Last night I was going through some *old* paperwork and on the back of a
report found a very simple program I wrote in Qbasic.

Did a drive search and found a backup from a 386 I had worked on a long
time ago and it had my program on it along with a few games.

I mainly use Linux now but installed DosBox to see if the stuff would run.
It did!

Played Nibbles a few times just for laughs and enjoyed it.

I am not a gamer and never played anything newer than Tetris.

On Fri, 5 Feb 2016 11:28:02 -0600, philo wrote:

Last night I was going through some *old* paperwork and on the back of a
report found a very simple program I wrote in Qbasic.
Did a drive search and found a backup from a 386 I had worked on a long
time ago and it had my program on it along with a few games.
I mainly use Linux now but installed DosBox to see if the stuff would run.
It did!
Played Nibbles a few times just for laughs and enjoyed it.
I am not a gamer and never played anything newer than Tetris.



You did good ! I would have bet against it.
Brought-to-mind my first pc - Tandy 386 -
and how proud I was after upgrading the memory and
adding a math co-processor. Old fav games included
Lemmings, Sokoban, and a few of the Sierra ones
.. Leisure Suit Larry, Police Quest ..
My archives consist of saving the hard drives from all
the old pc's ... doubt I could retrieve much from them
now, even if I wanted to ..
John T.


--- news://freenews.netfront.net/ - complaints: ---

On Fri, 05 Feb 2016 13:06:13 -0500, wrote:

On Fri, 5 Feb 2016 11:28:02 -0600, philo wrote:

Last night I was going through some *old* paperwork and on the back of a
report found a very simple program I wrote in Qbasic.
Did a drive search and found a backup from a 386 I had worked on a long
time ago and it had my program on it along with a few games.
I mainly use Linux now but installed DosBox to see if the stuff would run.
It did!
Played Nibbles a few times just for laughs and enjoyed it.
I am not a gamer and never played anything newer than Tetris.



You did good ! I would have bet against it.
Brought-to-mind my first pc - Tandy 386 -
and how proud I was after upgrading the memory and
adding a math co-processor. Old fav games included
Lemmings, Sokoban, and a few of the Sierra ones
.. Leisure Suit Larry, Police Quest ..
My archives consist of saving the hard drives from all
the old pc's ... doubt I could retrieve much from them
now, even if I wanted to ..
John T.


--- news://freenews.netfront.net/ - complaints: ---

Why not? You can connect them to a windows machine and it will read
FAT just fine. You could also load it as C: and get a blast from the
past. W/3.1 is sweet on a P4. Your games might run a little too fast
to be useful tho.
I loaded my old A-10 Warthog game and found it was impossible to even
take the plane off without crashing.

DOSBOX is an option tho since you can slow down the apparent CPU
speed.
I still run dBaseIV in DOSBOX and it really screams. The extended
memory driver loads and it sees a huge virtual drive. I keep all of
this on a thumb drive that I mount in DOSBOX as C: and it is like I am
back in the 90s. Even the tiniest thumb drive or SD card is
unbelievably huge for a DOS w/3.1 environment.
I also took a little leftover space on one of my hard drives (100 meg
or so) and partitioned it as FAT so DOS will see it. I haven't done it
yet but one of these days I am going to "SYS" a DOS 6.3 boot loader on
it. I just do not have a diskette drive on this machine to get that
going.

"philo" wrote in message
...
Last night I was going through some *old* paperwork and on the back of a
report found a very simple program I wrote in Qbasic.

Did a drive search and found a backup from a 386 I had worked on a long
time ago and it had my program on it along with a few games.

I mainly use Linux now but installed DosBox to see if the stuff would run.
It did!

Played Nibbles a few times just for laughs and enjoyed it.

I am not a gamer and never played anything newer than Tetris.

Let me know if you find an OCR to read in the old punched cards and run
their programs.

On Fri, 05 Feb 2016 13:57:59 -0500, wrote:

I haven't done it
yet but one of these days I am going to "SYS" a DOS 6.3 boot loader on
it. I just do not have a diskette drive on this machine to get that
going.

Burn them to CD to get around it?

http://www.allbootdisks.com/

On Fri, 05 Feb 2016 13:57:59 -0500, wrote:
snipped
My archives consist of saving the hard drives from all
the old pc's ... doubt I could retrieve much from them
now, even if I wanted to ..
John T.


--- news://freenews.netfront.net/ - complaints: ---

Why not? You can connect them to a windows machine and it will read
FAT just fine.
That depends. If it is an old RLL or MFM drive he might have a LOT of
trouble finding an interface card that would fit a new machine and
match the drive - and then to find one with driver support??? Even
harder yet would be an older ESDI drive.

You could also load it as C: and get a blast from the
past. W/3.1 is sweet on a P4. Your games might run a little too fast
to be useful tho.
I loaded my old A-10 Warthog game and found it was impossible to even
take the plane off without crashing.

DOSBOX is an option tho since you can slow down the apparent CPU
speed.
I still run dBaseIV in DOSBOX and it really screams. The extended
memory driver loads and it sees a huge virtual drive. I keep all of
this on a thumb drive that I mount in DOSBOX as C: and it is like I am
back in the 90s. Even the tiniest thumb drive or SD card is
unbelievably huge for a DOS w/3.1 environment.
I also took a little leftover space on one of my hard drives (100 meg
or so) and partitioned it as FAT so DOS will see it. I haven't done it
yet but one of these days I am going to "SYS" a DOS 6.3 boot loader on
it. I just do not have a diskette drive on this machine to get that
going.

On Fri, 05 Feb 2016 11:23:16 -0800, Oren wrote:

On Fri, 05 Feb 2016 13:57:59 -0500, wrote:

I haven't done it
yet but one of these days I am going to "SYS" a DOS 6.3 boot loader on
it. I just do not have a diskette drive on this machine to get that
going.

