9 Dec
2007
9 Dec
'07
12:27 p.m.
On Sunday 09 December 2007 13:15, Liam Proven wrote:
Not too likely on that box...
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.
I don't particularly see a need for another GUI box, mostly.
OK. What /do/ you want to be able to do with it, then?
That's the big question. I'm wondering what the box might be particularly
well-suited for as compared to a bunch of the other old boxes I have around
here. :-)
Hell, my _server_ currently has only 64MB of ram in it, and seems to do
quite well most of the time. I've been getting by with 4G disks for installs
where I want a lot in there, but if I get real picky I can get by with quite
a lot less. A far change from my original install of linux back in 1999
(which was Slackware 4.0), when I installed *everything*, since I wanted to
get to know it a bit, and had room left over on a 1G drive.
That sort of nonsense is a lot of why I'm not usually in any particular hurry
to upgrade software. :-)
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
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
I'll have to have a look. Sounds good...
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.
Ok, that one sounds worth a look too.
[Furrowed brow] What /do/ you do with your time? 8?)
Never enough of it, that's for sure. :-)
Just barely.
That made quite a big splash among the commodore crowd (most of the folks in
the area that I saw back when things were going strongly with our shop). It
*really* needed at least the REU, which I never had one of, so the one time
I got to try it out the performance was rather abysmal, to put it mildly.
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. :?)
I'll get around to it at some point. :-)
Ah. It's my living, or a large part of it.
As it is for a family member, who we got started with a lower-end Zenith
clone machine many years back. The help system and wysiwyg display in
textmode that word did on that machine was actually quite impressive. He's
running macs these days, though, which seem to be favored by dtp folks.
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.
I'm not sure about the software since it's been a really long time but I am
pretty sure about the version number, anyhow. I run across the box with
that in it, I'll have a look...
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.
Probably. As far as a lot of the "stuff" they were trying to do, I'm not
convinced that software needed to really go there.
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.
I started out as a user, and this area was particularly rich in them for a
while, particularly ones running on c64 machines, which was interesting.
Sometimes the software running on those would assume you had one too, and
sent all sorts of codes for colors and whatnot which of course wouldn't work
for me on my Osborne Exec running CP/M. Eventually I became a "point" system
(much more efficient), and then a bit later a node. I was a "net
coordinator" by the time I was done, but at that point there was only one
other node in the net, so there really wasn't that much point to it.
It's something genuinely /different/. I used to rather like Netware; I
wish server-side Linux had evolved into something as simple and
powerful.
I remember one time trying to help a friend of mine out who had a system in a
dental office that was showing bad problems on a hard drive. Putting a new
one in there and running their utility on it seemed to take darn near
forever...
Of course, that was on an actual "AT", and it was not a particularly fast
machine. :-)
If you're a former OS2er, you should at least look at it! (A former
OS2er speaks.)
Ok, maybe I'll take a look. :-)
There's a freebie shareware version. I've got it to install and run in the
past.
I didn't see that on there.
It's amazing how much you can do with DOS these days on by modern
standards tiny resources.
Sure. I can also only imagine what it'd be like running cp/m on some of the
faster z80 chips that seem to be available these days, too, as well as
faster than floppy drives. It might be fun if I can get around to it.
Not that much work, though I admit getting a little lazy on it the last time
around and now it eats somewhere around half of a 540M drive.
Sure. But since I have this card here anyway, which happens to have a 68040
on it and 64MB of cache, I might as well have some fun with it. I just wish
I could find some parity or better yet ECC ram to put on it.
> >
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. 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? 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.
OK, that's probably what I'm thinking of. I have a number of floppies around
here someplace that seem to be for PNW, apparently serialized? Never wanted
to do much of anything with them, but then I don't toss things just because
I have no immediate use for them...
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".
Ok, I'll have a look.
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. 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.
I never could understand why dv didn't go farther than it did.
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. 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.
Europe also seems to have gone considerably further earlier on with regard to
making broadband connections available to folks than what's happened here.
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.
That's the sort of thing running a point system was supposed to do, too.
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.
I've never used any of the pay services myself, though I have seen others
using them, and "horrendously clunky" seems to be a pretty apt term for a
lot of it. But then that was true of a lot of stuff back then -- people just
didn't get it. I used to download and try out lots of software back then,
and later just downloaded it and put it in the files section of the bbs for
other folks. One program in particular I recall was rather obnoxious in that
it tried to tell you that you _must_ complete some things before you can go
on to other steps, I can't even remember now what the heck it was supposed
to do. It wouldn't let you out! I guess they were a mite confused about
whose computer that was, anyway, as after reset/reboot the thing got
deleted. I don't expect that particular "shareware" author saw much income
out of that...
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.
Yes, though I recall some nontrivial activity in fidonet before I left, in
Europe and all sorts of other places. People were using it anyhow, to some
extent.
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.
Not cheaper than free, seeing as how I have all this old hardware kicking
around anyway, and would prefer to use it instead of just continuing to
store it...
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.
That's the plan.
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.
I'm not sure what the chip is in my latest acquisition, it's a dual CPU board
and I'm told they run at 500 MHz, but they're not P-II, they're
socket-something-or-other, and that sort of thing is what I had in mind for
it. Wish I had as big as 40G drives to put in there, but that's bigger than
anything I have on hand here currently, so what I build is going to be
somewhat smaller, but still quite useful, I think.
The box got here already decorated, where a previous user had done this on
the side:
http://www.badpenguin.org/wallpapers/born2frag.jpg
:-)
--
Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and
ablest -- form of life in this section of space, ?a critter that can
be killed but can't be tamed. ?--Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters"
-
Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James
M Dakin
