8 Dec
2007
8 Dec
'07
2:13 p.m.
On 06/12/2007, Roy J. Tellason <rtellason at verizon.net> wrote:
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 Internet access?
Do you want productivity apps?
It's a bit low-spec for a modern Linux distro. You could try some
low-end distros, like DamnSmallLinux, Puppy, or VectorLinux. I've also
heard good comments of SaxenOS & Crux on low-end PCs, but I've not
tried them myself yet.
It would run NetBSD pretty nicely, but then, the same is probably true
of some toasters.
One that might suit it quite well would be Minix 3. Never played with
that yet myself.
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.
FreeDOS or DR-DOS plus OpenGEM would run very well; indeed, it's quite
high-spec for that.
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/
(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.
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.)
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. 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. 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.
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.
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.
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
Also on a DEC theme, there's FreeVMS, but I don't think they have any
downloads yet.
http://www.freevms.org/
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...
--
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
9 Dec
9 Dec
12:30 a.m.
On Saturday 08 December 2007 14:13, Liam Proven wrote:
On 06/12/2007, Roy J. Tellason <rtellason at
verizon.net> wrote:
Not too likely on that box...
I tend to run a GUI on one box, and leave the rest of them in textmode.
Right now that's a server and a firewall/router but this other huge box just
arrived here yesterday and that's gonna be another server, and I need to
build another workstation.
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 Internet access?
Networked with the rest of what I have here will do. :-)
Got plenty of 3c509 cards to deal with that. Even some with boot roms on
them...
Do you want productivity apps?
I'm not sure what you mean there. Office-type stuff? Nah.
It's a bit low-spec for a modern Linux distro. You
could try some
low-end distros, like DamnSmallLinux, Puppy, or VectorLinux. I've also
heard good comments of SaxenOS & Crux on low-end PCs, but I've not
tried them myself yet.
It would run NetBSD pretty nicely, but then, the same is probably true
of some toasters.
Heh.
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.
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?
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.
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...
--
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
1:15 p.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
3:27 p.m.
New subject: Obscure PC operating systems and apps [was Re: got this old peecee...]
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
3:52 p.m.
In article <575131af0712091015g45358a03kdaf5db9fe88e874d at mail.gmail.com>,
"Liam Proven" <lproven at gmail.com> writes:
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.
Actually, its a glimpse of where Apple went wrong. The creative force
behind BeOS was at Apple and couldn't get anyone at Apple interested
in BeOS-like directions, so he went to form his own company. When the
Be computer as a piece of hardware didn't pan out and the OS was the
remaining IP of the company that had any promise of a future, Apple
still wasn't interested.
--
"The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download
<http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/book/download/index.html>
Legalize Adulthood! <http://blogs.xmission.com/legalize/>
4:06 p.m.
New subject: Obscure PC operating systems and apps [was Re: got this oldpeecee...]
----- Original Message -----
From: "Richard" <legalize at xmission.com>
To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts"
<cctalk at classiccmp.org>
Sent: Sunday, December 09, 2007 3:52 PM
Subject: Re: Obscure PC operating systems and apps [was Re: got this
oldpeecee...]
Actually, its a glimpse of where Apple went wrong. The creative force
behind BeOS was at Apple and couldn't get anyone at Apple interested
in BeOS-like directions, so he went to form his own company. When the
Be computer as a piece of hardware didn't pan out and the OS was the
remaining IP of the company that had any promise of a future, Apple
still wasn't interested.
--
NEXTstep was a finished OS that just needed ported, BEOS was a work in
progress that needed more work (networking etc). It came down to Gassee
wanting too much cash and Jobs being a better bullshitter.
All in all the stockholders did better with Jobs then they would have with
Gassee (who didn't have much luck at Apple to begin with).
What product they make their billions from does not matter in the end, as
long as they make the money.
4:50 p.m.
New subject: Obscure PC operating systems and apps [was Re: got this oldpeecee...]
In article <006701c83aa7$5f230860$c600a8c0 at game>,
"Teo Zenios" <teoz at neo.rr.com> writes:
NEXTstep was a finished OS that just needed ported,
BEOS was a work in
progress that needed more work (networking etc). It came down to Gassee
wanting too much cash and Jobs being a better bullshitter.
