<I kinda have to agree. My laptop has had a dead floppy drive for some ti
<now; probably over 2 years. The only time I really miss it is a) when I
<want to move data/pgms to a machine/person not "connected" or b) when I
A handy way around that is to use intersvr and interlnk provided with dos
6.x. Those combined with a laplink serial or parallel cable can allow you
to annex another systems drives for copies or installs. Using the
parallel cable is faster. It's documented in the MSdos useres guide.
I currently have a headless 386sx/25 with a few small hard disks, and two
non 3.5" floppies and a CDrom that via parallel cable and the interlnk
software serves and a sort of portable disk/cdrom/floppy to all my dos
boxen. It's real handy for systems that only have a floppy or tiny hard
disk. It saves having to have a network or anything more than a bootable
disk with the programs on it (they are small!). Once running all of the
disks on the server end are available as if they were connected locally.
Allison
At 01:35 PM 5/8/98 -0500, you wrote:
>On Fri, 8 May 1998, Don Maslin wrote:
>
>> I learned from a friend who picked it up (for $3.10) at the swapmeet that
>> HP made a lunchbox that had HP-UX all in ROM. No drives in the box.
>
>The Integral PC! Tell him I'll give him $10 for it :-) It is 68K-based
>and has a small subset of HP-UX in ROM, but it really wants to boot from a
>disk hanging off its HPIB bus.
Not exactly, it has a built-in floppy drive that you can boot from, or
you can use an external drive on the HP-IB. >BUT< they also had an
optional ROM that contained an entire HP-UX system. HP called it a
software engineering ROM. From what i've been told they're extremely rare.
HP also made another ROM that contained a complete HP Technical BASIC in it.
I just picked up my third IPC. One of mine has the Technical Basic Rom,
one has the HP-UX ROM but the last one has both! :-)
Joe
On May 8, 22:28, Ward Donald Griffiths III wrote:
> John Ruschmeyer wrote:
> > I presume the system, like the Performas et al., will come with a
> > bootable
> > CD which can be used to restore the system to "factory" condition.
>
> And there went everything that was put on the disk after it left
> the factory.
Not necessarily, if it's done "right". Sun sparcstations and SGI
workstations come with the O/S on bootable CD, and re-installing doesn't
imply deleting all the other stuff that was added since the first factory
install. The O/S and support software/datafiles can be added/replaced in
modular fashion.
--
Pete Peter Turnbull
Dept. of Computer Science
University of York
At 07:31 PM 5/7/98 -0400, you wrote:
>> Actually, if I were to design a computer, I would consider not
>> including a floppy drive, or at least making it so that it doesn't
>
>I totally agree. Any more, floppy disk drives are more a PITA than they
>are useful. Creation is no longer the focus of home computing---the
>browser took care of that issue. This means having removable, writeable
>media is less of a priority. In the corporate setting, where computers are
>still used primarily for creation and dissemination, you have LANs to
>alleviate the need for such media.
>
>The floppy plays little role in modern computing.
I kinda have to agree. My laptop has had a dead floppy drive for some time
now; probably over 2 years. The only time I really miss it is a) when I
want to move data/pgms to a machine/person not "connected" or b) when I
want to install (floppy-only) software.
The first is handled by the net, the second by getting software on CD (or
swapping my HD into an identical machine with a good floppy.)
Nowadays, data and programs are both so big as to make floppies unusuable.
(Can you imagine backing up 1GB to floppy? 8^)
--------------------------------------------------------------------- O-
Uncle Roger "There is pleasure pure in being mad
roger(a)sinasohn.com that none but madmen know."
Roger Louis Sinasohn & Associates
San Francisco, California http://www.sinasohn.com/
just a few new museum items: 1. TRS-80 model 100 portable manual
2. Zenith laptop model ZFL-184-01
3. Kaypro 16 20meg 1-5 1/4 FD
4. TI lowprofile KB
5. Corona model PC-21
6. Silicon Compilers D-Scan Graphic display
model GR-
1104C missing kb
7. 2 Toshiba ext cd-roms
8. Sun shoebox 2 FD drives model SUNIPC-FPY2
one marked
AT Compat the other PC compat
9. Beneath Apple ProDos by Don Worth and
Pieter Lechner
10. 2 tech manuals for NeXT 1988 draft
11. Mac Performa 400
12. NeXT cube case
13. Apple Newton model 1000 with video tape
and manuals
14. Sony ext scsi cdrom model CDU7205
15 8 ea Ti 99 game cartridges
16. Mac LCII needs HD
17. Many other non classic items waiting for
their time
I looking for the address , web site, phone number or any info to locate a
company called AE or Applied Engineering, or AE Research Corp. I need some
parts from them and manuals. Thanks in advance John
Some years ago, when I was secondary school (grade|high school), someone
donated two calculators which sat on a side table in the school computer
room. One was a nice but not that rare wind-the-handle Facit. The
other was more modern and electronic.
The electronic one was interesting mainly for its display. It was
fluorescent (greenish digits sealed in a long glass tube), but not
7-segment. Instead, there were (I think) nine segments, all of strange
curly shapes, which made up digits much easier to read than the angular,
blocky, 7-segment types. But I can no longer remember how these were
arranged, nor even any details like the manufacturer of the calculator.
Does anyone know of machines with such displays?
At what date were they made?
Did anyone ever do an LCD version of these, and if not, why not?
And finally, what exactly were the segments and how did they fit
together? I've tried to reconstruct the arrangement, but try as I
might, I can't do it in fewer than twelve segments.
Philip.
<But I remember one computer from the early 80's (don't remember the name)
<where the floppy was the computer -- a small SBC mounted on top of the
<floppy, and that's all there was.
AmproLB a complete z80, 64k, 2serial, printer port and SCSI on a board
the size of a 5.25" floppy. I have one.
I also have a SB180 that is faster with 4x the ram on a card half the
size.
Neither stepped around the problem by putting all of the base software on
rom. The EPSON PX-8 did. I also did it for a s100 system years before
that. With EPROMS, EEProms and Flash ram as dense as they are a 1.44mb
floppy seems a lot of work.
Allison
Well, I scored a Panasonic Senior Partner (IBM-compatible luggable) with a
20meg HD. No matter what the product, I always like what Panasonic
manufactures. The design and (physical) user interface of stuff they
make just works for me.
Anyway, this one came complete with Rogue, Nethack and Mahjong installed.
I just enjoyed a splendid game of Rogue which I haven't played in ages
(made it to Level 8, Warrior with about 2500 gold).
It also had some C code, some unix utils in C:\BIN and a file pertaining
to Apollo workstations. Seems this machine used to be owned by a Unix
hacker for sure.
Sam Alternate e-mail: dastar(a)siconic.com
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Don't blame me...I voted for Satan.
Coming in September...Vintage Computer Festival 2.0
See http://www.siconic.com/vcf for details!
[Last web page update: 05/03/98]
