Install Floppies (Was: Compaq Deskpro boards/hard drives from

On Fri, 23 Jul 2021, Grant Taylor via cctalk wrote: Well, maybe similarly to how you did with AIX, by the total size divided by number of images. Although what I was referring to was people's memories of the size of the box that they kept the install disks in :-) The "Tools" CD-ROM was a third party commercial product containing a large collection of CD-ROM drivers. In August 1991, I attended a Microsoft Developer conference in Seattle. Bill Gates didn't show up, because he was in NYC on TV about the birthday of 5150 (August 11, 1981). They gave us copies of Windows 3.10 (which couldn't load on the 286 laptop that I had brought along, because it didn't have A20 support, and gave those of us who asked that international distribution Windows 3.0 CD-ROM. Never saw it before or since. It had Windows 3.0 installation with at least half a dozen different languages. Actually, you can, and easily. MS-DOS 6 had an "INSTALL" program, which was demented. It INSISTED on installing on drive C:. But, some of my machines had four floppies, and I didn't want it to install on the 8" drive, or 3.25" drive, . . . Once you install it on SOME/ANY OTHER machine, then, with that OTHER machine booted up to DOS 6, just do a FORMAT A: /S of a boot floppy, and copy files onto that, specifically including FORMAT. FORGET ABOUT THE "INSTALLATION" files. with extreme prejudice. Boot your target machine with the DOS 6 boot floppy; it has FORMAT.COM on it (which IIRC was actually a .EXE file renamed .COM), and then use that to FORMAT C: /S . Once that system format is done, and CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT are up, then all of the rest is just copying files, which can be COPY *.*. For learning any language, it helps a LOT to have a copy of something that you are familiar with in that language. When she started to learn Spanish, I gave her a copy of McCracken FORTRAN in Spanish (she was familiar with, and had a copy of, the English edition), and loaned her the international Win3.0 disc. She then setup one machine with Win3 in English, one in Chinese, and one in Spansish. Win3.0 could run on an 8088, which were then a dime a dozen. I don't know whether you could put more than one copy on a machine. I think that you could - we had a copy of Win3.1 on a Win95 machine! But, the Windows 3.10 BETA program sent us tons of floppies. It had an even more demented problem: it installed Smartdrv first. Then, if it hit any error, the installation would fail, without the usual option to IGNORE and manually copy the failed file later. Instead, SMARTDRV cut out the options, and you could only R(etry)! If the error wasn't transient, then you could only power down the machine! But SMARTDRV had told DOS that stuff was ALREADY written that it hadn't done yet, so powering down wiped the whole installation. I had one machine that had an error that neither SpinRite nor SpeedStor could find, but the Windoze installation consistently found it! The work around was to put a lot of extraneous files on the disk, so that the sector with the error was used by something else. I reported the problem to the BETA support; their response was "That's a HARDWARE problem, NOT OUR PROBLEM." My comment that 1) any program should exit gracefully even from a hardware problem, not lock up the machine and 2) that SMARTDRV's actions would end up costing them substantially. (It DID; DOS 6.20 was written primarily to deal with SMARTDRV causing problems!) 'course my comment also meant that I wasn't invited back for any other BETA programs; they only wanted cheerleaders, not critics nor actual testers. maybe. It eliminated another LARGE box of floppies. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com