A fair enough assessment, but the main point I wanted to make is that
it wasn't just Unix and Windows that passed on the ideas in BeOS. It
was everyone.
--
"The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download
<http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/book/download/index.html>
Legalize Adulthood! <http://blogs.xmission.com/legalize/>
5:24 p.m.
New subject: Obscure PC operating systems and apps [was Re: got this
In article <006701c83aa7$5f230860$c600a8c0 at
game>,
"Teo Zenios" <teoz at neo.rr.com> writes:
At the time of the deal with Jobs, sure. When I adopted it at BeOS Pro R5
(2000), no, it was a finished OS. The downfall was with Gassee and his
boneheaded drivers philosophy (or strategy if you want to call it that).
Rather than continuing to write drivers to support products, (and this is
verbatim what I was explained by tech support there at the time) they
wanted to force the hardware manufacturers to support them and take them
seriously for driver support. I.e., enough users contact the hardware
manufacturers wanting a driver and they in turn will decide to support
BeOS and write the driver for it.
Of course that didn't work, the drivers never appeared, users had to stick
with older hardware or loose BeOS support, and BeOS sold to PALM.
On the plus side, there's Haiku. An open source version of BeOS R5,
that's compatible in both source and binary. I've actually replaced some
parts of my Pro R5 with it, and they've worked flawlessly. I believe they
just need to complete the network and usb stacks to have a full
replacement (last I checked).
Marty
NEXTstep was a finished OS that just needed
ported, BEOS was a work in
progress that needed more work (networking etc). It came down to Gassee
wanting too much cash and Jobs being a better bullshitter.
A fair enough assessment, but the main point I wanted to make is that
it wasn't just Unix and Windows that passed on the ideas in BeOS. It
was everyone. 
4:49 p.m.
On 9 Dec 2007 at 13:52, Richard wrote:
Actually, its a glimpse of where Apple went wrong.
The creative force
behind BeOS was at Apple and couldn't get anyone at Apple interested
in BeOS-like directions, so he went to form his own company. When the
Be computer as a piece of hardware didn't pan out and the OS was the
remaining IP of the company that had any promise of a future, Apple
still wasn't interested.
There was an article in, I think, "Nuts and Volts" about Gassee and
his BeBox and BeOS. It looked very innovative with a lot of good
thought behind it--and much too late to make any kind of a splash.
It seems that Apple is getting closer to MICROS~1 every day. I
powered up my old G3 with Panther installed the other day and learned
that there was something like 59MB in security updates waiting for me
to install. I can't imagine how a user with slow modem access deals
with this kind of thing. And the US is full of people with modem as
their only available internet access--and not at anywhere near 56K.
A friend upgraded to Leopard from Tiger on his G4 and lost every bit
of his saved email. And Apple is now flogging the new Macs as great
Windoze machines. Good times.
Cheers,
Chuck
5:34 p.m.
New subject: Obscure PC operating systems and apps [was Re: got this old peecee...]
Chuck Guzis wrote:
It seems that Apple is getting closer to MICROS~1 every day. I
powered up my old G3 with Panther installed the other day and learned
that there was something like 59MB in security updates waiting for me
to install. I can't imagine how a user with slow modem access deals
with this kind of thing. And the US is full of people with modem as
their only available internet access--and not at anywhere near 56K.
To be fair, I don't think this is limited to Apple or Microsoft; I
booted an Ubuntu Linux box of mine a few weeks ago and had about 75mb of
updates that it wanted me to install. Programmers make mistakes,
unfortunately, and I don't think that's a trend that's going to change
anytime soon. At least they're fixing the problems, though I agree that
it's painful to get the fixes over a modem (haven't had to do that in
years, thankfully.)
Josh
6:08 p.m.
New subject: Obscure PC operating systems and apps [was Re: got this old peecee...]
On Sunday 09 December 2007 16:49, Chuck Guzis wrote:
It seems that Apple is getting closer to MICROS~1
every day.
(Snip)
And Apple is now flogging the new Macs as great
Windoze machines. Good
times.
Ick.
They can keep 'em...
--
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
9:34 p.m.
