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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 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
Microsoft is claiming that Windows 7 will work on such a machine, if you can wait a little while.
Right. However, creating 360k disks in a 1.2MB drive may not be easily readable by an actual 360k drive due to the different read/write head sizes between the two. The smaller head on the 1.2 doesn't have a problem with the wider tracks of the 360k, but the other way around is know to cause issues.
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!
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.
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!
Sad? No, actually it's annoying. Bill Gates never actually said what you think he said.
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=
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
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!