thinking of the "ultimate" retro x86 PCs - what bits to seek/keep ?
Fred Cisin
cisin at xenosoft.com
Thu Jun 2 18:09:06 CDT 2016
>>>> No CD.
>> Why no CD-ROM? 2/3G storage; SCSI or proprietary interfaces, even parallel
>> port adapters.
> Oh, that was someone else. I'll put in a SCSI CDROM, probably a Plextor or
> Pioneer.
>> CD-ROM was less work for installing Windoze 3.10/3.11 than a couple
>> dozen floppies.
> Or installing SLS or Slackware with 40 floppies. :-)
It wasn't very hard using parallel port, to implement SCSI (Trantor
Mini-SCSI and the like), including Floptical, and 2.8M (MicroSolutions
"Backpack")
On machines without SCSI or CD-ROM, I would temporarily bring up CD-ROM
off of parallel port when I had Windoze installations or the like to deal
with.
I never realized that floptical or 2.8M drives were scarce or rare,
although blank media started to be harder to come by.
One of the machines that I used quite a bit in my office (<2000) had a
360K 5.25", a 720K 5.25", a switch between an extrnal box with 1.2M 5.25"
and 8" and the other position of the switch was 3" and 3.25", with
a floptical/1.4M on a SCSI card, and a 2.8M/1.4M on a parallel port.
(Did I mention that I was working with floppy disk formats?)
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com
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