9 Dec
2007
9 Dec
'07
10:15 a.m.
On 09/12/2007, Roy J. Tellason <rtellason at verizon.net> wrote:
OK. What /do/ you want to be able to do with it, then?
Minix 3 is a total rewrite, very modular, microkernel, designed to be
usable as a low-end Unix system on a 386-class machine. Big change
BeOS is stunning. A glimpse of what the future might have been. Shows
where we went wrong with Windows and Unix. It's a must-see OS, IMHO.
[Furrowed brow] What /do/ you do with your time? 8?)
DR-DOS is a clone of MS-DOS, based on the core of Concurrent-CP/M. It
has no native networking, any more than MS-DOS does. Some versions
were bundled with Personal Netware or Netware Lite, Novell's 2 doomed
peer-to-peer products. Both are best avoided.
But DR-DOS itself is a great DOS. There's a version out there that's
open source, with current updates - Google the "dr-dos enhancement
project".
Just barely.
I have a boxed copy but I'm on the wrong side of the Atlantic and
anyway I don't really want to part with it. :?)
It's a very interesting system, though. I wish DV/X had taken off
instead of Windows. Rather than the current battle between Windows
versus Unix, via DV/X, the world of DOS would have been led into
multitasking, GUIs and networking via the Unix standards. The two
would have merged rather than diverged. It would be a very different
IT world today. I'm not saying better, but interesting.
Ah. It's my living, or a large part of it.
Please do.
Yes, AFAICR, WP6 *DOS* had a full-on graphics-mode GUI. WP 5.1 had
CUA-compliant drop-down menus /as well as/ WP's own weird F-key driven
interface. I think WP5 did, too, but less CUA-like. The last version
which was F-key only was WP 4.2, I think.
There's no /need/ but the last generation of DOS apps was trying very
hard to look and work like Windows apps, but without the need for the
overhead and licence of Windows. At the time, they were too big and
slow. 15y later, they would be tiny and sleek by modern standards.
Fair enough. TBH, I confined my online comms activity to JANET,
Compuserve and (mainly) CIX until the Web happened. I never got into
the bulletin board scene. In Europe, we pay for local calls too. There
are no free calls except 0800 numbers, where the company on the other
end pays. This means BBSs were very expensive to use, so they were not
that big here. Some people did it; I couldn't afford the phone bills.
The selling point of CIX was offline readers: you dialled in, grabbed
your messages with a script, sent your outgoing ones, and hung up, as
fast as possible to keep the bills down. This meant that services like
Compuserve, with no official offline reader and only some horrendously
clunky and primitive 3rd party ones, were prohibitively expensive, so
I never used them unless my employers were paying.
Before broadband, the comms world in Europe was very very different to
North America, with its (to us) weird system of lots of rival phone
companies, free local calls and vastly expensive long distance ones.
It's something genuinely /different/. I used to rather like Netware; I
wish server-side Linux had evolved into something as simple and
powerful.
If you're a former OS2er, you should at least look at it! (A former
OS2er speaks.)
There's a freebie shareware version. I've got it to install and run in the past.
It's amazing how much you can do with DOS these days on by modern
standards tiny resources.
On Saturday 08 December 2007 14:13, Liam Proven
wrote:
I see no reason. A fast 486 with a decent graphics accelerator would
be all right, if you confined yourself to DOS-era GUIs, things that
run in SVGA or VESA modes and the like.
On 06/12/2007, Roy J. Tellason <rtellason at
verizon.net> wrote:
Not too likely on that box... On Thursday 06 December 2007 12:53, Chuck Guzis
wrote:
> On 6 Dec 2007 at 1:52, Roy J. Tellason wrote:
> > I'd originally planned to put OS/2 in this box. Now I'm lots less
> > enthused about that OS than I was at one time, so I dunno what I'm
> > gonna do with it. Thoughts on this?
Depends what you want to do, or be able to do, with it, obviously!
Do you want a GUI OS? Do you want
productivity apps?
I'm not sure what you mean there. Office-type stuff? Nah. I may use it for playing with smaller distros, though
mostly they seem to
want to boot into some sort of a graphics mode and impress you with their
eye-candy.
The baseline for that these days seems to be roughly a fast Pentium-1
or slow Pentium-II with ~128MB of RAM and 6-8GB of disk.
One that might
suit it quite well would be Minix 3. Never played with
that yet myself.
Never played with any of them, and didn't know there was a v3 out there. from v1/2, which was a demo/teaching system for XTs.
Much lower-end
than Linux, though, smaller and simpler. Free with a capital F.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minix_3
It might run
BeOS, especially with a 5x86 chip in there. BeOS Max is a
good, freely-available BeOS distro. Mainly intended for Pentium-class
systems, though.
Well, I have a bunch of those around too and assorted cases I could stuff 'em
into if I ever got the desire... FreeDOS or
DR-DOS plus OpenGEM would run very well; indeed, it's quite
high-spec for that.
I think I looked at DR-DOS once, don't they run some oddball sort of
networking in there? For a more
modern, but commercial, DOS GUI, there's Geos, AKA
GeoWorks, now known as Breadbox Ensemble. Again, it costs, but you can
assemble a fairly complete little system from various free demos and
things that have been put out there.
http://www.breadbox.com/
Hm, I didn't know that was still around. (I think
others have suggested something akin to Concurrent DOS. IMS'
Real32 was the last supported descendant of that, I think, but it's
primarily a multiuser thing so not of great interest on a standalone
box - it just looks like MS-DOS.)
Or just plain old DOS, together with DesqView, or, if you want
something cool and exotic, DesqView/X.
