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101090 discussions

Can Windows 98SE run on an Intel I7 with SATA gard drives?

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Mark Moulding > Win-98 SE ... it would have been nice if it recognized USB storage > devices natively. There is that package you can add (my copy is in a self-extracting archive, called "nusb23e.exe") that recognizes USB drives, etc. I run a number of USB devices (memory sticks, mice, etc) on my 98SE's and they all work fine. My approach to keeping my 98SE machines running is _lots_ of spares of all kinds. They were easy and cheap to acquire a while back - they're a lot harder to find now, those machines are all totally obsolete. Noel

10 years

Can Windows 98SE run on an Intel I7 with SATA gard drives?

by mark＠markesystems.com

> Date: Thu, 28 Jan 2016 11:44:44 -0500 > From: "Jerome H. Fine" <jhfinedp3k at compsys.to> > Subject: Can Windows 98SE run on an Intel I7 with SATA gard drives? > > I run Windows 98SE on a 14 year old Pentium III. I have > replaced the power supply twice and all three hard disk drives. <...> > Aside from the daylight savings time changing 3 weeks too late > in the spring and a week early in the fall, I really like the system > and I would like to use it for another 20 years. Since I am > 77 years old now, I figure that will be just about satisfactory. Win-98 SE was definitely one of the higher points of the Windows lineage. For most of what I did (and do, for that matter), it worked very well; it would have been nice if it recognized USB storage devices natively. > The Pentium III hardware is more than a bit of a concern. I would > be very pleased to upgrade to 64-bit Windows 10, but the DOS > variant of Ersatz-11 is not supported and I really would prefer to > keep using Netscape 7.2 since I have over 100,000 e-mails > and posts to newsgroups that it is important to be able to keep. The hardware is worth worrying about. Replacement power supplies will probably continue to be available, but those disks are likely to be unobtanium, and are practically guaranteed to fail at some point. My personal "sweet spot" for operating systems was Windows XP, and it was with with quite a bit of trepidation that I eventually moved on to Win7-32. Eventually, I needed a new laptop, and moved to Win8.1-64, which took a great deal of massaging to make comfortable (the "Classic Shell" product is very nicely-done, and free, and went a long way towards making things usable). However, there were still a lot of problems: - 64 bits absolutely breaks any 16-bit code, whether it be a DOS program or a Windows 3.1 application. Unfortunately, I have a large industrial application that I've maintained for the last 20 years (things last a long time in industry), written in Visual Basic 3. Maintaining it under XP was easy, because XP would just magically fire up ntvdm (NT Virtual DOS Machine), then run a Windows compatibility layer (wowexec) on top of that; this all made everything work just fine, and with almost complete transparency. For DOS programs, it would capture any physical I/O calls (for example, to the com port addresses) and do a fantastic job of emulating them - again, completely transparent to the application program. Win7 (Vista, actually, but nobody cares about that) broke all of that. - I have an application that I like and use a lot (CircuitMaker-2000) which runs fine on every version of Windows from 98SE on up to at least Win8.1-64 bit, and presumably Win10, though I haven't tried it. However, printing has been broken on everything since Win98SE. - The versions of Office and QuickBooks I was using started exhibiting numerous problems; Word continued to work "OK", sort of, but QB was completely unstable, and I depend upon it to run my business. - The security implementation of pretty much everything, starting with Win7, makes a lot of things difficult; registry writes are now tightly controlled, registering DLLs and OCXs requires elevated privileges, network firewall functions are highly complex, convoluted, and depending upon the version (Premium, Pro, Ultimate, etc.) the tools may not even be provided to completely manage all of this. My solution to most of this (except some of the network issues) has been to use VirtualBox. It's free, and does a great job of handling XP as a guest operating system. With XP, mouse movements, virtual disks, networking, and even the clipboard are all nicely integrated into the host operating system, so my XP machine is always just a keyboard shortcut away. I also have a virtual Win98SE machine, to handle the printing issues with CircuitMaker. This is less well integrated, in that the