
I've also thought some about how valuable computer history is in the learning process. Every class or book I've ever read starts out with a "brief" history. In the end I decided that my son is going to start out with whatever is currently relevant, because for me, it's easier to learn something that has potential for immediate real world application. Learning about dad's old Epson crap box doesn't seem very interesting to me. Trying to cram uninteresting, and relatively useless information into a young persons head can quickly lead to boredom, and frustration with their perception of the "learning process". Teach them some action script and let them watch the results.
Now that you can get an emulator for practically anything*, there isn't much of a point to messing around with these old systems (I'll admit I've done it a-plenty in the past for various reasons).
*seriously, I finally after years am able to play Master of Magic again with almost perfect audio (which I haven't been able to do before) using DOSbox 0.73, and I can play old NES games on of all things, my iPod Touch. Yes, nostalgic games are my only use for old systems/emulators.
...a sub-par 2400 baud modem. (and that's pushing it)
Seriously, I have a Linksys router that would process circles around it; even before overclocking! I don't even think I could underclock my router to the speed of an i8088. (4.77Mhz) By Moore's Law, what you have there is an antique and little more... it's only good as a vehicle for driving down memory lane.
Excerpt from original user manual:
A number of option cards are available to expand the memory up to 640K, and a special Epson memory expansion card is available from your Epson dealer to expand memory to 512K without using an option slot.
Imagine all that you could do with a whole 640K!</sarcasm>
If you're running a Linux server from your home, then this would make a good serial terminal, but only if you can find the emulator software to do it. You might be able to retrofit a controller for a 3.5" floppy, but USB is going to be a stretch. Do they even make USB controllers for ISA bus? The manual didn't specify the type of “option card” it uses, which makes me think it's the original 8-bit ISA standard. ISA was practically dead in 1997, then USB only rose to dominance after 1998... I'm not even sure they intersect!
Abandon all hope, ye who enter a “system dick” [sic] to continue. <nods to ta bu shi da yu>
Recycle it or donate to a museum. Otherwise, best of luck!
This post © Copyrite Duggeek, all rights reversed.
Raw editing of your hard drive can be done with any simple bootdisk with the flavor you like: Linux, DOS or Windows.
This is a pure OS limitation because of buffering etc..
Windows changed a lot because it used to be multi-threading instead of multi-tasking; which needed some buffers to keep the speed up. .. pure speed ..
A single tasking OS like DOS doesn't need such heavy buffering because it's not doing any multi-tasking.
Newer drives also have buffers on its print for the same sake
I've got to be honest, I kindof miss the "old" Norton tools, when they were worthy of being called "REAL TOOLS!" before they got boulimic with their software ...
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
Her resignation speech. It wasn't the Gettysburg Address, but it had a message. According to a lot of articles, she just jibbered. She didn't.
I don't know if I agree with any of her points, but they were at least made.
It's been too long since I saw the Katie Couric interview; I remember not being impressed with her during the campaign. But you cannot arbitarilly assume that everything thereafter she will say is dumb. Or, if that's your opinion, you should just ignore anything she says, as opposed to claiming it fits into a preconceived mold.
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I assume you mean DOS 6.22? Why would you use 3.22?
I like Dan Quayle, but "potatoe" aside. he's said some doozies.
http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/Dan_Quayle/
Hey, I've still got some 512kb memory sticks for sale. I'll even consider selling them at rock bottom 1/2 of 1984's original introduction price. Do we have a deal?
Did you know that Windows was actually programmed by a Croatian spirit medium channelling the ghost of Albert Einstein? It's true! All that stuff about Microsoft is a lie.
Don't believe me? That's right - you can search for references.
It's been a long time.
Yeah, my first response is something like "yeah, let's see you call interrupt 10h with 0 in your ah register and 13h in your al register then start writing to the A000 segment and we'll talk". :P
There's nothing sadder than an 8-bit hardware nerd.
It's been a long time.