Burn them to CD to get around it?

http://www.allbootdisks.com/

I have plenty of diskette drives here, it is just plugging one in.

On Fri, 05 Feb 2016 15:08:29 -0500, wrote:

Why not? You can connect them to a windows machine and it will read
FAT just fine.
That depends. If it is an old RLL or MFM drive he might have a LOT of
trouble finding an interface card that would fit a new machine and
match the drive - and then to find one with driver support??? Even
harder yet would be an older ESDI drive.

Good point.

On 2/5/2016 11:57 AM, wrote:
On Fri, 05 Feb 2016 13:06:13 -0500, wrote:

On Fri, 5 Feb 2016 11:28:02 -0600, philo wrote:

Last night I was going through some *old* paperwork and on the back of a
report found a very simple program I wrote in Qbasic.
Did a drive search and found a backup from a 386 I had worked on a long
time ago and it had my program on it along with a few games.
I mainly use Linux now but installed DosBox to see if the stuff would run.
It did!
Played Nibbles a few times just for laughs and enjoyed it.
I am not a gamer and never played anything newer than Tetris.



You did good ! I would have bet against it.
Brought-to-mind my first pc - Tandy 386 -
and how proud I was after upgrading the memory and
adding a math co-processor. Old fav games included
Lemmings, Sokoban, and a few of the Sierra ones
.. Leisure Suit Larry, Police Quest ..
My archives consist of saving the hard drives from all
the old pc's ... doubt I could retrieve much from them
now, even if I wanted to ..
John T.

Why not? You can connect them to a windows machine and it will read
FAT just fine.

Compaq introduced the IDE drive with their 386 machines. Other
machines were still using ST506 technology.

You may also discover that a modern BIOS expects LBA addressing to
be a panacea and may not work with the tiny drives (i.e., 1GB!) from
that era. I keep a handful of smallish drives on hand for legacy equipment
simply because new drives confuse old BIOS's; the reverse is likely true,
as well.

There are limits to "backward compatibility".

You could also load it as C: and get a blast from the
past. W/3.1 is sweet on a P4. Your games might run a little too fast
to be useful tho.

Unlikely that all of the legacy drivers would work with newer hardware.
Most old games talked directly to soundblaster, GUS MAX, etc. audio.
Anything that required a genuine serial/parallel port is likely to choke
when encountering a USB driven counterpart.

I loaded my old A-10 Warthog game and found it was impossible to even
take the plane off without crashing.

I can no longer run BRIEF as software timing loops make it hundreds
of times too fast for a human interface.

You may also notice some visual artifacts with legacy games on modern
hardware. A romp through the MAME forums might give you an idea of
the sorts of things to look for.

Also, copy protection schemes (key disks, etc.) may fail to work
on modern hardware (in which the software can't directly access
specific IO ports but, instead, have to deal with a virtualization
layer).

DOSBOX is an option tho since you can slow down the apparent CPU
speed.
I still run dBaseIV in DOSBOX and it really screams. The extended
memory driver loads and it sees a huge virtual drive. I keep all of
this on a thumb drive that I mount in DOSBOX as C: and it is like I am
back in the 90s. Even the tiniest thumb drive or SD card is
unbelievably huge for a DOS w/3.1 environment.
I also took a little leftover space on one of my hard drives (100 meg
or so) and partitioned it as FAT so DOS will see it. I haven't done it
yet but one of these days I am going to "SYS" a DOS 6.3 boot loader on
it. I just do not have a diskette drive on this machine to get that
going.

On 2/5/2016 1:08 PM, wrote:
On Fri, 05 Feb 2016 13:57:59 -0500, wrote:
snipped
My archives consist of saving the hard drives from all
the old pc's ... doubt I could retrieve much from them
now, even if I wanted to ..
John T.


--- news://freenews.netfront.net/ - complaints: ---

Why not? You can connect them to a windows machine and it will read
FAT just fine.
That depends. If it is an old RLL or MFM drive he might have a LOT of
trouble finding an interface card that would fit a new machine and
match the drive - and then to find one with driver support??? Even
harder yet would be an older ESDI drive.

It's not just the physical/bus interface (ISA vs PCI). Much old software
talked directly *to* the hardware. So, expected to see particular registers
at particular IO ports that caused particular things to happen *in* the
hardware. Much of that has now been virtualized (as it should have been
ages ago -- but MS is always a decade or three behind the times) and likely
won't work.

I keep a Compaq Portable 386 for the express purpose of supporting legacy
hardware and software devices. Granted, it's only a 20MHz machine. But,
most of the hardware and software that I'm supporting were *designed* for that
sort of horsepower. So, not really "slow"!

On 02/05/2016 12:06 PM, wrote:
On Fri, 5 Feb 2016 11:28:02 -0600, philo wrote:

Last night I was going through some *old* paperwork and on the back of a
report found a very simple program I wrote in Qbasic.
Did a drive search and found a backup from a 386 I had worked on a long
time ago and it had my program on it along with a few games.
I mainly use Linux now but installed DosBox to see if the stuff would run.
It did!
Played Nibbles a few times just for laughs and enjoyed it.
I am not a gamer and never played anything newer than Tetris.



You did good ! I would have bet against it.
Brought-to-mind my first pc - Tandy 386 -
and how proud I was after upgrading the memory and
adding a math co-processor. Old fav games included
Lemmings, Sokoban, and a few of the Sierra ones
.. Leisure Suit Larry, Police Quest ..
My archives consist of saving the hard drives from all
the old pc's ... doubt I could retrieve much from them
now, even if I wanted to ..
John T.



You'd be surprised. I have a number of ancient hard drives, some as
small as 100 megs and they are still good.

Had I not been able to run my old DOS programs in an emulator, I still
have a small collections of old machines ...and other than a dead CMOS
battery probably still work.


Funny thing from what I've seen of the new computer games, they are
basically just the old ones with a lot of graphics and audio.