On Dec 9, 2007, at 4:49 PM, Chuck Guzis wrote:
It seems that Apple is getting closer to MICROS~1
every day. I
powered up my old G3 with Panther installed the other day and learned
that there was something like 59MB in security updates waiting for me
to install.
Updates aren't bad. An OS being so poorly designed and implemented
that it can't function WITHOUT updates is bad. That's the difference.
I can't imagine how a user with slow modem
access deals
with this kind of thing. And the US is full of people with modem as
their only available internet access--and not at anywhere near 56K.
As someone who has worked in the ISP industry for many years, and
currently manages a (quickly shrinking) dialin bank, I say "bunk".
Dialup is very nearly dead.
A friend upgraded to Leopard from Tiger on his G4 and
lost every bit
of his saved email.
Leopard is problematic in a number of ways, it seems. I won't be
moving to it for some time.
And Apple is now flogging the new Macs as great
Windoze machines.
Good times.
Yep. I might have to move back to Sun for my main desktop platform
if Apple keeps trying to turn themselves into a PeeCee company.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire
Port Charlotte, FL
10:13 p.m.
On 9 Dec 2007 at 21:34, Dave McGuire wrote:
As someone who has worked in the ISP industry for
many years, and
currently manages a (quickly shrinking) dialin bank, I say "bunk".
Dialup is very nearly dead.
According to a July report from the American Farm Bureau Federation,
only about 24 percent of rural US households have any access to
broadband at all. Fewer than 10 percent actually subscribe. It's
kind of the rural electrification before REA.
Not everyone lives in a city. Heck, I'm only 2 miles outside of the
city and there's no WiFi or cable here--but because I was willing to
sell a parcel of land to the telco, I do have DSL.
Cheers,
Chuck
10:29 p.m.
New subject: Obscure PC operating systems and apps [was Re: got this oldpeecee...]
----- Original Message -----
From: "Chuck Guzis" <cclist at sydex.com>
To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts"
<cctalk at classiccmp.org>
Sent: Sunday, December 09, 2007 10:13 PM
Subject: Re: Obscure PC operating systems and apps [was Re: got this
oldpeecee...]
According to a July report from the American Farm
Bureau Federation,
only about 24 percent of rural US households have any access to
broadband at all. Fewer than 10 percent actually subscribe. It's
kind of the rural electrification before REA.
Not everyone lives in a city. Heck, I'm only 2 miles outside of the
city and there's no WiFi or cable here--but because I was willing to
sell a parcel of land to the telco, I do have DSL.
Cheers,
Chuck
America used to be a nation of farmers who left the farms to find work in
the city. The way work in the city is going you might want to get that
parcel of land back from the telco. ;)
What speed data access do you get using cell phones these days? Just about
anywhere has cell phone access these days and I figure sooner or later the
data rate will be high enough you can just use the cell for DATA instead of
having to have a cable or DSL landline.
11:08 p.m.
New subject: Obscure PC operating systems and apps [was Re: got this oldpeecee...]
On 9 Dec 2007 at 22:29, Teo Zenios wrote:
What speed data access do you get using cell phones
these days? Just about
anywhere has cell phone access these days and I figure sooner or later the
data rate will be high enough you can just use the cell for DATA instead of
having to have a cable or DSL landline.
A lot of wireless coverage depends on terrain. It's kind of funny
watching cars with Verizon coverage headed down the hill stop on the
road just in back of my house to get their last crack at cell
coverage. I've invited several friends with various carriers to
visit my bass pond at the bottom of a draw. Nada, zip, nothing down
there and probably never will be. Gives me a great excuse to be
incommunicado--gone fishin'. :)
Cheers,
Chuck
10:36 p.m.
New subject: Obscure PC operating systems and apps [was Re: got this old peecee...]
On Sunday 09 December 2007 22:13, Chuck Guzis wrote:
On 9 Dec 2007 at 21:34, Dave McGuire wrote:
Interesting approach, that. I have a friend in rural WV and who had
basically *no* options besides dialup until he very recently got satellite,
which cost for some equipment and is costing him *way* more a month than what
I'm spending here on DSL -- about 4 times as much.
