16 Aug
2013
16 Aug
'13
7:40 a.m.
On Fri, 16 Aug 2013, Jules Richardson wrote:
On 08/15/2013 06:41 PM, Jim Stephens wrote:
The archives there go all the way back to the first 8086 Deskpro. I've
used them to make the 360k diagnostics disks.
On 8/15/2013 2:31 PM, Jules Richardson wrote:
Hmm, I think almost all of that is related to later systems from the
'486 onward; there doesn't seem to be much in there at all from the '286
and '386 timeframe. I do see a see a diagnostic disk from 1992 -
although even that is 7 years after the Deskpro/286's release, so I'm
not sure if Compaq would have retained support for older systems in
there. If I do need the Compaq DOS floppies, does anyone
have images
available (3.5" preferred, but I think I have some spare 5.25" HD
floppies and could put the Compaq's drive into my desktop PC
temporarily to write them)
amazingly ftp.compaq.com is still online. You can go to /pub/softpaq
and get anything. I have downloaded all of the softpaq so I could
search the indices.
I'll email you the index of SP 0000 thru 23000 offline direct. After
that from SP23000 thru 45000 there are only the indexes for each
product. Mind you, the dates are perhaps a little suspect
anyway - e.g. "ProLinea
486-Based PCs Windows 3.1 Support" dated November '87. I don't think The
i486 even came out until a couple of years or so after that.
Check the dates inside the zip files, those should be correct.
Interesting how some of the descriptions are
truncated. I did chuckle at
"The Windows Delete Utility will delete the Windows Delete Utility from
the hard drive.", which sounds like one of the most useful utilities
ever. :-)
What you are looking for will be in one of the low numbered directories
such as sp0000-0500, sp0501-1000, etc. Unfortunately most of these early
disk images don't have .txt description files. I too have a copy of most
of this archive but I've never gotten around to recreating a full index.
Back when these files were on the Compaq BBS, there were files.bbs
descriptions for all these disk images. Those apparently didn't make the
migration to the FTP server though. Since most of these are self-creating
disk images, there are file descriptions embedded in the .exe files.