A friend of mine (yep old timer like me) spends tons of money so he can
have the best hardware to play all the new games.

He fully admits that he likes to do nothing but waste time.

On 02/05/2016 12:57 PM, wrote:

et ---

Why not? You can connect them to a windows machine and it will read
FAT just fine. You could also load it as C: and get a blast from the
past. W/3.1 is sweet on a P4. Your games might run a little too fast
to be useful tho.
I loaded my old A-10 Warthog game and found it was impossible to even
take the plane off without crashing.

DOSBOX is an option tho since you can slow down the apparent CPU
speed.
I still run dBaseIV in DOSBOX and it really screams. The extended
memory driver loads and it sees a huge virtual drive. I keep all of
this on a thumb drive that I mount in DOSBOX as C: and it is like I am
back in the 90s. Even the tiniest thumb drive or SD card is
unbelievably huge for a DOS w/3.1 environment.
I also took a little leftover space on one of my hard drives (100 meg
or so) and partitioned it as FAT so DOS will see it. I haven't done it
yet but one of these days I am going to "SYS" a DOS 6.3 boot loader on
it. I just do not have a diskette drive on this machine to get that
going.




Run Win3.1 on even a P-II and it will scream!


I also recall having to apply a patch to Win95 to get it running on a
CPU over 300 mhz

On 02/05/2016 02:13 PM, wrote:
On Fri, 05 Feb 2016 11:23:16 -0800, Oren wrote:

On Fri, 05 Feb 2016 13:57:59 -0500, wrote:

I haven't done it
yet but one of these days I am going to "SYS" a DOS 6.3 boot loader on
it. I just do not have a diskette drive on this machine to get that
going.

Burn them to CD to get around it?

http://www.allbootdisks.com/

I have plenty of diskette drives here, it is just plugging one in.




I had to help a friend of mine repair a CNC machine that was powered by
OS/2. Hard drive was bad and had to do a fresh install which required
boot floppies...

I must have gone through at least 50 old floppies just to find three
good ones.



(Got the OS and software installed but too many of the custom settings
were lost, so the repair job was a failure unfortunately)

On 02/05/2016 02:08 PM, wrote:
On Fri, 05 Feb 2016 13:57:59 -0500, wrote:
snipped
My archives consist of saving the hard drives from all
the old pc's ... doubt I could retrieve much from them
now, even if I wanted to ..
John T.


--- news://freenews.netfront.net/ - complaints: ---

Why not? You can connect them to a windows machine and it will read
FAT just fine.
That depends. If it is an old RLL or MFM drive he might have a LOT of
trouble finding an interface card that would fit a new machine and
match the drive - and then to find one with driver support??? Even
harder yet would be an older ESDI drive.

You could also load it as C: and get a blast from the
past. W/3.1 is sweet on a P4. Your games might run a little too fast
to be useful tho.
I loaded my old A-10 Warthog game and found it was impossible to even
take the plane off without crashing.

DOSBOX is an option tho since you can slow down the apparent CPU
speed.
I still run dBaseIV in DOSBOX and it really screams. The extended
memory driver loads and it sees a huge virtual drive. I keep all of
this on a thumb drive that I mount in DOSBOX as C: and it is like I am
back in the 90s. Even the tiniest thumb drive or SD card is
unbelievably huge for a DOS w/3.1 environment.
I also took a little leftover space on one of my hard drives (100 meg
or so) and partitioned it as FAT so DOS will see it. I haven't done it
yet but one of these days I am going to "SYS" a DOS 6.3 boot loader on
it. I just do not have a diskette drive on this machine to get that
going.




I still have two MFM drives that work on a Zenith Data Systems 286


Used to have quite a few at one point...and they would just plain 100%
die with no warning.

On 02/05/2016 01:10 PM, taxed and spent wrote:
"philo" wrote in message
...
Last night I was going through some *old* paperwork and on the back of a
report found a very simple program I wrote in Qbasic.

Did a drive search and found a backup from a 386 I had worked on a long
time ago and it had my program on it along with a few games.

I mainly use Linux now but installed DosBox to see if the stuff would run.
It did!

Played Nibbles a few times just for laughs and enjoyed it.

I am not a gamer and never played anything newer than Tetris.

Let me know if you find an OCR to read in the old punched cards and run
their programs.





LOL

I have one program left on punch cards back from the FORTRAN I-V days

(In the same box with my slide rule)

kept it because I thought some day it would be a collector's item.


I think the kids today just would not believe the old days.

On Fri, 5 Feb 2016 15:56:28 -0600, philo wrote:

On 02/05/2016 12:06 PM, wrote:
On Fri, 5 Feb 2016 11:28:02 -0600, philo wrote:

Last night I was going through some *old* paperwork and on the back of a
report found a very simple program I wrote in Qbasic.
Did a drive search and found a backup from a 386 I had worked on a long
time ago and it had my program on it along with a few games.
I mainly use Linux now but installed DosBox to see if the stuff would run.
It did!
Played Nibbles a few times just for laughs and enjoyed it.
I am not a gamer and never played anything newer than Tetris.



You did good ! I would have bet against it.
Brought-to-mind my first pc - Tandy 386 -
and how proud I was after upgrading the memory and
adding a math co-processor. Old fav games included
Lemmings, Sokoban, and a few of the Sierra ones
.. Leisure Suit Larry, Police Quest ..
My archives consist of saving the hard drives from all
the old pc's ... doubt I could retrieve much from them
now, even if I wanted to ..
John T.



You'd be surprised. I have a number of ancient hard drives, some as
small as 100 megs and they are still good.

What about 10, 20, 30, and 35MB drives???

Had I not been able to run my old DOS programs in an emulator, I still
have a small collections of old machines ...and other than a dead CMOS
battery probably still work.


Funny thing from what I've seen of the new computer games, they are
basically just the old ones with a lot of graphics and audio.

