5 Aug
2006
5 Aug
'06
11:59 a.m.
Chuck Guzis wrote:
On 8/5/2006 at 2:12 PM Ray Arachelian wrote:
I keep an old Gateway 486 for legacy work (3+5" floppies, nice
slow ISA bus, etc.). I can hack together an interface card
for that bus a lot easier than for any of the other machines
I have here (PCI, SBUS, NuBus, etc.) And, it's mechanically
a lot more tolerant (bigger fingers, etc.).
Yeah, I got a few old boxen here too. I need to
figure out a use for
the old P100. I do have a 486 and a 386 somewhere in the closet too. I
think I have some ancient 8 port serial card somewhere that's ISA, or
perhaps I can use it with a catweasel as a data transfer machine with
5.25" floppies or such.
They're fine for copying floppies, data transfer, handling tapes, etc. My
old standby for most data transfer stuff is an HP Vectra P1 166 tower. One
with the expansion slots at a right angles to the mobo, so that I can get
at cards easily. It's new enough that it runs Win98, Linux or NetBSD just
fine, even though it spends most of its time in DOS--and it has the old ISA
Catweasel in it. I still keep an old XT around for things like the
MatchPoint and Deluxe
Option Boards. It's not networked (yet) although I do have an Artisoft
NE1000 clone card installed. Just no software yet. Same idea for old AT
and 33MHz 386 boxes around here.
I use a Xircom parallel port adapter on my compaq portable 3
for networking. If I am lucky, I can get about 75KB/s (B not b)
so it's better than nothing (and, for just moving files it's
a helluvalot better than trying to copy 5" floppies between
machines!).
Since it is a 286, it'll never run any "real" software (<grin>)
though it is a perfect home for the Opus card.