I ran dos/dv on a different box, also with a 5x86/133 chip, for a really
long time, and that was in fact the last box that ran my BBS, which shut
down for the last time in October of 2005 or thereabouts. Never played with
dv/x, though. If I could access the BBS stuff I think I remember seeing
something in there about where one could snag a copy of that. That might be
both fun and quite productive couple with some of the
last-generation, high-end DOS apps, like MS Word 5.5 (available free
from MS and so downloadable, as they gave it away rather than issue
Y2K patches for Word for DOS.)
Got a whole package here someplace that's WP6 for dos, which I think I'd
prefer, maybe. Though I do recall some of those real early versions of Word
(whatever one it was that ran on XT-class hardware) that would actually show
things like bold and italics on screen. But a machine for WP? I don't do
that much of it. I'd like
to try WordPerfect 6.0 for DOS, which had a full GUI, but
I've been looking for a copy for years with no joy.
Hmm. :-)
For dos? I don't think so, or at least don't remember that being in there,
though it was menu-driven by comparison with the funky key stuff that you had
to deal with in 5.1. OTOH, my brother at one point had at least 3 copies of
WP6 for windoze (presumably 3.1 at the time?) and it may have been that one
you were thinking of? I'm sure I have that whole package someplace, anyhow,
if I run across it I could look. It was
unusably slow at the time, but on a more recent PC like a fast 486,
it should fly along. There was also a full-GUI graphical spreadsheet version
of one of the major spreadsheets, but I don't remember details now. I
think it might have been Borland Quattro or QuattroPro 5 or so for DOS.
I actually used multiplan under dos, until that machine died. Not all that
much was in there, and at this point if I really need to do spreadsheet-type
stuff I'll use open office. Not that I see a need for GUI in that type of
app, either. If you can get
a supported TCP/IP stack running on DOS, there *are* some DOS
web browsers, such as Arachne and Lineo's WebSpyder. I'm not sure about
email programs, though.
I've heard of the first one, not the second. And I had a fair collection of
stuff for all sorts of functions. Crynwr (sp?) drivers for one thing,
though that stuff didn't get along well with dv. And a couple of different
ftp clients. I had one heck of a collection of assorted utilities I picked
up over time, probably still do someplace, in some backup copy. I also ran
a UUCP gateway that would call out from time to time to a local system I had
a login on, and exchange email traffic, and then gate things to
fidonet-type messages. Bung in a SCSI
card and a couple of old SCSI disks, make it into a
NetWare server? There was a freely-available 2-user version of Netware
4.1, and that can be patched up to date with free service packs,
making it fully W2K compliant and so on.
Ok, do-able but why would I want to run Netware? If you want to
try a modern, networking-enabled OS/2, there's
Serenity's eComStation. Expensive, though. There's a free demo live
CD, but it's not installable.
Hm. If you fancy
something unusual, which IME doesn't work well in VMs on
modern PCs, you could try the DEC-like TSX-32, which is sort of
aesthetically appropriate - it's a sort of PDP-like OS for the PC.
http://www.sandh.com/tsx32.htm
A bit on the spendy side, certainly more than I can afford to spend on an old
machine to fool around with. Also on a DEC
theme, there's FreeVMS, but I don't think they have any
downloads yet.
http://www.freevms.org/
Some, but also some very interesting links from there too. Bookmarked! :-)
Somewhere lost in a cupboard I have an ancient
386 notebook PC, whose
80MB hard disk has DOS (DR-DOS 7 with QEMM) coupled to a choice of
about 4 GUIs, a range of productivity apps, and also dual-boots with
Pygmy Linux giving me TCP/IP through a parallel port Ethernet adaptor
and thus very basic Web access with Links. All this in 80MB and it's
about one-third full. I think it has WordPerfect 5.1, Word 5.5, a
spreadsheet of some kind, plus a selection of DesqView, OpenGEM,
ViewMAX and GeoWorks Ensemble. It was a real nostalgia-fest putting it
together. It has the Microsoft free DOS network stack, too, with
TCP/IP, but it can't actually talk to any modern Windows machine. Just
don't ask me to get it to print...
Hehe. Sounds like a fun box to play with, all right. That reminds me of
a "lunchbox" style machine I almost snagged a while back, probably pretty
similar in terms of what the hardware is capable of. The first incarnation of my firewall/router used an
80M drive as well, and I
had plenty of room left over on that, too. And that wasn't using anything
special, just plain old Slackware, I was just real choosy about what
packages I let it install.
Too much work for me. I used to use Smoothwall.
However, now, it's cheaper to run a hardware NAT firewall.
Probably I'll be working up another
"workstation" here next, so I can stop
using this laptop. The keyboard quit some time back anyhow, and the
pointing device always was flaky, I'm just not sure how I'm going to feel
staring at a monitor screen instead of this display. And then get that
second file server going here. That box has two CPUs in it, enough room for
plenty of drives so I can play a bit with this RAID card I have here, and
get to know some more aspects of the software. I can see how easy it would
be to set up other, more specialized boxes for various purposes like fax
server, print server, and so forth but I really don't see a need for any of
that here on this small home LAN just yet...
With cheap unreliable EIDE drives and relatively cheap CPU and RAM,
software RAID works very well these days. You can build a RAID5 or
RAID6 on an old PC for next to no money and have loads of *reliable*
storage. My home fileserver is an old dual PII-400 board in a big
tower case with 6 old 40GB drives, in a RAID5 using Ubuntu Server.
--
Liam Proven ? Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com
Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884 ? Fax: + 44 870-9151419
AOL/AIM/iChat: liamproven at aol.com ? MSN/Messenger: lproven at hotmail.com
Yahoo: liamproven at yahoo.co.uk ? Skype: liamproven ? ICQ: 73187508