A friend of mine (yep old timer like me) spends tons of money so he can
have the best hardware to play all the new games.

He fully admits that he likes to do nothing but waste time.

On Fri, 5 Feb 2016 15:58:34 -0600, philo wrote:

On 02/05/2016 12:57 PM, wrote:

et ---

Why not? You can connect them to a windows machine and it will read
FAT just fine. You could also load it as C: and get a blast from the
past. W/3.1 is sweet on a P4. Your games might run a little too fast
to be useful tho.
I loaded my old A-10 Warthog game and found it was impossible to even
take the plane off without crashing.

DOSBOX is an option tho since you can slow down the apparent CPU
speed.
I still run dBaseIV in DOSBOX and it really screams. The extended
memory driver loads and it sees a huge virtual drive. I keep all of
this on a thumb drive that I mount in DOSBOX as C: and it is like I am
back in the 90s. Even the tiniest thumb drive or SD card is
unbelievably huge for a DOS w/3.1 environment.
I also took a little leftover space on one of my hard drives (100 meg
or so) and partitioned it as FAT so DOS will see it. I haven't done it
yet but one of these days I am going to "SYS" a DOS 6.3 boot loader on
it. I just do not have a diskette drive on this machine to get that
going.




Run Win3.1 on even a P-II and it will scream!


I also recall having to apply a patch to Win95 to get it running on a
CPU over 300 mhz
We had a "slowdown" utility that went with all our 20mhz XP clones so
you could throttle it back to run games written for 4.7 processors.
Used the same program for our 20mhz AT clones (when the AT was an 8mhz
box)

On Fri, 05 Feb 2016 17:47:14 -0500, wrote:

What about 10, 20, 30, and 35MB drives???

The 10 made a good door stop

On Fri, 5 Feb 2016 16:03:35 -0600, philo wrote:

On 02/05/2016 02:08 PM, wrote:
On Fri, 05 Feb 2016 13:57:59 -0500, wrote:
snipped
My archives consist of saving the hard drives from all
the old pc's ... doubt I could retrieve much from them
now, even if I wanted to ..
John T.


--- news://freenews.netfront.net/ - complaints: ---

Why not? You can connect them to a windows machine and it will read
FAT just fine.
That depends. If it is an old RLL or MFM drive he might have a LOT of
trouble finding an interface card that would fit a new machine and
match the drive - and then to find one with driver support??? Even
harder yet would be an older ESDI drive.

You could also load it as C: and get a blast from the
past. W/3.1 is sweet on a P4. Your games might run a little too fast
to be useful tho.
I loaded my old A-10 Warthog game and found it was impossible to even
take the plane off without crashing.

DOSBOX is an option tho since you can slow down the apparent CPU
speed.
I still run dBaseIV in DOSBOX and it really screams. The extended
memory driver loads and it sees a huge virtual drive. I keep all of
this on a thumb drive that I mount in DOSBOX as C: and it is like I am
back in the 90s. Even the tiniest thumb drive or SD card is
unbelievably huge for a DOS w/3.1 environment.
I also took a little leftover space on one of my hard drives (100 meg
or so) and partitioned it as FAT so DOS will see it. I haven't done it
yet but one of these days I am going to "SYS" a DOS 6.3 boot loader on
it. I just do not have a diskette drive on this machine to get that
going.




I still have two MFM drives that work on a Zenith Data Systems 286


Used to have quite a few at one point...and they would just plain 100%
die with no warning.
What brand?? I used to work for (at the time) the largest hard drive
distributor in Canada and remenber when the super fast connor hard
drives came out. 300Mb 3.5" drives!!!
Can't remember the brands we carried but in less than 2 years we went
from 10mb drives to 300mb drives - from full hight to half hight 5.25
inchers to 3.5 inchers - and from about $2000 for a (10mb) drive and
matched controller to $300 for a 300Mb drive that used a more or less
universal controller.

Some of those drives just ran and ran - and others were like pop-corn.

On Fri, 5 Feb 2016 16:06:13 -0600, philo wrote:

On 02/05/2016 01:10 PM, taxed and spent wrote:
"philo" wrote in message
...
Last night I was going through some *old* paperwork and on the back of a
report found a very simple program I wrote in Qbasic.

Did a drive search and found a backup from a 386 I had worked on a long
time ago and it had my program on it along with a few games.

I mainly use Linux now but installed DosBox to see if the stuff would run.
It did!

Played Nibbles a few times just for laughs and enjoyed it.

I am not a gamer and never played anything newer than Tetris.

Let me know if you find an OCR to read in the old punched cards and run
their programs.





LOL

I have one program left on punch cards back from the FORTRAN I-V days

(In the same box with my slide rule)

kept it because I thought some day it would be a collector's item.


I think the kids today just would not believe the old days.
I've got a few data cassettes for the CoCo2 still packed away

On 02/05/2016 04:55 PM, wrote:






I still have two MFM drives that work on a Zenith Data Systems 286


Used to have quite a few at one point...and they would just plain 100%
die with no warning.
What brand?? I used to work for (at the time) the largest hard drive
distributor in Canada and remenber when the super fast connor hard
drives came out. 300Mb 3.5" drives!!!
Can't remember the brands we carried but in less than 2 years we went
from 10mb drives to 300mb drives - from full hight to half hight 5.25
inchers to 3.5 inchers - and from about $2000 for a (10mb) drive and
matched controller to $300 for a 300Mb drive that used a more or less
universal controller.

Some of those drives just ran and ran - and others were like pop-corn.




I kept a few dead MFM drives and there is an assortment:
Seagate, Mitsubishi, Mini Scribe and NEC. No "one" brand sticks out but
through the years I think Seagate was most common,


I just remembered that I have a working Kaypro that a friend gave me
(his father's). It would have an MFM drive , 10 mb I believe.

