Compaq Deskpro boards/hard drives from the late 1990s

On Sat, 24 Jul 2021 at 01:29, Grant Taylor via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote: A fair point. I had a freelance project in about 1997: PC Pro magazine had obtained a very early PC SSD. It had 16MB of battery-backed RAM on a PCI card and a controller that meant the PC could cold-boot from it. I got the job of benchmarking a PC OS booting from a hard disk versus the solid-state disk. The snag was that the disk, when formatted, was only about 15MB, and few complex OSes would fit into that even by 1997. Win95 would not, but I knew it very well, and I could cut it down _hard_. (I had ported the PC Pro benchmark suite from 16-bit to 32-bit Windows for them, a year or two earlier.) I went through Win95 file by file. I removed all apps except for Notepad, all fonts except those needed by Explorer and the DOS prompt. I removed all non-essential binaries, most of the DOS support, all the online help and docs, all the image files, the diagnostic tools and so on. I got it down to 14MB and it would, just barely, boot from the 16MB SSD, although you could barely do anything as there was almost no free disk space. It was a vain effort in the end -- being so minimal, it booted in a few seconds from any medium. It did make the point for the magazine that an OS would boot from SSD in a fraction of the time of cheap, they would be very desirable. What _actually_ became doable and desirable never became really possible with the Windows platform, sadly, although it's trivial with Linux and quite easy with Mac OS X: to put the core OS and application binaries on SSD, but keep the home directory on spinning media. Config files are tiny compared to modern binaries. They are read in milliseconds, maybe microseconds. With Linux, you just make /home a separate filesystem. It's trivial. My OS partitions are typically 16GB, which is plenty for Linux and all my normal apps. The /home directory is on a separate partition on a spinning disk, meaning terabytes of inexpensive space and no perceptible speed decrease. I suspect only people working with huge data files -- big RAW-format images, video, maybe uncompressed audio -- would notice the hit. With OS X you can just move the user's home directory. /home is on the OS drive but (e.g.) /home/lproven is on an HDD. This works perfectly but it completely breaks OS X's tools for migrating to a new machine, so I have reverted to using a Fusion Drive that RAIDs together an SSD and an HDD into one volume. There's no easy clean way to do this on Windows. You can't move /Users without ugly registry hacks that can break compatibility. Ah well. Terabyte-class SSDs are affordable now; the method is obsolete. *nod* Aha! TFTI! It's not very long. You know, that's an excellent idea and I wish I'd thought of it then. My desktop was an IBM PC-AT and would have made this difficult, and mostly we used IBM PS/2 boxes, which still made it non-trivial -- no dangling a drive from the controller cable! But it was doable. I remember it vividly as one of my worst tasks ever. Japanese and to an extent Chinese OSes were very instructive, especially in historical context. As the DOS PC conquered the industry in the West, it did not in Japan. DOS could not handle Japanese fonts well enough; VGA is not really enough for readable kanji, hiragana and katakana. So Japanese PCs stayed non-IBM-compatible. GUIs finally broke into that market: soft-rendered scalable fonts could make good-looking kana. So, originally, Windows 3.11 (note, *not* Windows for Workgroups 3.11) was originally Japanese, IIRC, and I think the last ever version of Win 3.x, Windows 3.2, was Chinese-only. https://microsoft.fandom.com/wiki/Windows_3.2 Geos I believe had Japanese versions. DR-DOS 6 and ViewMax had special Japanese editions that supported Japanese fonts: https://www.betaarchive.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=30331 But by the same token the Chinese market especially was not rich and was slower to adopt expensive peripherals such as optical drives -- thus, OSes sold on floppies long after these had largely disappeared Urgh. Yes! :-) -- Liam Proven ? Profile: https://about.me/liamproven Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? gMail/gTalk/gHangouts: lproven at gmail.com Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn/Flickr: lproven ? Skype: liamproven UK: +44 7939-087884 ? ?R (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053