--
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
As someone who has worked in the ISP industry
for many years, and
currently manages a (quickly shrinking) dialin bank, I say "bunk".
Dialup is very nearly dead.
According to a July report from the American Farm Bureau Federation,
only about 24 percent of rural US households have any access to
broadband at all. Fewer than 10 percent actually subscribe. It's
kind of the rural electrification before REA.
Not everyone lives in a city. Heck, I'm only 2 miles outside of the
city and there's no WiFi or cable here--but because I was willing to
sell a parcel of land to the telco, I do have DSL. 
20 Dec
20 Dec
9:59 p.m.
I think Word6 for DOS is at http://www.vetusware.com/ in their office section.
2007/12/8, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com>:
On 06/12/2007, Roy J. Tellason <rtellason at
verizon.net> wrote:
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 Internet access?
Do you want productivity apps?
It's a bit low-spec for a modern Linux distro. You could try some
low-end distros, like DamnSmallLinux, Puppy, or VectorLinux. I've also
heard good comments of SaxenOS & Crux on low-end PCs, but I've not
tried them myself yet.
It would run NetBSD pretty nicely, but then, the same is probably true
of some toasters.
One that might suit it quite well would be Minix 3. Never played with
that yet myself.
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.
FreeDOS or DR-DOS plus OpenGEM would run very well; indeed, it's quite
high-spec for that.
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/
(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.
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.)
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. 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. 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.
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.
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.
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
Also on a DEC theme, there's FreeVMS, but I don't think they have any
downloads yet.
http://www.freevms.org/
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...
--
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
21 Dec
21 Dec
2:13 p.m.
On 21/12/2007, from at fu3.org <fu3.org at gmail.com> wrote:
I think Word6 for DOS is at http://www.vetusware.com/
in their office section.
Nope, Word 6 is for Windows 3. AFAIK 5.5 was the last ever version for DOS.
--
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
22 Dec
22 Dec
1:07 a.m.
New subject: Obscure PC operating systems and apps [was Re: got this old peecee...]
Liam Proven wrote:
On 21/12/2007, from at fu3.org <fu3.org at
gmail.com> wrote:
And the only versions worth using, IMO, are the ones with Lotus-style
menus. If you think about it, it's a lot less screen real-estate,
especially for word-processing. I believe 5.0 was the last one to use
lotus-style menus; 5.5 added drop-down menus IIRC.
--
Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org) http://www.oldskool.org/
Help our electronic games project: http://www.mobygames.com/
Or check out some trippy MindCandy at http://www.mindcandydvd.com/
A child borne of the home computer wars: http://trixter.wordpress.com/
I think Word6 for DOS is at
http://www.vetusware.com/ in their office section.
Nope, Word 6 is for Windows 3. AFAIK 5.5 was the last ever version for DOS.
2:37 a.m.
New subject: Obscure PC operating systems and apps [was Re: got this old peecee...]
On Friday 21 December 2007 14:13, Liam Proven wrote:
On 21/12/2007, from at fu3.org <fu3.org at
gmail.com> wrote:
Not to drag out this OT stuff, we were talking about WP, not Word...
--
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
I think Word6 for DOS is at
http://www.vetusware.com/ in their office
section.
Nope, Word 6 is for Windows 3. AFAIK 5.5 was the last ever version for DOS. 
2:58 a.m.
New subject: Obscure PC operating systems and apps [was Re: got this oldpeecee...]
-----Original Message-----
From: cctech-bounces at classiccmp.org
[mailto:cctech-bounces at classiccmp.org]On Behalf Of Liam Proven
Sent: Friday, December 21, 2007 2:14 PM
To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts
Subject: Re: Obscure PC operating systems and apps [was Re: got this
oldpeecee...]
On 21/12/2007, from at fu3.org <fu3.org at gmail.com> wrote:
There was a version 6 for DOS that had a GUI interface (run from a DOS
prompt with Windows not even installed on the system)for it, as well as the
text based one. I have a copy of it here. There was also a Windows version
of it.
Sorry,
Greg
I think Word6 for DOS is at
http://www.vetusware.com/ in their
office section.
Nope, Word 6 is for Windows 3. AFAIK 5.5 was the last ever
version for DOS.
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