The company I used to work for was a Kaypro distributor but only handled
them as a side line as we just sold their multi-meters. (First hand held
digital) At any rate I had the price sheets for the computers and when I
told my friend they were something like $7000 or so in maybe 1979 he
said: "No wonder my mother got so mad when he bought it."

On 02/05/2016 04:49 PM, wrote:
On Fri, 5 Feb 2016 15:58:34 -0600, philo wrote:

On 02/05/2016 12:57 PM, wrote:

et ---

Why not? You can connect them to a windows machine and it will read
FAT just fine. You could also load it as C: and get a blast from the
past. W/3.1 is sweet on a P4. Your games might run a little too fast
to be useful tho.
I loaded my old A-10 Warthog game and found it was impossible to even
take the plane off without crashing.

DOSBOX is an option tho since you can slow down the apparent CPU
speed.
I still run dBaseIV in DOSBOX and it really screams. The extended
memory driver loads and it sees a huge virtual drive. I keep all of
this on a thumb drive that I mount in DOSBOX as C: and it is like I am
back in the 90s. Even the tiniest thumb drive or SD card is
unbelievably huge for a DOS w/3.1 environment.
I also took a little leftover space on one of my hard drives (100 meg
or so) and partitioned it as FAT so DOS will see it. I haven't done it
yet but one of these days I am going to "SYS" a DOS 6.3 boot loader on
it. I just do not have a diskette drive on this machine to get that
going.




Run Win3.1 on even a P-II and it will scream!


I also recall having to apply a patch to Win95 to get it running on a
CPU over 300 mhz
We had a "slowdown" utility that went with all our 20mhz XP clones so
you could throttle it back to run games written for 4.7 processors.
Used the same program for our 20mhz AT clones (when the AT was an 8mhz
box)





Yes, I think it was call "moslo"

On 02/05/2016 04:47 PM, wrote:
On Fri, 5 Feb 2016 15:56:28 -0600, philo wrote:

On 02/05/2016 12:06 PM, wrote:
On Fri, 5 Feb 2016 11:28:02 -0600, philo wrote:

Last night I was going through some *old* paperwork and on the back of a
report found a very simple program I wrote in Qbasic.
Did a drive search and found a backup from a 386 I had worked on a long
time ago and it had my program on it along with a few games.
I mainly use Linux now but installed DosBox to see if the stuff would run.
It did!
Played Nibbles a few times just for laughs and enjoyed it.
I am not a gamer and never played anything newer than Tetris.



You did good ! I would have bet against it.
Brought-to-mind my first pc - Tandy 386 -
and how proud I was after upgrading the memory and
adding a math co-processor. Old fav games included
Lemmings, Sokoban, and a few of the Sierra ones
.. Leisure Suit Larry, Police Quest ..
My archives consist of saving the hard drives from all
the old pc's ... doubt I could retrieve much from them
now, even if I wanted to ..
John T.



You'd be surprised. I have a number of ancient hard drives, some as
small as 100 megs and they are still good.

What about 10, 20, 30, and 35MB drives???

The smallest IDE drive I have is 40MB

Just through boredom, I installed win95 on a larger drive , then cloned
it to the 40 MB. The 40MB drive was too small to run an installation.

Anything smaller would be an MFM drive and the biggest one I had was
145megs. It came from a military surplus 386 as most people probably
could not easily have afforded a drive that big in thos days.

On 02/05/2016 04:56 PM, wrote:
On Fri, 5 Feb 2016 16:06:13 -0600, philo wrote:

On 02/05/2016 01:10 PM, taxed and spent wrote:
"philo" wrote in message
...
Last night I was going through some *old* paperwork and on the back of a
report found a very simple program I wrote in Qbasic.

Did a drive search and found a backup from a 386 I had worked on a long
time ago and it had my program on it along with a few games.

I mainly use Linux now but installed DosBox to see if the stuff would run.
It did!

Played Nibbles a few times just for laughs and enjoyed it.

I am not a gamer and never played anything newer than Tetris.

Let me know if you find an OCR to read in the old punched cards and run
their programs.





LOL

I have one program left on punch cards back from the FORTRAN I-V days

(In the same box with my slide rule)

kept it because I thought some day it would be a collector's item.


I think the kids today just would not believe the old days.
I've got a few data cassettes for the CoCo2 still packed away




I did not have that one, but did have a Ti-99/4

When the price when down to $50 I got one.

I wrote a few programs in basic but then used it just to play games and
kept it until the game port died, then sold it at a rummage sale as-is
for $25

On Fri, 05 Feb 2016 13:33:36 -0700, Don Y
wrote:

On 2/5/2016 1:08 PM, wrote:
On Fri, 05 Feb 2016 13:57:59 -0500, wrote:
snipped
My archives consist of saving the hard drives from all
the old pc's ... doubt I could retrieve much from them
now, even if I wanted to ..
John T.


--- news://freenews.netfront.net/ - complaints: ---

Why not? You can connect them to a windows machine and it will read
FAT just fine.
That depends. If it is an old RLL or MFM drive he might have a LOT of
trouble finding an interface card that would fit a new machine and
match the drive - and then to find one with driver support??? Even
harder yet would be an older ESDI drive.

It's not just the physical/bus interface (ISA vs PCI). Much old software
talked directly *to* the hardware. So, expected to see particular registers
at particular IO ports that caused particular things to happen *in* the
hardware. Much of that has now been virtualized (as it should have been
ages ago -- but MS is always a decade or three behind the times) and likely
won't work.

I keep a Compaq Portable 386 for the express purpose of supporting legacy
hardware and software devices. Granted, it's only a 20MHz machine. But,
most of the hardware and software that I'm supporting were *designed* for that
sort of horsepower. So, not really "slow"!