mouse capture is clumsy, and the file system integration features aren't there, but that was easy enough to get around by just creating shared folders on the host, and setting them up as network drives on the Win98 VM. It took a solid week of tinkering to get everything set up to my satisfaction (I have a lot of disparate interests, and their associated applications), but now I have a setup that I'm very happy with. (I broke down and advanced a single version - to 2003 - for both Office and Quickbooks, so those both run happily in native mode now.) > QUESTION: Is it even possible to run Win98SE on a current > Intel I7 CPU with SATA hard disk drives? I realize that it might > be possible under a virtual machine, but I really want all of the > advantages that Win98SE provides. One problem, of course, Almost certainly not, at least practically. Even if you can get it to boot and install, it will have no idea how to handle any of the modern peripherals, and drivers certainly won't be available. So sound won't work, the screen will be limited to VGA-16, and I'm not sure about the keyboard and mouse (there's a reasonable chance that the BIOS will emulate the legacy PS-2 devices, just as it's abstracting the details of the SATA disks). I really think that your best solution would be to go the virtual route. Get a huge monitor (mine's 28" 2560 x 1440 - I would have preferred an even larger curved 4k unit, but HDMI wouldn't support it at full resolution, and that's all my laptop has) - or even a dual monitor setup, a terabyte or two of hard disk, and plan to spend that week tinkering. As much as you like Win98SE (and I completely understand why!), you might find that XP will still run everything you're interested in, and VirtualBox handles that very well. There's every reason to expect that the virtual machine will continue to be stable and supported for the foreseeable future (like 20+ years), regardless what the host Microsoft operating system evolves to be. Of course there's no reason not to have both XP and Win98SE VMs, as I do - I even have a Win3.1 machine, just for the fun of it. For backup, I stubbornly store everything in two large directory trees: C:\Library and C:\Data (actually, I have a C:\Music as well). The C:\Data tree has absolutely everything that I've ever worked on: source, designs, correspondence, pictures, taxes, email store, and the VM disks. It takes a bit of persuading for the modern versions of Windows to accept C:\Data as the "My Documents" folder, but it can be done. The C:\Library tree has all kinds of documentation (PDFs of manuals and data sheets, and lots of just plain reading material), as well as a large sub-tree called Distrib that has the installation sources for all my software applications. In some cases, this is in the form of ISO CD-ROM images, but mostly it's sub-directories with the contents of all those. Everything is there: all the Visual Basic/Studio versions, all the Office versions, compilers, Adobe, Photoshop, PLC and other development systems, SolidWorks and AutoCAD, and even the installation media (in both ISO and file formats) of the Microsoft OSes as well (DOS through Win-7). All of this fits comfortably on the single terabyte drive that came with the laptop, and backing up is a simple matter of either just copying the two (three) large trees, or using some difference software (I use a free program called TreeComp, but there are many others too) to sync everything to an external USB (3.0 strongly preferred) drive, which I keep in the fire safe. Moving to a new computer is simply (if time-consumingly) a matter of copying those trees to the new machine, then installing the software directly from the \Library tree - no other CDs required. > Alternatively, does it seem reasonable to attempt to keep a > system with a Pentium III CPU and associated hardware > running for another 20 years? It's probably possible (although the weak link would probably be the disks), but if it were me, I'd treat that more as a hobby project than as a machine I depended upon. So far, I've successfully avoided giving up the applications and "way of doing things" that I like and am comfortable with, while still migrating to current hardware and software. I have to admit, effectively unlimited speed and space are quite nice... ~~ Mark Moulding

10 years

M. Minsky - AI & Classic Computing

by c.murray.mccullough＠gmail.com

I learned today of the passing of a true computing visionary, Marvin Minsky He of artificial intelligence fame. We in the classic computing fraternity, and computing in general, can enjoy our ?hobby? because of his work. Happy computing Murray :)

10 years

What to Do with a PS/2?

