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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!
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.
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
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!
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
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 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.
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!
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.
Hundreds of years before the dawn of history
Lived a strange race of people... the Druids
No one knows who they were or what they were doing
But their legacy remains
Hewn into the living rock... Of Stonehenge
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
Sad? No, actually it's annoying. Bill Gates never actually said what you think he said.
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)
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.
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.
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=
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.
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
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.
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
Deja vu...
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 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.
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...
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?
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
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.
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.)
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
What, like it doesn't FEEL like an eternity?
=)P