I have an old socket 7 (P1) machine here that has't puked up any bad
capacitors yet and it will still run old drives (40meg was the last
one I dumped) but most of my legacy stuff is on SCSI drives and they
work fine on my fax/scanner/file server Latitude laptop.
The scanner is SCSI and I have an open port on the cable.
I still have the "data" drive that was on my work system when I
retired in 96 (including the backup of the C but it is also spinning
on this machine ... the whole thing about the size of a short video
clip.

On Fri, 5 Feb 2016 15:58:34 -0600, philo wrote:

I also recall having to apply a patch to Win95 to get it running on a
CPU over 300 mhz

W98 works fine on a P4. Never had much use for W95. I was running Warp
in those days.

On Fri, 5 Feb 2016 16:01:56 -0600, philo wrote:

I must have gone through at least 50 old floppies just to find three
good ones.

If you are going to write on a floppy, try bulk degaussing it before
you run a format.
I have been about 50:50 getting old floppies to read but the
factory/vendor written ones seem better than the ones that have
scribbled labels on them. They may not have been good when I put them
away tho. I just have a big box of diskettes and I am not even sure
where I got them. Every time I decide I am going to archive them and
throw them away, I come up needing a diskette for something. I do have
a "mapped" network diskette drive in the system but I can't boot from
it on this machine.
I just got rid of my last 3363 5.25" optical drive a little while ago
and it was about 3 years ago that I ditched all of my PS/2 stuff.

On Fri, 5 Feb 2016 16:03:35 -0600, philo wrote:

I still have two MFM drives that work on a Zenith Data Systems 286

I got rid of my last MFM drive when I went from a PC/AT to a PS/2 M55
and a M70 with the F2DBA drives. Then I moved to a M57 with the 486
upgrade. I stayed with SCSI after that. SCSI was the first true "hot
pluggable" drives I had and I used them like diskettes.

On Fri, 05 Feb 2016 14:55:09 -0800, Oren wrote:

On Fri, 05 Feb 2016 17:47:14 -0500, wrote:

What about 10, 20, 30, and 35MB drives???

The 10 made a good door stop
The full hight 35 worked better.

On Fri, 5 Feb 2016 18:02:57 -0600, philo wrote:

On 02/05/2016 04:55 PM, wrote:






I still have two MFM drives that work on a Zenith Data Systems 286


Used to have quite a few at one point...and they would just plain 100%
die with no warning.
What brand?? I used to work for (at the time) the largest hard drive
distributor in Canada and remenber when the super fast connor hard
drives came out. 300Mb 3.5" drives!!!
Can't remember the brands we carried but in less than 2 years we went
from 10mb drives to 300mb drives - from full hight to half hight 5.25
inchers to 3.5 inchers - and from about $2000 for a (10mb) drive and
matched controller to $300 for a 300Mb drive that used a more or less
universal controller.

Some of those drives just ran and ran - and others were like pop-corn.




I kept a few dead MFM drives and there is an assortment:
Seagate, Mitsubishi, Mini Scribe and NEC. No "one" brand sticks out but
through the years I think Seagate was most common,


Some of the Miniscribe and Micropolis drives were terrible. Then there
was an upstrat brand I can't remember off-hand that had fantastic
specs - was low priced - and lasted on the market for about a year -
about twice as long as it's average drive life!!!

Every six months or a year one company would switch places with
another for having the worst drive ---
I just remembered that I have a working Kaypro that a friend gave me
(his father's). It would have an MFM drive , 10 mb I believe.

The company I used to work for was a Kaypro distributor but only handled
them as a side line as we just sold their multi-meters. (First hand held
digital) At any rate I had the price sheets for the computers and when I
told my friend they were something like $7000 or so in maybe 1979 he
said: "No wonder my mother got so mad when he bought it."

My former brother-in-law was a "financial planner" and "Investment
broker" who always had to have the best - at least in his mind. It was
champaign living on a beer budjet but he spent the money. His first PC
compatible (pre XT days) cost him just over $2000 - then another $2000
for a hard drive a few weeks later, Then another $3000 for a high
resolution colour display set-up -I think it was an EGA but not sure -
may well have been some standard that never caught on- so he had about
3 times as much tied up in his computer as in his new Country Squire
wagon - and then he just absolutely HAD to have a Laserjet printer -
another $3000.

I don't think he ever made enough in that business to even pay for his
equipment - they lived on my sister's earnings as a nurse.

On Fri, 5 Feb 2016 18:07:06 -0600, philo wrote:

On 02/05/2016 04:47 PM, wrote:
On Fri, 5 Feb 2016 15:56:28 -0600, philo wrote:

On 02/05/2016 12:06 PM, wrote:
On Fri, 5 Feb 2016 11:28:02 -0600, philo wrote:

Last night I was going through some *old* paperwork and on the back of a
report found a very simple program I wrote in Qbasic.
Did a drive search and found a backup from a 386 I had worked on a long
time ago and it had my program on it along with a few games.
I mainly use Linux now but installed DosBox to see if the stuff would run.
It did!
Played Nibbles a few times just for laughs and enjoyed it.
I am not a gamer and never played anything newer than Tetris.



You did good ! I would have bet against it.
Brought-to-mind my first pc - Tandy 386 -
and how proud I was after upgrading the memory and
adding a math co-processor. Old fav games included
Lemmings, Sokoban, and a few of the Sierra ones
.. Leisure Suit Larry, Police Quest ..
My archives consist of saving the hard drives from all
the old pc's ... doubt I could retrieve much from them
now, even if I wanted to ..
John T.



You'd be surprised. I have a number of ancient hard drives, some as
small as 100 megs and they are still good.

What about 10, 20, 30, and 35MB drives???

The smallest IDE drive I have is 40MB

Just through boredom, I installed win95 on a larger drive , then cloned
it to the 40 MB. The 40MB drive was too small to run an installation.

Anything smaller would be an MFM drive and the biggest one I had was
145megs. It came from a military surplus 386 as most people probably
could not easily have afforded a drive that big in thos days.