by johnwallace4＠yahoo.co.uk

[massive snippage, sorry] Several folks have mentioned Dave Cutler. There's a book called "Inside Windows NT", by Helen Custer at Microsoft Press. The aforementioned Dave Cutler (architect of software including RSX11, VAX/VMS, VAXELN, and WNT) wrote a foreword for it. There, he says the goals of NT were "portability, security, POSIX compliance, compatibility, scalable performance, multiprocessor support, extensibility, and ease of internationalisation" (p xviii in my copy). Obviously some of that list has fallen away during the NT/Gates years (portability? security? POSIX?) WNT's kernel stuff, process architecture, etc has some VAXELN heritage. VAXELN was a not particularly well known (even inside DEC) Cutler project for a distributable realtime OS which would feel comfortable for VMS programmers without being VMS, and allow distributed RT applications to be developed without need to understand low level hardware specifics and OS kernel interface details. VAXELN incorporated early examples of a process model which also incorporated threads, and a nice approach to interprocess data sharing (a distributed naming service, transparent messaging between apps whether on the same node or separate, etc). Marvellous stuff, some of which duly made its way into NT, though many writers understandably missed the VAXELN connection (it is briefly mentioned in Custer's book). Those who are moderately familiar with the internals of NT, VMS, and VAXELN (which probably isn't that many people) will recognise some of the VMSisms that VAXELN didn't have and which are also not present in NT. At a detail level, where are WNT's ASTs, where are logical names? And at a big-picture level - VMS is a mostly monolithic setup (one single kernel address space), WNT originally wasn't, though over time Gates forced changes towards the monolithic approach, e.g. moving assorted drivers and subsystems into the kernel for performance reasons that for security and robustness reasons should have been isolated from each other. Neither VAXELN nor NT have quotas or privileges as such. There is no meaningful security architecture on WNT; on VMS there is. And so on. But fewer people will know VAXELN, and so the Cutler project that gets the publicity in the "where does WNT come from" context is VMS (it is, after all, still pretty close even if VAXELN is closer). And the WNT name? Who knows. The magic words PRISM and MICA perhaps come into this discussion somewhere too, but I know nothing about them. Have a lot of fun. John Wallace (not to be confused with John Willis!) [Repurposed with minor edits from some of my occasional WNT/VAXELN/VMS ramblings on comp.os.vms]

10 years

C-64 Time delay code?

by tulsamike3434＠gmail.com

I am still working on the Choose your own adventure game and I was wondering it there a code line to let the player have a few minuets to read the text before the "make your choice " pops up under the opening text. I know to most of you think this is a dumb question but I just can nopt find the correct dose for this?

10 years

Jacques Laporte's HP-35 webpage

by kylevowen＠gmail.com

Does anyone have the full webpage from here? http://home.citycable.ch/pierrefleur/Jacques-Laporte/index.html Lots of broken links, missing images, etc. His former site was at http://www.jacques-laporte.org as far as I know. Here's a page that is particularly broken: http://home.citycable.ch/pierrefleur/Jacques-Laporte/HP%2035%20Display.htm I'm mostly interested in his work on reverse engineering the HP-35 hardware. I know I used his site a couple of years ago, and it was very helpful in understanding the 35. Very sad to hear of his passing. The Wayback Machine doesn't have it apparently, thanks to robots.txt. Thanks, Kyle

10 years

Free Apple ImageWriter I (A9M0303)

by paul＠mcjones.org

I bought it new in 1984 or 1985, and used it for six or seven years until I bought a laser printer. It?s been in its original packing box ever since. I just powered it up and verified that the line feed and form feed buttons seem to trigger appropriate movements, and the print head seeks over to the left margin. First priority to someone who will pick it up in Mountain View, California; otherwise to someone who will pay for shipping. Paul McJones

10 years

Can Windows 98SE run on an Intel I7 with SATA gard drives?