Most good MFM drives could be run on RLL controllers with a 50%
increase in capacity (and speed) All RLL drives could be run as MFM
with a 33% decrease in capacity. The smallest RLL drives we sold were
30MB drives - which were "converted" 20Mb drives. I did put a few 10mb
MFMs on RLL to get 15 out of them.

On Fri, 5 Feb 2016 18:09:10 -0600, philo wrote:

On 02/05/2016 04:56 PM, wrote:
On Fri, 5 Feb 2016 16:06:13 -0600, philo wrote:

On 02/05/2016 01:10 PM, taxed and spent wrote:
"philo" wrote in message
...
Last night I was going through some *old* paperwork and on the back of a
report found a very simple program I wrote in Qbasic.

Did a drive search and found a backup from a 386 I had worked on a long
time ago and it had my program on it along with a few games.

I mainly use Linux now but installed DosBox to see if the stuff would run.
It did!

Played Nibbles a few times just for laughs and enjoyed it.

I am not a gamer and never played anything newer than Tetris.

Let me know if you find an OCR to read in the old punched cards and run
their programs.





LOL

I have one program left on punch cards back from the FORTRAN I-V days

(In the same box with my slide rule)

kept it because I thought some day it would be a collector's item.


I think the kids today just would not believe the old days.
I've got a few data cassettes for the CoCo2 still packed away




I did not have that one, but did have a Ti-99/4

When the price when down to $50 I got one.

I wrote a few programs in basic but then used it just to play games and
kept it until the game port died, then sold it at a rummage sale as-is
for $25
I still have the CoCo - with an Ados controller and double dual
density 5 1/4 inch drives, a home built E-Prom burner, and the OS9
multitasking OS with C compiler. It also has a composite video driver
I built into it in place of the RF (TV) output.

I also have an MC10 (micro-coco) converted from 12 volts AC to 12 volt
DC operation to use in the rallye car - which we never got installed
because at that time we couldn't get a suitable display ...

On Fri, 5 Feb 2016 18:02:57 -0600, philo wrote:

I kept a few dead MFM drives and there is an assortment:
Seagate, Mitsubishi, Mini Scribe and NEC. No "one" brand sticks out but
through the years I think Seagate was most common,

The Seagate stepper motor drives (ST 2025, 238 etc) used to crap out
after a while. As long as you got on it right away you could usually
get the data off. Then if you did a low level format and started over
they would work again for a while. The problem was wear in the access
and they lost tracking.

On Fri, 05 Feb 2016 21:12:41 -0500, wrote:

On Fri, 5 Feb 2016 18:02:57 -0600, philo wrote:

I kept a few dead MFM drives and there is an assortment:
Seagate, Mitsubishi, Mini Scribe and NEC. No "one" brand sticks out but
through the years I think Seagate was most common,

The Seagate stepper motor drives (ST 2025, 238 etc) used to crap out
after a while. As long as you got on it right away you could usually
get the data off. Then if you did a low level format and started over
they would work again for a while. The problem was wear in the access
and they lost tracking.
A 15 degree F change in temperature could make a stepper drive
unreadable.

On 2/5/2016 3:56 PM, philo wrote:
On 02/05/2016 12:06 PM, wrote:
On Fri, 5 Feb 2016 11:28:02 -0600, philo wrote:

Last night I was going through some *old* paperwork and on the back of a
report found a very simple program I wrote in Qbasic.
Did a drive search and found a backup from a 386 I had worked on a long
time ago and it had my program on it along with a few games.
I mainly use Linux now but installed DosBox to see if the stuff would
run.
It did!
Played Nibbles a few times just for laughs and enjoyed it.
I am not a gamer and never played anything newer than Tetris.



You did good ! I would have bet against it.
Brought-to-mind my first pc - Tandy 386 -
and how proud I was after upgrading the memory and
adding a math co-processor. Old fav games included
Lemmings, Sokoban, and a few of the Sierra ones
.. Leisure Suit Larry, Police Quest ..
My archives consist of saving the hard drives from all
the old pc's ... doubt I could retrieve much from them
now, even if I wanted to ..
John T.



You'd be surprised. I have a number of ancient hard drives, some as
small as 100 megs and they are still good.

Had I not been able to run my old DOS programs in an emulator, I still
have a small collections of old machines ...and other than a dead CMOS
battery probably still work.


Funny thing from what I've seen of the new computer games, they are
basically just the old ones with a lot of graphics and audio.

A friend of mine (yep old timer like me) spends tons of money so he can
have the best hardware to play all the new games.

He fully admits that he likes to do nothing but waste time.


I like to play a few games. One on my pc that I like is Minesweeper.
The majority of the mines are pretty easy to find, but there are some
mines that don't have a logical placement based on the numbers that show
in the squares and it comes totally down to just guessing where the mine
might be.

--
Maggie

On 02/05/2016 07:31 PM, wrote:
On Fri, 5 Feb 2016 16:01:56 -0600, philo wrote:

I must have gone through at least 50 old floppies just to find three
good ones.

If you are going to write on a floppy, try bulk degaussing it before
you run a format.
I have been about 50:50 getting old floppies to read but the
factory/vendor written ones seem better than the ones that have
scribbled labels on them. They may not have been good when I put them
away tho. I just have a big box of diskettes and I am not even sure
where I got them. Every time I decide I am going to archive them and
throw them away, I come up needing a diskette for something. I do have
a "mapped" network diskette drive in the system but I can't boot from
it on this machine.
I just got rid of my last 3363 5.25" optical drive a little while ago
and it was about 3 years ago that I ditched all of my PS/2 stuff.



I thinned out my old computer collection quite a bit but don't see
myself as ever getting rid of my IBM ps/2 , that is one fine piece of
hardware.

On 02/05/2016 07:54 PM, wrote:
nder my mother got so mad when he bought it."

My former brother-in-law was a "financial planner" and "Investment
broker" who always had to have the best - at least in his mind. It was
champaign living on a beer budjet but he spent the money. His first PC
compatible (pre XT days) cost him just over $2000 - then another $2000
for a hard drive a few weeks later, Then another $3000 for a high
resolution colour display set-up -I think it was an EGA but not sure -
may well have been some standard that never caught on- so he had about
3 times as much tied up in his computer as in his new Country Squire
wagon - and then he just absolutely HAD to have a Laserjet printer -
another $3000.

I don't think he ever made enough in that business to even pay for his
equipment - they lived on my sister's earnings as a nurse.




Even though I was around back in the punch card days, by 1982 I was so
sick of computers I said I would never touch one again...and except for
doing my inventory at work, pretty much stuck to that.

In 1995 my (now) wife spent $1600 for a Packard Bell P-1 75 mhz with 8
megs of RAM, I thought for sure she was nuts.


When she got a P-II a few years later she gave her old machine to me so
I figured I might as well fool with it...and before too long got hooked.

Put in a 200 mhz cpu and maxed the RAM out to 256megs

a 20 Gig HD and dual booted Win98 and RedHat 5.2

My real computer knowledge started trying to get Linux installed and
running. Took me six months before I got everything configured properly.

On 02/05/2016 07:22 PM, wrote:
On Fri, 5 Feb 2016 15:58:34 -0600, philo wrote:

I also recall having to apply a patch to Win95 to get it running on a
CPU over 300 mhz

W98 works fine on a P4. Never had much use for W95. I was running Warp
in those days.



I still have an AMD-450 with a removable drive kit and a box with 20
hard drives in caddies. I've got Warp 3 on one of them and a huge
assortment of old operating systems.

Just for nostalgia I've got ECS in a virtual machine

On 2/5/2016 6:19 PM, wrote:
On Fri, 05 Feb 2016 13:33:36 -0700, Don Y
wrote:

On 2/5/2016 1:08 PM, wrote:
On Fri, 05 Feb 2016 13:57:59 -0500, wrote:
snipped
My archives consist of saving the hard drives from all
the old pc's ... doubt I could retrieve much from them
now, even if I wanted to ..
John T.


--- news://freenews.netfront.net/ - complaints: ---

Why not? You can connect them to a windows machine and it will read
FAT just fine.
That depends. If it is an old RLL or MFM drive he might have a LOT of
trouble finding an interface card that would fit a new machine and
match the drive - and then to find one with driver support??? Even
harder yet would be an older ESDI drive.

It's not just the physical/bus interface (ISA vs PCI). Much old software
talked directly *to* the hardware. So, expected to see particular registers
at particular IO ports that caused particular things to happen *in* the
hardware. Much of that has now been virtualized (as it should have been
ages ago -- but MS is always a decade or three behind the times) and likely
won't work.

I keep a Compaq Portable 386 for the express purpose of supporting legacy
hardware and software devices. Granted, it's only a 20MHz machine. But,
most of the hardware and software that I'm supporting were *designed* for that
sort of horsepower. So, not really "slow"!

I have an old socket 7 (P1) machine here that has't puked up any bad
capacitors yet and it will still run old drives (40meg was the last

Re-capping a machine isn't tough. I've an Optiplex 745 USF (Core2 duo @1.8G)
sitting on the floor (alongside *this* Optiplex 745 UFS) that I'll be
recapping next week (as a spare for this box)

one I dumped) but most of my legacy stuff is on SCSI drives and they
work fine on my fax/scanner/file server Latitude laptop.
The scanner is SCSI and I have an open port on the cable.

I have three HBA's on each of my "PC" workstations; two on each of the
Sun workstations. SCA drives essentially let me swap volumes without
even having to uncable the drive enclosures. (though the internal
drives in the Sun boxen are FC-AL so not really easy to unplug while
the machine is running -- hence the use of the external disk shelf's)

Two scanners are SCSI while the third and fourth I've elected to use
their USB interface (because they are physically two far from their
hosts for a SCSI cable -- without resorting to the "3B/s" SCSI
asynchronous rate for the entire cable!)

I still have the "data" drive that was on my work system when I
retired in 96 (including the backup of the C but it is also spinning
on this machine ... the whole thing about the size of a short video
clip.

My WfWG machines were ~4G when I retired them (early 90's?). A far cry from
the 60M on my first PC (and the dual 8", 1.4MB floppies on my first "computer")

I long ago archived all (old) my machines to 9T tape. From there, to
MO media. And, from there, to CD and DVD. Currently, the images reside
on external USB drives.

"Live" images reside on a SCSI disk shelf (JBOD) and run on a *hardware*
emulator (a 700MHz PC-on-a-card) in a SPARC chassis. I.e., I can run
a "real" PC inside a Solaris "window" and not have to worry about
hardware compatibility because the "emulator" has all the hardware
of a real PC!

But, as the SB2000 (that hosts that emulator) doesn't remotely support
an "ISA bus", I need something else to run "PC hardware". The Compaq
Portable 386 has two ISA slots (because mine has the expansion chassis
http://www.vintage-computer.com/images/compaq3drive.jpg). This
gives me support for 5" floppies and the ISA expansion slots without
having to keep an ancient PC/keyboard on hand just for that capability.

[And, it's got a cute little canvas bag so I don't have to keep dusting
the damn thing! : ]

On Fri, 05 Feb 2016 17:55:58 -0500, wrote:


What brand?? I used to work for (at the time) the largest hard drive
distributor in Canada and remenber when the super fast connor hard
drives came out. 300Mb 3.5" drives!!!

I had a Connor tape backup drive. It was faster doing a
backup/restore with it than doing a defrag.
Restored the drive in a defragged state.
Can't remember if I used it on original IBM PC, but I know I used it
extensively on my PS/1.