by jhfinedp3k＠compsys.to

I run Windows 98SE on a 14 year old Pentium III. I have replaced the power supply twice and all three hard disk drives. It is a really good system to run the Ersatz-11 emulator for the PDP-11, specifically RT-11. Since Ersatz-11 has built-in VT100 emulation, I don't need a separate terminal emulator. I also run Netscape 7.2 for e-mail and newsgroups. And that is all - no surfing the internet or google of any sort. Incidentally, I use Ghost 7.0 for backups to DVDs. Aside from the daylight savings time changing 3 weeks too late in the spring and a week early in the fall, I really like the system and I would like to use it for another 20 years. Since I am 77 years old now, I figure that will be just about satisfactory. The Pentium III hardware is more than a bit of a concern. I would be very pleased to upgrade to 64-bit Windows 10, but the DOS variant of Ersatz-11 is not supported and I really would prefer to keep using Netscape 7.2 since I have over 100,000 e-mails and posts to newsgroups that it is important to be able to keep. QUESTION: Is it even possible to run Win98SE on a current Intel I7 CPU with SATA hard disk drives? I realize that it might be possible under a virtual machine, but I really want all of the advantages that Win98SE provides. One problem, of course, is that there must be a patch to Win98SE when more than 1 GB of actual physical RAM is present. But I can't seem to find out anything else. What leads me to believe that there is a reasonable chance is that the IDENTICAL 3.5" floppy media is able to boot DOS >from drive A: and run on both the Pentium III (with a 3.5" HD floppy drive, of course) AND on a Q9550 Core 2 quad CPU which also has a 3.5" HD floppy drive which currently runs 64-bit Windows 7 from the C: drive, of course, using three SATA hard drives where the C: drive has an NTFS file structure and all the other partitions on all of the SATA drives have a FAT32 file structure. So without really understanding the details of the device drivers and the BIOS, it would seem that the SATA drive hardware and software is compatible. Ghost 7.0 is a file on the F: drive of the Q9550 CPU (first extended partition of the 1st physical SATA hard drive). Ghost is able to take a file produced as a backup image on the Pentium III system (and copied over the router connecting the Pentium III and the Q9500 systems - that also provides internet access for both systems) and re-create the same files on a specified partition on the Q9550 via the Ghost 7.0 program while the Q9550 is booted from the 3.5" floppy media. Since the SATA hard drives on the Q9550 system don't seem to have a problem with DOS on the floppy, then I have some hope that Win98SE could manage them as well. Has anyone experience or knowledge about being able to run Win98SE using an Intel I7 CPU with SATA hard drives all of them using a FAT32 file structure? Alternatively, does it seem reasonable to attempt to keep a system with a Pentium III CPU and associated hardware running for another 20 years? Jerome Fine

10 years

MU-BASIC V2 and RT-11 V03B distribution disks.

by mattislind＠gmail.com

I found some 8 inch floppies with distribution kits for MU-BASIC V2 and RT-11 V03B. I imaged those and put them here http://www.datormuseum.se/documentation-software/rx01-and-rx02-floppy-disks if anyone is interested in playing with MU-BASIC. There are both RAW disk images and to be used in SimH and like and also DMK/IMD files. The system that floppies came with is this little ( http://www.datormuseum.se/computers/digital-equipment-corporation/pdp1103-l) system once used at Scania in S?dert?lje.

10 years

HP 9845 Option ROMs

by ball.of.john＠gmail.com

So in the past few weeks I've been playing with my latest aquisition, an HP 9845A that's been upgraded at some point to a 9845B. The filter caps for the PSU are in the mail still and I have yet to actually see the system turn on so I've been working on other projects in the meantime like cleaning the machine, troubleshooting faults in the floppy drives it came with and sourcing a food dehydrator to bake the tapes it unexpectedly came with. It's a fairly basic machine without the internal printer or second tape drive. Only the I/O, graphics and Mass Storage ROMs are installed and there's at least one other option ROM module not accounted for according to one of the manuals that came with. In fact it seems the option ROMs aren't common to begin with or at least they are not cheap on ebay. I seem to remember a few years ago someone out further West than I am who also had a 45 discussed some sort of ROM board that acted like the PRM-85 ROM board for the HP 85 and let you load whatever ROMs you wanted onto a modern EPROM and do away with HP's silly modules completely however my memory is fuzzy and I can't seem to find any mention of such a device on the internet. What I did find was the System ROM replacement board on hp9845.net but it doesn't mention the ability to add in images of the option ROMs he has available on his site. Anyone else heard of this mysterious adapter? -John

10 years

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